“That will set the United States’ position in this part of the world back fifty years!” I can still hear the despairing tone of an eminent scholar in the Athens Tennis Club as our conversation was interrupted by a waiter who announced that the American Marines had just stormed the beaches of Beirut. I agreed, but was wrong.

Forty-nine years later, it’s clear that our preemptive strike prevented civil war in Lebanon, splitting apart Christian president & Sunni prime minister. Conclusion: Give me 49 years and I’ll tell you whether any particular preemptive strike was a Good Idea. (Was our Army & Marine pull-out of Lebanon 25 years after our Marine invasion a Good Idea? I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.)

On this week’s question, I’m so ignorant as not even to know whether our preemptive war in Iraq was a good idea—so how would I know whether our staying in, or getting out, would be a good idea? But the question is not about strategic foreign-affairs decisions made and to be made by persons democratically empowered to make them. It’s about the moral component in the decision-making process involving all our citizenry. The question is even narrower: Can we speak of “the moral position” on the “out of Iraq” question?

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