MISSION ACCOMPLISHED:

The Iraq War was a Success (Simon Maass, June 13, 2024, Providence)

In terms of its objectives, Operation Iraqi Freedom was a clear success. Saddam Hussein was deposed, tried and executed with ease. “We achieved our goals,” as John Bolton put it. Even so, the Iraq War is usually characterized as the poster child for American failure in foreign affairs, a perception based on questionable assumptions. […]

Eli Lake lists several indicators of Iraq’s progress since the invasion. In the two intervening decades, the country’s GDP ballooned approximately tenfold, while life expectancy, literacy rates, and the prevalence of cell phone plans also increased. According to the World Bank, Iraq’s GDP per capita declined from 2000 to 2003, but rose quite swiftly thereafter – that is, it actually started to grow following the invasion. Currently, it is nearly at an all-time high. The suicide rate remained roughly unchanged by the war, while infant mortality continued to diminish.[…]

As Alan Dowd writes, “it pays to recall that Saddam murdered 600,000 Iraqis.”If one includes deaths incurred during his war of aggression against Iran, that figure is reasonable. Human Rights Watch famously estimated the number of people “disappeared,” then killed, by the Ba’athist regime at “between 250,000 and 290,000 people.” This number was based on just the government’s major sprees of detentions and killings.

David French compares Iraq to neighboring Syria, which also had a Ba’athist dictatorship. That tyranny was not overthrown. When the Arab Spring swept across the Middle East, Syria was plunged into a civil war which has made the country “a charnel house.” We can supplement this point with some numbers. According to the UN, the decade from 2011 to 2021 saw over 350,000 deaths in the Syrian Civil War. Combined with Iraq Body Count’s figure, this implies that, despite having a smaller population, Syria experienced more deaths from falling into civil war than Iraq experienced from an American invasion. This illustrates that the lack of American intervention does not mean many people will not suffer. Furthermore, the Syrian Network for Human Rights currently estimates that “Syrian regime forces and Iranian militias” are responsible for 87% of the war’s civilian casualties. Note also that Syria’s population plummeted after its civil war began, whereas Iraq’s kept rising fairly smoothly after the invasion.

The critics generally prefer dictators keeping their Third World populations quiet to messy democracies.

WHINGEING IS NOT HARDSHIP:

We’ve never been richer: But we’re still quite cranky about the economy (Matt Phillips, 6/7/24, sherwood News)

The latest quarterly numbers from the Federal Reserve show that the net worth of the U.S. household sector hit a new high of $160.8 trillion in the first quarter, after rising $5.1 trillion during the first three months of the year. Net worth was up 8.8% compared to the first quarter of 2023, handily outpacing 3.5% rise in inflation over that period.

Hard to be the hero of your own story when the living is as easy as it is today. So we pretend times are hard.

CREATION IS OBJECTIVELY BEAUTIFUL:

Shaftesbury’s Theory of a “Moral Sense” Sets the Direction of the British Enlightenment (Part 2)
(Walter Donway, May 9, 2024, Liberty Fund: Online Library of Liberty)

Still, his essential message emerges. We can answer Hobbes and Locke if we think of moral goodness as analogous to beauty. We all have a sense of beauty: we all respond to visual and other harmony, for example. We all respond to proportionality. That is why art and music exist in every known culture. There is a universal “sense of beauty” that is a response to form not content. Man’s moral goodness can be grounded in objective features of the world, not arbitrarily but in an empiricist framework. Again, speaking broadly: moral beauty is the harmony and proportionality of our choices and actions with what advances and preserves the life of creatures of our species—the life of man qua man, man living as man.

COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE BECAUSE TRUE:

Camille Bordas on What Stand-Up Comedy Can Teach Writing Workshops About Growing Thicker Skin: Adam Ehrlich Sachs in Conversation with the Author of “The Material” (Adam Ehrlich Sachs, June 13, 2024, LitHub)

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Adam Ehrlich Sachs: The Material is set in a dystopia where MFA programs in Stand-Up Comedy have spread across the country. Until recently you taught at an MFA in Creative Writing. I couldn’t help (forgive me) but wonder about the relation between them.

Sometimes you seem to imply a reductio ad absurdum: Now we think we can teach good writing, next we’ll imagine we can impart a sense of humor. But sometimes the Stand-Up students seem like the sane ones, pragmatically honing punch lines, believing only in laughter, while writers chase phantoms like epiphany, truth, and meaning.

Punch lines are effective because they bring epiphanies of truth and meaning out of the absurd.