The peculiar institution
3rd August 2008
Megan McArdle limns the self-serving hypocrisy of the anti-war movement.
The South posed no immediate military threat to the North; they wanted to leave the Union, not invade it. If you don’t think that, say, Saddam’s awful behavior posed a valid moral reason to invade*, then it’s hard to make an argument that we had a right to invade to end slavery. Even a prudential argument doesn’t work very well on this metric–we killed more confederates than Iraqis both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and the south was far more economically devastated by the war than Iraq will have been.