Today's Most Depressing Counterfactual: Sam Harris on Saddam Hussein

Following his dust-up with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher's HBO show the other night, Sam Harris posted an impassioned blog about liberals' confusion with Islam.  In it, he concluded as follows:

"As I tried to make clear on Maher’s show, what we need is honest talk about the link between belief and behavior. And no one is suffering the consequences of what Muslim “extremists” believe more than other Muslims are. The civil war between Sunni and Shia, the murder of apostates, the oppression of women—these evils have nothing to do with U.S. bombs or Israeli settlements. Yes, the war in Iraq was a catastrophe—just as Affleck and Kristof suggest. But take a moment to appreciate how bleak it is to admit that the world would be better off if we had left Saddam Hussein in power. Here was one of the most evil men who ever lived, holding an entire country hostage. And yet his tyranny was also preventing a religious war between Shia and Sunni, the massacre of Christians, and other sectarian horrors. To say that we should have left Saddam Hussein alone says some very depressing things about the Muslim world."

The fact that the original scenario that prompted the 2003 war vs. Iraq was a nightmare -- ie. the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iraq motivated to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction -- makes it tragically ironic that we are now flirting with the fantasy about having kept him in power all along.

There really is no better confirmation of the fact that we cannot judge history while we're still in the middle of it.  Only knowing the ending allows us arrive at a judicious conclusion.  And we are clearly very far from any ending in the current war against radical Islam in the Middle East.

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