What was the moral alternative to removing Saddam Hussein?
I know that I got many things wrong in the run-up to the 2003 war, but, in spite of everything, I still do not know how to regret wanting to knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The nature of political action is that its consequences are unknowable. That is the source of the wonder, beauty, and ugliness that politics can bring into the world. Should I have let that unknowability determine the morality of the case for the overthrow of the regime in Iraq? Would we have had a moral war in 2003 if there had arisen an Iraqi version of Nelson Mandela, and are we now saddled with an immoral one because he did not appear? I cannot think like that. Perhaps it is incumbent upon those who now regret supporting regime change back in 2003 to tell us what the alternative moral course of action was. Was it to wait and watch until the time bomb that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq blew up in everyone’s faces?