The conservative point of view is that misfortunes will come, like wars and the necessity for wars, and are not to be avoided by the best-designed, nor even by a hypothetically perfect political system. When we are attacked, we have to fight back, not look around for means of placating an enemy willing to kill Americans or Britons indiscriminately. The trouble with Bush’s War on Terrorism from the outset was that not very many of the terrorists could be found for us to go to war with them. Like many on the Left, I thought at the time that there was no point in attacking Saddam Hussein for what someone else entirely had done. But Bush turned out to be right, and I turned out to be wrong. The Iraq War brought the terrorists out of the woodwork and made it possible for us to get at them like nothing else that we could have done. And we deposed a vicious, murdering tyrant and dictator as a lagniappe, and gave his people their first chance in half a century to live under a free and democratic government. For such deeds I can well believe that, as The Times’s correspondent wrote, London was attacked. But that just shows us that Bush and Blair were on the right track all along and spotted the link between Iraq and 9/11 before there was one.
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