Shadi Hamid has a rather different reaction to Tony Blair’s Iraq cynicism than I did. “I think it’s undoubtebly true that Iraq – and the Middle East – is better off now than it was under Saddam and than it would have been had Saddam not been removed from power.” There’s nothing “undoubtedly true” about this at all. Relying on a counterfactual conditional is the sign of a hollow argument. Saddam rule from 2003 to 2009 could have been a nightmare, an internal abbatoir, an intensification of his disgusting regime. Or better things might have happened. We have, from the perspective of logic, no way of responsibly addressing this point.

What we do have is an Iraq that has stabilized post-surge to a high-but-not-out-of-control degree of violence, in which sectarian concerns simmer but are not presently boiling and an imperfect democracy is holding. And we got that following an ocean of blood: tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of civilian deaths; a sectarian war that will mark Iraq’s history; over 4680 U.S. casualties and counting; an invasion and occupation based on, at the very least, incorrect premises about weapons of mass destruction; and a confession that the architects of the war would have sold it to their democratic publics based on any available argument.

Shadi says he wants to engage in a thought experiment about what would make the war retroactively justified. Yet he lists precisely none of these relevant considerations in his post. This is neither history nor philosophy. It’s blithe indifference to the overwhelming human costs of war masquerading as concern for human rights.