For Andrew Coyne, Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word

Coyne's Wednesday Column is a non-apology for his support of that hideous abortion of history known as Gulf War II. He says, with apparent irony, that:

...it falls to me to defend the glittering success that is present-day Iraq.

His argument:

If we say the world is a more dangerous place with Saddam gone, it seems to me we are obliged to give some thought to what the world would be like had Saddam remained.

Coyne then runs through a series of hypotheticals: considers what might have happened had Saddam stayed in power. Maybe sanctions would have failed, and maybe Saddam would once again have begun pursuing WMDs. Hell, maybe he would have just bought them from North Korea. And maybe, when he had them, he would have sold them to Al Qaeda, who might have found shelter in Iraq after Tora Bora fell.

To which the best response is probably that of Mijnheer, who wrote on Coyne's blog:

Never mind that bin Laden hated Saddam and his type — there might have been a marriage of convenience. What if Ed Broadbent, fed up with the childish histrionics of the House of Commons and despairing of any prospect of rectifying this via peaceful means, had allied himself with a nuclear-armed Saddam! Why didn't we take out Ed years ago? And what if Peter MacKay, enraged by his treatment by some female dog, had sought recourse with a mini-nuke smuggled into Canada in an oil barrel from a nuclear-armed Iraq via a corrupt Oil-for-Food official (from France!)? The mind boggles.

Indeed the mind boggles.

But lets launch a few hypotheticals of our own. Maybe one day we will get a display of that "personal responsibility" from Coyne that is alleged to be a Conservative trait. Maybe one day Coyne will rise up from behind his desk in the Southam building, and trek to wherever they keep Jean Chretien, and kiss his ass by way of apology. In fact, maybe Stephen Harper and Ralph Klein and every warmonger in Northern Alberta will hop grey-hounds out to Quebec and kiss Chretien's ass, to show that they have achieved some sort of insight into the war they pushed madly upon this country, and which only cooler Lib-Left heads kept us out of.

Maybe...