Kenneth F. Thomas sends a question that I thought was worth answering here…
As far as your search engine tells me, I don't think you've ever expressed an opinion on the relationship between the death of Leon Klinghoffer and the rationale for the Iraq war. As you no doubt know, U.S. forces under Bush in 2003 captured Abu Abbas, the head of the P.L.F. terrorist group responsible for Klinghoffer's murder on the Achille Lauro. Abbas escaped arrest for the crime in Italy using an Iraqi passport and was sheltered by Saddam Hussein for many years after that. Christopher Hitchens among others has used this point to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein did indeed make alliances with terrorist groups, one of the major reasons for the war. I'll stop short of asking what you think Kirby might have thought about the Iraq war, but if you have a moment to share your thinking on the subject seen from this perspective, I would appreciate it.
For those of you puzzled by the connection between Leon Klinghoffer (the elderly, wheelchair-confined gentleman killed aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985) and the great comic book creator, Jack Kirby…Jack and Leon were childhood pals who'd remained in contact. They and their spouses had dined together not long before the Klinghoffers' tragic vacation. As you might expect, his friend's death enraged and depressed Jack, especially because it happened during a time of great personal stress in his life: During his celebrated battle with Marvel Comics over the return of his original artwork. Jack's wife Roz later told me that the murder of "Albie" — that was Klinghoffer's childhood name — had a deep impact on Jack, and in an upcoming article somewhere, I'll try to discuss what that impact seems to have involved. It's too long a discourse to go into here and it's not what you asked about, anyway.
I won't speculate on how Jack would have viewed the Iraq War except to say that he was an early opponent of the Vietnam conflict and that around 1971, he told me — with a certain amount of pride, I sensed — that he'd never voted Republican in his life. Does that mean he'd be as against the current war as some of us are? Who knows? People do change over the years. I have one friend who went from Rabid Democrat to Mad Dog Republican in about a decade and a half — and Jack was often unpredicable.
As for me: It's frustrating for some of us that the "selling" of this war has also included the notion that you have to buy the entire package. There can be good aspects in a situation that is largely disastrous and one can also agree with the goals but decide that too high a price is being paid to achieve them. The friend I described in the previous paragraph argues with me as if I have to either back Bush 100% on everything or I'm effectively wishing that Saddam Hussein was back in power and that whatever terrorists have been killed or caught were free to plot another 9/11.
Deposing Saddam seemed like a commendable goal but the loss of lives (American and those of the people we're ostensibly liberating) and resources sure seems like a bad trade-off. When it's claimed that what we're doing over there is increasing the world's supply of terrorists, not depleting it, it really sounds like a terrible idea. Like an ever-increasing majority of citizens, I've come to the belief that we're going to look back on the Iraq War as an enterprise that killed a horrifying number of human beings just to replace one dreadful situation in Iraq with another. Not everything that has happened in the War on Terror has been a disaster, and catching Abu Abbas was certainly, in and of itself, a good thing. But history will not suggest it was worth the lives of thousands of American soldiers and countless Iraqis, plus all the ancillary destruction and grief that comes with those deaths, just to make more of the world wish we were all dead and to catch the guy Jack Kirby used to play handball with.