Olivier Dubois, a French journalist kidnapped almost two years ago in Mali, arrived back in France Tuesday.

Hundreds of people have been arrested in recent protests, but few were charged. Critics say this tactic is too arbitrary.

Workers across France have vowed to continue protesting as President Emmanuel Macron shows no sign of backing down over controversial pension reforms

Bonfires in the streets of French cities, broken windows and mass protests: the French citizens are against an increase in the retirement age, which the cabinet approved despite public resistance.

On the days she’s feeling most generous toward men—say, when she sees a handsome man on the street—Helena Lee can sometimes put her distaste aside and appreciate them as “eye candy.” That’s as far as she goes: “I do not want to know what is inside of his brain.” Most of the time, she wants nothing at all to do with men.

“I try to have faith in guys and not to be like, ‘Kill all men,’” she says. “But I’m sorry, I am a little bit on that side—that is, on the extreme side.”  

Her father, she says, was abusive and moved out when she was 6, and she has lived with her mother and grandmother ever since, a mini-matriarchy that suits her fine. She wears her hair in a bob, and on the day we met, she had on a black-denim button-down and a beige trench coat. In college, male classmates told her she’d be cuter if she “fixed her gay style.” The worst part, she said, was that they were surprised when she was offended—they thought they’d paid her a compliment. She is 24, studying for civil-servant exams, and likes reading Andrea Dworkin, Carl Sagan, and the occasional romance novel, which she considers pure fantasy.

Lee is part of a boycott movement in South Korea—women who are actively choosing single life. Their movement—possibly tens of thousands strong, though it’s impossible to say for sure—is called “4B,” or “The 4 No’s.” Adherents say no to dating, no to sex with men, no to marriage, and no to childbirth. (“B” refers to the Korean prefix bi-, which means “no”.)

They are the extreme edge of a broader trend away from marriage. By one estimate, more than a third of Korean men and a quarter of Korean women who are now in their mid-to-late 30s will never marry. Even more will never have children. In 1960, Korean women had, on average, six children. In 2022, the average Korean woman could expect to have just 0.78 children in her lifetime. In Seoul, the average is 0.59. If this downward drift continues, it will not be long before one out of every two women in the capital never becomes a parent.

Many countries’ populations are aging and, in some cases, shrinking. In January, China recorded its first population decline since the 1960s, when the country had been racked by famine. America’s birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession (though 86 percent of American women still have at least one child by the time they’re in their 40s). But South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world.

Marriage and children are more closely linked in South Korea than nearly anywhere else, with just 2.5 percent of children born outside of marriage in 2020, compared with an OECD average of more than 40 percent. For nearly 20 years, the Korean government has tried to encourage more marriages and more babies. In 2005, the government recognized low fertility as a matter of national importance and put forth its Framework Act on Low Birth Rate in an Aging Society, versions of which have been renewed every five years.

The government has tried expanding maternity leave, offering couples bigger and bigger bonuses for having babies, and subsidizing housing in Seoul for newlyweds. The mayor there has proposed easing visa restrictions to import more cheap foreign nannies, while some rural governments fund bachelors seeking foreign brides. In 2016, the government published a “birth map” online showing how many women of reproductive age lived in different regions—a clumsy attempt to encourage towns and cities to produce more babies. It prompted a feminist protest with women holding banners that read my womb is not a national public good and baby vending machine. The map was taken down.

In all this time, the country has spent more than $150 billion hoping to coax more babies into the world. None of its efforts are working. Many Korean metro systems have hot-pink seats designated for pregnant women, but when I visited Seoul in November, six months pregnant myself and easily tired, I was rarely able to snag a seat; they were filled with dozing elderly people.

There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care. But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.”

“I think the most fundamental issue at hand is that a lot of girls realize that they don’t really have to do this anymore,” Lee told me. “They can just opt out.”

By one estimate, more than a third of Korean men and a quarter of Korean women now in their mid-to-late 30s will never marry. (Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic)

The plummeting fertility rate has its roots in the rapid transformation of Korean society. After the Korean War, many people migrated from villages to work in urban factories for miserable wages, as part of a state-led economic transformation that became known as the “Miracle on the Han River.” High-school and college enrollment shot up. A prodemocracy movement eventually led to the toppling of military rule in 1987, and to new freedoms. After the 1997 financial crisis, companies restructured, and Korea’s corporate culture—known for demanding long hours in exchange for job security—took on the precarity familiar to Americans.

But gender roles were slower to evolve. Chang Kyung-sup, a sociologist at Seoul National University, coined the term compressed modernity to describe South Korea’s combination of lightning-fast economic transformation and the slow, uneven evolution of social institutions such as the family. More and more women entered higher education, finally surpassing their male counterparts in 2015. But educated women were still often expected to drop out of the workforce upon marriage or motherhood. The family remained the basic unit of society, and both the old order and the new assigned familial responsibilities nearly exclusively to women. Women’s ambitions have expanded, but the idea of what it means to be a wife and mother in Korea has not. As a result, resentments on both sides of the gender divide have flourished.

On a sunny day in November, I met Cho Young-min, 49, at a café in Gangnam. After more than two decades in marketing, she runs a business creating urban gardens. She sees the gender war partly as a result of that disconnect in expectations, and the fact that, for the first time, men and women are now genuinely competing for jobs.

The unemployment rate in Korea is relatively low, less than 4 percent, but it’s significantly higher for people in their 20s. Mandatory male military service—South Korea is still technically at war with North Korea—gives women what many men perceive as an advantage in the labor market, a head start of 18 months to two years. Women counter this with data on the pay gap, the largest in the OECD at 31 percent.

For nearly 20 years, the Korean government has tried to encourage more marriages and more babies. (Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic)

“To women’s minds, before, they had a very small portion of the pie, like this”—Cho held her thumb and index finger close together. “Now they are expanding the portion, bit by bit. It’s still very small compared to the men’s portion. But to men, they are losing.”

Last March, Yoon Suk-yeol was elected president on a wave of male resentment. He pledged to abolish the country’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which he said treated men like “potential sex criminals.” And he blamed feminism for the country’s low birth rate, suggesting that it “prevents healthy relationships between men and women,” adding that this was “not a problem that can be solved by giving out government subsidies.”

According to exit polls, nearly 59 percent of men ages 18 to 29 voted for Yoon, while 58 percent of women in that age group voted for the liberal candidate. One commentator declared it the “incel election.” Several people noted to me that in a country as ethnically homogenous as South Korea, the election emphasized the extent to which gender, rather than race or immigration status, has become the key social fault line.

Cho Jung-min had always planned to be married by 23. Her mother had married young, and given birth to her at 22. Cho loved having a young mom; the two of them watch the same TV shows and admire the same singers. “I wanted to do the same thing for my child,” Cho told me. But when she was 17 or 18, she’d mentioned her marriage plan to a friend. “Then why are you struggling so hard to study and go to university?” her friend asked. Good question. “That was one of the turning points,” she told me. Cho is 32 now and single.

We met at an Indian restaurant near her office. Cho has wavy black hair and swanned in wearing a stylish wool coat and sparkly scarf. She had studied and worked in France for years, but moved home during the pandemic. She is now a corporate strategist at a luxury e-retailer, where many of her workdays stretch until 10 or 11 p.m. (This is not uncommon: Last week a government proposal to raise the cap on the legal workweek from 52 hours to 69 hours was abandoned after young people and women’s groups protested.)

These hours provide Cho with little opportunity for dating, which, anyway, has not been a resounding success. She’s gone on four or five blind dates in the past two years. (Blind dates set up by friends or colleagues, as well as large matchmaking companies, are common ways of meeting people in South Korea, where online dating is not as widespread as it is in the U.S.) She found the men closed-minded, with “a traditional way of thinking.” Men, she said, “always want to debate with me: ‘Why are you thinking that way?’ They all need to teach me.” She doesn’t tell them she’s a feminist. Her mom has warned her not to, because she thinks it could be dangerous.

When I asked why she thought young Koreans were retreating from dating, Cho immediately brought up physical safety. “These days, there is a lot of violence during dating, so we start to feel very afraid,” she said.

In 2016, a 34-year-old man murdered a woman in a public restroom near the Gangnam metro station in Seoul. Although he said he was motivated by women routinely ignoring him, police blamed mental illness. This was a germinal event for many Korean young women, who were furious and terrified; it could have happened to anyone.

Indeed, a 2016 survey by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family found that 62 percent of South Korean women had experienced intimate-partner violence, a category that included emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as a range of controlling behaviors. In one 2017 study of 2,000 men, nearly 80 percent said they had been psychologically or physically abusive toward their dating partners.

Not long ago, Cho was on a bus waiting to get off at her stop when an SUV pulled over. A man got out and started throwing bowling balls into the street. A woman climbed out after him, crying and screaming, and he began hitting her. Cho called the police. “I thought it was only on the news,” she said. “I realized that it can also happen to me.”

Many women I interviewed said that their childhood had been marked by domestic violence and that they feared being hurt by men they might date, or filmed in an intimate moment.

Meera Choi, a Yale doctoral student, is researching gender inequality and changes in family formation in South Korea—what she calls a “crisis of heterosexuality.” When I expressed my surprise at how prevalent fears like Cho’s seemed to be, she estimated that 20 of the 40 women she had recently interviewed about these issues had experienced either familial or dating violence.

South Korea’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world. (Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic) Women’s ambitions have expanded, but the idea of what it means to be a wife and mother in Korea has not. (Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic)

Many of the women I spoke with said that patriarchy and sexism haunted their earliest memories. Some had grown up waiting until all the men in their families had finished eating before sitting down to their cold leftovers. They’d watched their parents dote on their brothers. They’d been hit by fathers and sexually harassed at school. They’d grown up and gone to job interviews and promptly been asked about their marital status.

But many said they had only come to articulate these experiences after encountering feminism—frequently online. They described a moment of awakening, perhaps even radicalization. They read about femicides, stalking, and digital sex crimes, known as molka, reported cases of which have been on the rise since 2011.

The world over, men are loud on the internet. The Korean website Ilbe.com, known for its overt anti-feminism, receives about 20 million visits each month, in a country of just under 52 million people. (Its users are anti- lots of other things too: anti-LGBTQ, anti-liberal, anti-immigrant). The Ilbe community has elements of the alt-right and the manosphere; some have likened it to 4chan or incel forums. Users refer to Korean women as kimchinyeo, or “kimchi women,” stereotyping them as vain, materialistic, and manipulative. Men share sexist memes and complaints about reverse discrimination that one Korean writer has described as “paranoid misogyny.”

In 2015, some women began to fight back. They created a website, Megalia, where they practiced the art of “mirroring”: They adopted the same rhetorical devices, sick humor, and misogynistic tropes, but used them to make fun of men. In response to the objectification of Korean women and complaints about their small breasts, women poked fun at Korean men for, they claimed, having small penises. The Megalia logo was a reference to this: an image of a hand with the thumb and pointer finger close together. They flipped the gender of common refrains about women, posting comments like “Women prefer a virgin man” and “Men should stay in the kitchen.” Jeong Eui-sol, a lecturer in gender studies at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, describes this as “troll feminism.”

Megalia shut down in 2017, after many users left for a new feminist community, Womad. But feminist ideas were traveling in other ways too. The novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, about the sexism that characterized a Korean woman’s life from childhood through motherhood, sold more than a million copies, and was made into a popular film. Kim Jo-eun, a sociologist studying gender and demography at KDI School of Public Policy and Management, in Sejong, found a sharp rise in the number of Google searches for misogyny and feminism after the Gangnam murder. Searches for feminism rose again in 2018, when Korea’s #MeToo reckoning began.

Distrust and even hatred between women and men, Kim believes, is the key to understanding South Korea’s declining birth rate. It’s not that women are with a partner and “thinking about having one or two more babies,” she told me. “It’s that you just don’t want to be in a relationship with men in Korea.”

Although Megalia’s methods were controversial, it accomplished its aim of making misogyny visible. In Helena Lee’s view, the success of the online feminist movement was that it showed women whom they were dealing with, and why men were not worth appeasing. “You don’t have to do plastic surgery; your appearance is not your worth; you don’t need to have long, flowy hair; you don’t have to do makeup; nurturing or mommying your boyfriend is not good for you,” she said, reciting some of the ideas that she and fellow feminists sought to impart.

What the movement did not do, most agree, is enlighten men or change their views. Instead, for men who already felt victimized and angry, it helped turn feminism into a dirty word.

Men are still expected to be breadwinners, and work an average of five more hours a week than women: 40.6 hours versus 35.2. (Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic)

If Korean women chafe at men’s expectations of them, the reverse is true as well.

Men are still expected to be breadwinners, and they work an average of five more hours a week than women—40.6 hours versus 35.2. Many Koreans still expect that the man or his family will buy a newlywed couple’s home, even when both partners have careers. Indeed, one study found that parental income is a strong predictor of whether a man will marry, but has no effect on marriage rates for women.

I met Ha Jung-woo at a café one evening after work. Ha is 31, tall and handsome, with a warm smile and impeccable manners, the kind of guy you wish you could clone for all your single straight girlfriends. He went to the University of Texas at Austin and had a serious relationship there, with a Korean American student. After they broke up and he moved home, he met another woman here. They shared the same values, he said. If they watched a movie together, they would cry at the same things, and if they were reading the news, they’d get angry over the same things. He liked that she laughed a lot.  

In 2021, they got engaged. The date was set, the venue booked. Both sets of parents had agreed that they would, together, help buy the newlyweds an apartment; her family would cover 30 percent of the purchase price, Ha 20 percent, and his father the remaining 50 percent. But then his father’s textile business suffered some setbacks, and he could put up only 30 percent. Ha was happy to take out a loan—he had a secure job. But he says that the news of his dad’s diminished circumstances spooked his fiancée’s family, and she called off the engagement.

Ha was devastated. He asked her: “Is it your decision or your parents’ decision?” When she said it was her decision, he gave up.  

Yoon Jun-seok is in his second year of a combined master’s and Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at the prestigious Seoul’s Korea University. When we met at a café near campus, he wore a San Francisco Giants hoodie, and black slide sandals with the Giants logo on them. He has few female friends, and has never had a girlfriend. He doesn’t feel that dating is “necessary” right now. At 25, his only priority is to finish his doctorate, which will take another five or six years, and then line up a steady job.

At that point, he’ll be about 32. Then, and only then, does he think he might make an effort to date. “If I can get married, then maybe I prefer between 35 and 40,” he said. “Raising kids in Korea costs a lot.”

In a 2020 survey of 1,000 South Koreans in their 30s, more than half of men who did not wish to marry cited financial concerns as their main hesitation; a quarter of women said they were “happy living alone,” while another quarter named “the culture of patriarchy and gender inequality” as their chief objection to marriage. (Another recent survey by two matchmaking companies found that women were reluctant to marry because they anticipate an asymmetrical division of housework, whereas men hesitated because of “feminism.”)

On my first morning in Seoul, I met Jung Kyu-won, a bioethicist who teaches law and medicine at two universities in Seoul, for coffee. We had been emailing about the gender war, and he had asked his male students if they would speak with me. The young men weren’t comfortable being interviewed, but they shared their thoughts with him, which he summarized for me. (That it was so much easier to find women willing to talk about these issues than men seemed perhaps connected to the problem itself.) They had a long list of complaints, many of which boiled down to a lack of trust in potential female partners, and resentment over the expectation that they would bear nearly all the financial responsibilities in a relationship.

Jung is in his late 50s and has been divorced for many years. He recently read an article about women’s expectations for a husband, he told me, and realized that he himself, despite his professional accomplishments, didn’t meet their salary requirements.

Some young people I met wish things were different. Shin Hyun, 20, is a devout Christian studying comparative literature and culture at Seoul’s Yonsei University. He is close to his parents, who always told their children, “You guys are my greatest reward.” He’s keen to marry and experience parenthood for himself one day. “I don’t think you can feel a love that’s greater than parental love,” he told me.  

Walking around Seoul, I began to wonder where the children were hiding. Throughout the city, I saw “no-kids zones”—restaurants and cafés with stickers on their door announcing the establishment’s no-kids policy. But the children must be somewhere, right?

Very few rich countries have successfully reversed a decline in fertility, and none has climbed back above the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman after dropping below it. (Dion Bierdrager for The Atlantic)

One evening, I went with a translator to Daechi-dong, an area in Gangnam famous for its concentration of hagwon—cram schools. He pointed up at the office buildings lining the boulevards, noting which schools were on which floors—this one was known for languages, that one for math. At about 9:30 p.m., cars (all with moms at the wheel) pulled up to idle by the curb. By 10, children and teenagers of all ages, laden with heavy-looking backpacks, streamed out into the street.

A few nights later, I sat down with Lira, a cheerful woman in her late 40s who asked that I use just her first name for privacy reasons. She grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, when students attended hagwon only if they were weak in a given subject. Now the schools are essential for any kid who wants to get into a decent college. Lira’s daughter studied at a high-pressure hagwon, 30 to 40 minutes from their house, to get into a competitive high school. It cost about $2,400 a month, “a lot of our family’s expenses,” Lira said. When I asked if her husband helped with any of the arrangements—researching the best hagwon, the daily drop-off and pickup, the fresh meals and special treats she made to ease her daughter’s stress—it took her a minute to stop laughing before she could say no: “In Korea, child care is more the woman’s responsibility.”

Indeed, many of the mothers I spoke with, despite being married, sounded like what I would soon become: a single mom. At 40, I decided to use eggs that I’d frozen a few years earlier for in vitro fertilization—something that is not only frowned upon in Korea, but basically impossible: The Korean Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology allows only married women to obtain donor sperm.

One day, toward the end of my trip, I visited a clinic run by CHA Fertility Center. I was surprised, given CHA’s growing egg-freezing business, to hear a director of the center tell me that she personally doesn’t support women becoming single parents, because “it’s not good for the child.” But as young people eye the heterosexual nuclear family with more and more skepticism, South Korea may need to accept, and even support, other models.

Very few rich countries have successfully reversed a decline in fertility, and none has climbed back above the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman after dropping below it. Paul Y. Chang, a Harvard sociologist who studies family life in Korea, sees the material and social challenges there as intertwined. “If you provide housing for every single unemployed man, my guess is they’ll be a little bit less misogynistic and less angry at the world,” he said. Similarly, “if we’re able to somehow force companies to pay women equally, and give them promotional pathways that are equivalent to what the men get, then I’m sure that it would take the edge off the feminism.” A more secure society could make people more comfortable planning for a future that includes marriage and children.

But most of the women I spoke with pushed back on these ideas. Some considered Korean society irredeemably misogynistic. Many women said they were happy living with their pets; others had started dating women.  

Park Hyun-joon, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, directed the Korean Millennials Project, for which he and colleagues surveyed about 5,000 Korean adults ages 25 to 49. He has found that many Koreans see family as “a luxury good.” But he also acknowledged the divergence in values between women and men, an issue that is less easily solved by policy interventions. “I clearly see why Korean women don’t want to get married to Korean guys,” he said. “Their political and cultural conservatism probably makes them pretty unattractive in the marriage market.”

Or as one young woman I spoke with put it, her friends “kind of hate men, and they are afraid of them.”

I wondered whether the real luxury Park was referring to was trust—the capacity to believe that tomorrow will be better than today, and that your fellow citizens are working to make it so.

I asked many people whether they thought South Korea was losing anything in its spurning of reproduction. Some had trouble grasping the question. A few mentioned something about having to pay higher taxes in the future. One woman, a 4B adherent, said she jokes with her friends that the solution to South Korea’s problems is for the whole country to simply disappear. Thanos, the villain in The Avengers who eliminates half the Earth’s population with a snap of his fingers, didn’t do anything wrong, she told me. Meera Choi, the doctoral student researching gender inequality and fertility, told me she’s heard other Korean feminists make the exact same joke about Thanos. Underneath the joke, I sensed a hopelessness that bordered on nihilism.

After talking with so many thoughtful and kind young people, I mostly felt sad that, a generation from now, there will be fewer like them in their country. One morning outside my hotel, I watched a father in a suit and trench coat wait with his young son on the corner. When a school bus pulled over, he helped the boy on, and stood there waving and smiling at him through the bus’s windows as the little boy trundled down the aisle to his seat. The father waved frantically, lovingly, as if he couldn’t squeeze enough waves into those last few moments in which he held his son’s gaze. He was still smiling long after the bus drove off.

Reporting for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

From India to France, bigots are scared of the hijab. Why are Western feminists so deafeningly silent about this?

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Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Zelensky has an answer for DeSantis. This is not great news for Donald Trump. Cool people accidentally saved America’s feet. Did Vermeer’s daughter paint some of his best-known works? Just War

I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything, and I hope you’ll bear with me in a somewhat longer edition of the Daily today for a personal exploration of the issue.

In retrospect, almost no American war except the great crusade against the Axis seems to have been necessary, especially for the people who have had to go and fight such conflicts. How could we have asked our military men and women to endure death and mutilation and horror in 1991 so that a bunch of rich Kuwaitis could return to their mansions, or in 2003 so that we could finally settle scores with a regional dictator? Yesterday, The Bulwark ran a searing, must-read reminiscence of the Iraq War written by a U.S. veteran that reminds us how high-flown ideas such as “national interest” or “international order” play little role on the actual battlefield.

And yet, there are just wars: conflicts that require the use of armed force on behalf of an ally or for the greater good of the international community. I was an advocate for deposing Saddam by the mid-1990s on such grounds. Here is what I wrote in the journal Ethics & International Affairs on the eve of the invasion in March 2003:

The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts.

Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime(and wars have started over less), but taken together they are a brief for what can only be considered a just war.

Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war, ostensibly to counter a gathering threat of weapons of mass destruction. (Preemptive war, by the way, is a war to avert an imminent attack, and generally permissible in international law and custom. Preventive war is going to war on your own timetable to snuff out a possible future threat, a practice long rejected by the international community as immoral and illegal. The Israeli move at the opening of the Six-Day War, in 1967, was preemptive; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, was preventive.

Of course, the Iraqi dictator was doing his damndest to convince the world that he had weapons of mass destruction, because he was terrified of admitting to his worst foe, Iran, that he no longer had them. (He sure convinced me.) But this was no evidence of an imminent threat requiring instant action, and the WMD charge was the shakiest of limbs in a tree full of much stronger branches.

Bush used the WMD rationale as just one in a kitchen sink of issues, likely because his advisers thought it was the case that would most resonate with the public after the September 11 terror attacks. For years, most Western governments saw terrorism, rogue states, and WMD as three separate problems, to be handled by different means. After 9/11, these three issues threaded together into one giant problem—a rogue state supporting terrorists who seek to do mass damage—and the tolerance for risk that protected the Iraqi tyrant for so many years evaporated.

In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history. Knowing what I now know, I would not have advocated for setting the wheels of war in motion. And although Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for this war, I could not have imagined how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with “transformation,” the idea that the U.S. military could do more with fewer troops and lighter forces, would undermine our ability to conduct a war against Iraq. As Eliot Cohen later said, “The thing I know now that I did not know then is just how incredibly incompetent we would be, which is the most sobering part of all this.”

My own unease about the war began when America’s de facto military governor, Paul Bremer, disbanded the Iraqi military and embarked on “de-Baathification,” taking as his historical analogy the “denazification” of Germany after World War II. This was bad history and bad policy, and it created a massive unemployment problem among people skilled in violence while punishing civilians whose only real association with Baathism was the party card required for them to get a good job.

And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better. Like many of our leaders, I was still amazed at the collapse of the Soviet Union, appalled at Western inaction in places like Rwanda, and convinced (as I still am) that U.S. foreign policy should be premised on a kind of Spider-Man doctrine: With great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, in my case, this turned into supporting what the late Charles Krauthammer in 1999 called “a blanket anti-son of a bitch policy,” which he described as “soothing, satisfying and empty. It is not a policy at all but righteous self-delusion.” Krauthammer was right, and people like me were too willing to argue for taking out bad guys merely because they were bad guys. But that word blanket was doing a lot of lifting in Krauthammer’s formulation; perhaps we cannot go after all of them, but some sons of bitches should be high on the list. For me, Saddam was one of them.

The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power. (Is the world better off because we left Bashar al-Assad in power and allowed him to turn Syria into an abattoir?) Yes, some rulers are too dangerous to remove; Vladimir Putin, hiding in the Kremlin behind a wall of nuclear weapons, comes to mind. Some, however, are too dangerous to allow to remain in power, and in 2003, I included Saddam in that group.

In 2007, Vanity Fair interviewed a group of the war’s most well-known supporters. Even the ur-hawk Richard Perle (nicknamed in Washington the “Prince of Darkness” when he worked for Ronald Reagan) admitted that, if he had it to do over again, he might have argued for some path other than war. But the comment that sticks with me to this day, and the one that best represents my thinking, came from Ambassador Kenneth Adelman. In 2002, Adelman famously declared that the war would be “a cakewalk,” but five years later, he said:

The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN’T DO. And that’s very different from LET’S GO.

Twenty years later, that’s where I remain. The cause was just, but there are times when doing what’s right and just is not possible. For almost 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the first Allied victory over Iraq, the United States had the chance to deepen the importance of international institutions. We squandered that opportunity because of poor leadership, Pentagon fads (the “Office of Force Transformation” was disbanded in 2006, shortly before Bush finally removed Rumsfeld), and amateurish historical analogies.

Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War. You’ll see arguments that experts supported it. (Most academics and many civilians in D.C. did not.) You’ll hear that it was a right-wing crusade backed only by a Republican minority. (Also wrong.) Had the war been executed differently, we might be having a different conversation today.

The fact remains that the United States is a great power protecting an international system it helped to create, and there will be times when military action is necessary. Fortunately, most Americans still seem to grasp this important reality.

Would I argue for another such operation today? If the question means “another massive preventive war far from home,” no. I have consistently opposed war with Iran and any direct U.S. involvement in Ukraine. I wrote a book in 2008 warning that we should strengthen the United Nations and other institutions to stop the growing acceptance around the world of preventive war as a normal tool of statecraft.

I also, however, supported the NATO operation in Libya, and I have called for using American airpower to blunt Assad’s mass murders in Syria. Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it would be another mistake to draw the single-minded conclusion (much as we did after Vietnam) that everything everywhere will forever be another Iraq. The world is too dangerous, and American leadership too necessary, for us to fall into such a facile and paralyzing trap.

Related:

David Frum: the Iraq War reconsidered The enduring lessons of the “axis of evil” speech Today’s News French President Emmanuel Macron’s government survived a no-confidence motion by nine votes, the result of widespread backlash to a bill that would raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64. President Joe Biden issued the first veto of his presidency, on a resolution to overturn a retirement-investment rule allowing managers of retirement funds to consider environmental and social factors when choosing investments. Chinese leader Xi Jinping visited the Kremlin, where he and Russian President Vladimir Putin greeted each other as “dear friend.” Washington denounced the visit.

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Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up more reader replies on the freedom and frustration of cars.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic; Getty

Please Get Me Out of Dead-Dog TikTok

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

A brown dog, muzzle gone gray—surely from a life well lived—tries to climb three steps but falters. Her legs give out, and she twists and falls. A Rottweiler limps around a kitchen. A golden retriever pants in a vet’s office, then he’s placed on a table, wrapped in medical tubes. “Bye, buddy,” a voice says off camera. Nearby, a hand picks up a syringe.

This is Dead-Dog TikTok. It is an algorithmic loop of pet death: of sick and senior dogs living their last day on Earth, of final hours spent clinging to one another in the veterinarian’s office, of the brutal grief that follows in the aftermath. One related trend invites owners to share the moment they knew it was time—time unspecified, but clear: Share the moment you decided to euthanize your dog.

Read the full article.

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P. S.

No recommendations today, other than to thank our veterans for shouldering the burden of a war that we asked them to fight.

— Tom