Dean Esmay has some thoughts:

Time after time the naysayers have proven themselves both morally and intellectually incoherent, and yet they never have the introspection to acknowledge this.

Furthermore, anyone calling himself a “liberal” or a “humanist”–Muslim or not–is in my view faced with a stark choice:

You either sit around pretending that a vicious, murderous, fascist “insurgency” that routinely cuts people’s heads off and shoots children in the face is the “legitimate voice of the Iraqi people,” or you recognize that there is in Iraq a government elected by the Iraqi people working under a Constitution written entirely by Iraqis that recognizes human rights better than any in the Arab world.

No matter how many reservations you have about how it was done or how imperfectly that elected government implements the ideals expressed in that ratified Constitution.

If you take the former position you have no business calling yourself a liberal or a progressive or a humanist. If you take the latter position, then maybe you have to swallow the bitter pill that someone named George Bush, whom you don’t like and maybe think is incompetent, was the instigator of something that damn well needs to be supported.

But you can’t have it both ways. Indeed, by declaring the whole thing illegitimate, all you’re doing is siding with the Islamophobes of the world who claim the Muslims and the Arabs are far too savage, backward, and primitive to respect things like democracy and human rights. Indeed, you’re implicitly siding with the Jihadwatch crowd.

They’re not anti-war. They’re just on the other side.

Oh, and I’m sure that the usual suspects in the “human rights community” will be speaking up about this violation of the Geneva Conventions any minute now.

Any minute now.

<sound=”chirping crickets”>

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Any minute.

So argues Mark Steyn:

How many times does the Islamic Republic have to (a) seize sovereign territory (the US embassy in Teheran); (b) order mob hits on foreign nationals (Salman Rushdie and his publishers); (c) perpetrate acts of state terrorism against citizens of countries with which it has no grievance whatsoever (the Buenos Aires community center bombing)? Its behavior has been consistent for three decades, yet, this time round as last time round, the British government calls in the Iranian ambassador and gives him a stern talking to, as if he were the emissary of Poland or India or any other civilized state.