Pop Sociology with Mr. Kristol

Dear Mr. Kristol,

Your conversation with Brian Lamb on Q&A left the impression that our escapade in Iraq is a giant stride Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy. A perusal of the transcript confirms that impression. How curious! As I recall, President Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad over Christmas in 1983 with a $500,000,000 stocking stuffer, tangible evidence of a tilt toward Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War. Our object, apparently, was to keep Iran in a box. Iran is twice the size of Iraq. The mullahs of Iran are the spiritual leaders of the Shi'a world. Iraq's Shi'a majority is concentrated in the oil-rich south. Saudi Arabia's Shi'a minority is concentrated in the oil-rich northeast. Iran exports Terror through Hezbollah. These sobering reflections urged the distasteful necessity of tilting toward Saddam, even though he was using chemical weapons in that vicious war.

Im March 2003, the containment of Iran was no less a necessity that two decades earlier. The invasion of Iraq repudiates the Reagan policy. Only someone self-deluded enough to discount 1300 years of Sunni-Shi'a hostility as "pop sociology" could praise this misadventure as Neo-Reaganite.