Stand Down is an important new blog from Max Sawicky and Julian Sanchez, bringing together writers from the left and right who think that under the present circumstances, invading Iraq is a bad idea. Read their mission statement here.

Here’s an example of why I think this blog is a good idea. The Lincoln Plawg recently took a few well-aimed swipes at an article by John Lewis Gaddis in Foreign Policy called “A Grand Strategy”, where Gaddis gets excited about the new National Security Strategy document. The Plawg has most of the bases covered, but one thing he doesn’t discuss jumped out at me. Gaddis argues:

The final innovation in the Bush strategy deals with the longer-term issue of removing the causes of terrorism and tyranny. Here, again, the president’s thinking parallels an emerging consensus within the academic community. For it’s becoming clear now that poverty wasn’t what caused a group of middle-class and reasonably well-educated Middle Easterners to fly three airplanes into buildings and another into the ground. It was, rather, resentments growing out of the absence of representative institutions in their own societies, so that the only outlet for political dissidence was religious fanaticism.

Really? Some counterexamples spring to mind. Take many of the countries in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and ’80s, for instance. Their people lacked representative institutions and were pretty resentful about it, but they didn’t channel their dissent into religious fanaticism, and they didn’t need a U.S. invasion to have their revolution. And closer to the region of interest, from what I understand, Iran is slowly managing to grow a civil society under the noses of the Mullahs.

If you are on the left, you can argue that this shows there are long-term routes to “regime change” that don’t involve massive, direct military commitments. If you are on the right, you can argue that fanaticism obviously isn’t caused simply by a lack of representative institutions, so invading and trying to impose democracy from above is unlikely to deal with the fanatics. Either way, the better policy choice is not to invade. This strikes me as just the kind of point that Stand Down is good for making, especially seeing as the alternative, badly reasoned view is getting play in the likes of Foreign Policy magazine.