{"id":12898,"date":"2011-11-21T14:30:45","date_gmt":"2011-11-21T22:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=12898"},"modified":"2011-11-21T21:09:29","modified_gmt":"2011-11-22T05:09:29","slug":"david-frums-fatal-conceit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/21\/david-frums-fatal-conceit\/","title":{"rendered":"David Frum’s Fatal Conceit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know it’s bad form to follow up on my own post so quickly, but I fear that I may have shortchanged the enormity of the assertion<\/a>\u00a0that “For an Iraqi, there was no price too high to pay to rid the country of Saddam Hussein.” Allow me to riff a bit, with a nod to some of the commenters.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nLet’s say that, in an instant, America \u2014 no, the whole world \u2014 could be magically remade into David Frum’s utopia. I don’t want to imagine what that would be like, and I probably wouldn’t live long enough to see much of it, but whatever. All the evils<\/a> that Frum deplores could be scrubbed from the planet, and for a relatively small price in the grand scheme of things: his wife and three kids<\/a>. (This is not just some far-fetched philosophy-class hypothetical; numerous Iraqis have lost their entire families in the last eight years.)\u00a0Would Frum pay that price?<\/p>\n

I don’t want to speak for him, but I strongly suspect that he would not. He’s not a robot, after all. He surely has normal human feelings for his own family. Faced with the prospect of any harm coming to them, he would likely accept the persistence of “evil” in the world and forgo Frumtopia. (He’s free to correct me on this in comments.)<\/p>\n

But Frum doesn’t hesitate to declare the lives of up to\u00a030 million other people an acceptable price. He doesn’t even linger over the matter: 18 words and he’s on to the next issue. Thirty million people. But he means well.<\/p>\n

“Sociopath” was far too vague a term for Frum. How about “genocidal maniac with a heart of gold”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know it’s bad form to follow up on my own post so quickly, but I fear that I may have shortchanged the enormity of the assertion\u00a0that “For an Iraqi, there was no price too high to pay to rid the country of Saddam Hussein.” Allow me to riff a bit, with a nod to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[465,47],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-frum","category-neocons"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12898"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12930,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12898\/revisions\/12930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12898"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}