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Roger Cohen, feeling sorry for himself in the virtual pages of the IHT marshalls this historical analogy:

What I find intolerable is the way a smug left personnified by Michael Tomasky (see his attempt at humor in God, what a bunch of whiners) can drone on about Iraq for 25 paragraphs or so without ever mentioning what Saddam’s murder-central was like. Perhaps Tomasky should think a little more about how the Soviet Gulag slipped out of the awareness of wide swathes of the European and American left, some of whom would not even see the horror for what it was when Solzhenitsyn finally rammed it down their throats. If he did search his untroubled conscience, Tomasky and others like him might be less inclined to reduce Saddam’s Gulag to a subordinate clause.

Leaving aside the bizarre insinuation that Michael Tomasky is soft on Stalinism, let’s take this historical analogy to its logical conclusion. Should the US have invaded the USSR in order to bring its horrors to a halt? And if Cohen thinks the answer is “no,” do I then get to say that Cohen is a naive fool who is soft on mass murder?