Michael Totten, Go Home.

Smarting from Roy's vivisection, Mr. Totten dips into the alicublog comments and says

Iraq was in hell already. I'm sorry it's still there. I would fix it if I could, and I think you know that.

Kia does not want.

Mr. Totten. That earlier level of hell still had a national museum containing irreplaceable artifacts from the beginnings of our civilization. It had drinking water and electricity. People could go to the pet market or indeed any market without fear of being blown up. They could go to the mosque without fear of being blown up. People were not having to go to the overloaded morgues to gather, with their bare hands, pieces of their dead relatives. Women could go out dressed as they like. Bad as it may have been, there were not millions of people fleeing the country to live the marginal, destitute life of a refugee in those vacation paradises, Jordan and Syria.

What the invasion has managed to do is to tear apart that web of connections and relationships, of the ordinary lived business of life, that keeps people living in peace with one another and makes a place home. The death toll will be in the millions before this mess is all over. These terrible things are direct consequences of the invasion. Without the invasion, many brothers, sons, sisters, fathers, families would be alive and living together at home. They might not have had Starbucks in Baghdad, but they would have had each other.

To say "Iraq was hell before" is to elide that rather large and critical distinction. What you mean to imply by it -- that the invasion had no role in this hell -- it is untrue, it is an insult to the dead and all those who have suffered on a scale beyond your imagining. Beyond your imagining even, apparently, after you have gone and looked.

When the consequences of an action are catastrophic on this scale it is time to shut up about how good your intentions were. Our responsibility does not extend only to the scope of our intentions; it extends to the limit of their consequences.

For you to be defending the good intentions of the leaders of this colossal clusterfuck suggests to me, not that you can't manage facts and data, but that your moral compass is bent. To be willing to tell a whopper like the one that I quoted here, and then pose as the nice guy who would like to fix Iraq if only he could, alas, is -- let me see if I can find a nice way to put this: it is utterly immoral, it is obscene.

And then you make big cow eyes at Roy and pay him what you seem to regard as a great compliment: suggesting that his failure to notice your huge and obvious good intentions is a lapse but you are confident you can expect better things of him.

I recommend that you take a pause from contemplating your own nice-guyness for a while and reflect on the implications and consequences of your work. Sooner rather than later.

Amen to that.