Steven DenBeste, writer of USS Clueless, has died

It was our moral obligation to go to war with Saddam, ask for an outline of details as I and as I recall Steve saw them if you want, but the moral case starts with "you broke it, you fix it" ... and come to think of it we followed the same pattern with Vietnam, except for our unprovoked breaking of that country vs. our responding to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. And that war was very successful and improved things in general, if for no other reasons than removing Saddam from power and blowing open the Khan nuclear production network (for which we rewarded Qaddafi with death...).

It was also our moral obligation to properly handle the aftermath, after we'd finished completely breaking the country, and that's where the horrible failures started, with e.g. the appointment of the clueless proconsul Paul Bremer (although killing zillions of jihadists on ground of our choosing was one good result).

I didn't believe that I would understand an argumentation in favour of the Iraq wars, but I actually did. Thanks for letting me know. I still don't agree with all he has said, but he gives good points to improve everybody's point of view.

It's important to recognise that he falls into the category of people who are convincing, argue at length with references, but are often wrong.

A little example from that link (2008):

"I don't expect the photovoltaic manufacturing industry to achieve that kind of production volume any time soon. 250 square kilometers is 250 million square meters. If they're turning out even as much as ten thousand square meters a year now I'd be very surprised. (I'd be a bit surprised if it was even one thousand.)"

For some reason solar panel production seems to be quoted in watts rather than area; but if I take 55,000MW from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics and multiply it by the smaller number in https://www.quora.com/To-produce-1-MW-of-solar-power-using-P... I get about 360 million square meters.

His strategising on the middle east hasn't exactly been vindicated by history either.

I double checked your last cited claim, and it's indeed correct, e.g.:

"And so it is in this case. If there were a way that the President could have revealed the true strategy for the war to us all without negative consequences, I would agree that he would have had an obligation to do so. But that's not the case; for the government to come out and frankly state that the purpose of this war was to bring about broad political and cultural reforms in the entire Arab/Islamic world would have guaranteed that the war would be much more costly to us, and raise a substantial risk that we would not succeed."

Which he justifies by how much harder it would have been to win the war part of it without starting from the ground on Kuwait.

Which is an utterly bogus calculus.

Although I don't remember it being such a big secret what we were really trying to accomplish, but it's been too long to remember the sequence of events. I also think that this doomed goal was necessary for us to try, if/when we have to implement a nuclear Final Solution to the Muslim Problem (in response to getting nuked, of course, see things like Wretchard's Three Conjectures for more discussion of this terrible calculus).

But for such a terribly difficult and unlikely to succeed endeavor as nation building, for that to be the main goal, to not get buy-in from the nation, was indescribably irresponsible. And helped to ensure its failure, even the middle of "Democracy, Whisky, Sexy" just got spiked in a middle of the night law passed by the Iraqi legislature....

I wasn't going to slam the guy quite that badly on his obituary, but you're correct.

I somehow missed that line, thanks!