"Still Pro-War"

Andrew Sullivan's July 2nd, 2005 post in The Stranger: Still Pro-War, Despite the Flaws.

Excerpt:

I'm not going to give you the lame answer: we're already in so deep we cannot just abandon Iraq now. That's a fool's argument. So here's my shot at a better one. The reality of 9/11 was a terrifying one. It was that we faced a fanatical enemy determined to kill any civilization or people who objected to the restoration of a medieval, theocratic dictatorship in the Middle East (and, eventually, as with all such ideologies, elsewhere). We'd ignored or appeased them for years. And then they killed over 3,000 innocents in the heart of the United States. If they had had the means, they would have killed 300,000. If they get the means in the future, they will.

What do you do? In my view, you fight back, remove their base of operations, and kill as many of them as we possibly can. That we did in Afghanistan, a war that many on the anti-war left now pretend they supported. But leaving the matter at Afghanistan was a superficial solution. The fundamental cause of this new, totalitarian ideology - forged in the Egypt of the 1960s - was Arab autocracy and dictatorship. My view was and is that only democracy could allow these forces to exhaust themselves sufficiently to remove the underlying threat. I believed and believe that we owed it to the victims of 9/11 to craft a root-and-branch solution, not just a quick regime turn-around in a relative side-show called Afghanistan.