A pretty pulverizing indictment Mr. Auster has laid out here. The poverty of our national debate on this war (and the wider war on terror) is very discouraging. Even more discouraging is the ceaseless efforts by the administration’s friends outside of government (“conservatives”) to advise complacency. We should trust the administration, they say, because they know better, and anyway, they are conservatives too!

This is a grim but frightening commentary on our “policy.” If Mr. Auster and James Fallows are correct, the Administration is far more incompetent even than the Johnson Administration at its worst. The “planners” cannot even be accused of planning on the basis of the misleading “best-case” scenarios suggested by the occupations of Germany and Japan. In those cases, many mistakes were made, at first, but there were extensive preparations for the occupations, and at least an attempt to understand the people we were dealing with. Come to think of it, those were not truly the best cases, as the war advocates also absurdly alluded to the liberation of France as a model… on alternate days. It will be interesting to apportion the blame between infantile neocon ideologizing and CCR fecklessness.

Again, we see GWB’s fundamental liberalism at work. The only thing the President and his neocon advisors were able to see in a post-Saddam Iraq were a mass of free and equal Iraqis who would welcome us and at once set up a liberal, multi-ethnic democracy - because they’re all just like us and all want the same things.

They refuse to acknowledge the existence of Kurds, Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, or of Islamic culture and its very nature. Bagdad was the capital of the great Caliphate, an epicenter of the very culture that spawned Al-Quaeda. How these people can become so completly delusional is the thing that’s really distressing.

As we all know, “greatness” is often a quality that is found in people who have a great deal of faith in themselves and (who) persevere, often under extremely difficult and challenging conditions with that faith guiding them. President Reagan was just that sort of man. So was Gen. George Patton, though he was (as Reagan was) villified by the press and was (eventually) brought down by them.

The reason I bring this concept of “greatness” up is because it is precisely what our country needs and is lacking now—a great leader—in the Army as well as in The White House. Many of us have sifted through the handful of possible future leaders in our minds. Many of us keep coming back to Ronald Reagan, because he was the last “great American leader” (Mr. Auster has written extensively—in another recent thread—on this subject, telling of the greatness and wonder of George Washington, possibly our greatest leader).

I brought up Gen. Patton because as a teen, I read about how he bedazzled and hoodwinked the retreating Nazis, and most notably, how he almost singlehandedly brought the war with Germany to a conclusion—and how, had Ike given him the go-ahead, Gen. Patten could have saved Czechoslovakia and possibly other Slavic countries from (Russian) Communism. Patton did it mostly with Michelin road maps, available to the Nazis and the Allies. He was also a amazing motivator. His men admired him and he got the most out of them. While the British were more trepdatious/slower to react under Gen. Montgomery’s leadership, Patton had relative freedom to act. The enemy feared and respected him. He was ingenius, but what most ingenius about him was his ability to make decisions on attacking the enemy ON THE BATTLEFIELD, sometimes riding in one of his tanks. The only thing that stopped him from going all the way to Berlin was Ike and the press. The “face slapping” incident in Italy came back to haunt him, and he never recovered, politically speaking.

The point I am trying to make is, we need a Gen. Patton in the field in Iraq—or wherever we are fighting, making the decisions that need to be made, sometimes by the seat of the general’s pants. While long-range missles and satellite spying and other advances in telecommunications have greatly changed today’s battlefield, there is still the need for “a Gen. Patton” in the Army, making quick, last-minute decisions in the field. Patton would be ashamed of the mess we are in, and how Bush 43 bowed to the murderer-cleric, al-Sadr. Letting him go and not “wasting” him and his followers as they hide out for months in a shrine’s basement was and is inexcusable. While I am sure we have competent generals in Iraq, Qatar and in Florida’s command center, I do not believe that they are in the mold of “ol’ blood and guts”—Gen. George S. Patton.

I think most people give the Arab’s far too little credit when it comes to discussing and understanding the cultural and social conflict that is occuring.

The Arabs, for better or worse, have considered Western liberalism, and they have rejected it.

It is true that that they are holding off necessary social reforms, but the are also rejecting feminism, homosexual marriage, abortion on demand, and the rest of the totalitarian liberal dogma that passes itself off as culture in the West. I don’t blame them for that.

I doubt the “Arabs” by which Ron apparently means the Western Islamic complex that also includes the Iranians and Pakistanis, do understand either Western liberalism, the cultural conflict, or indeed much else. Noone here will fault them for rejecting homosexual “marriage” for example,— but then so did the rest of mankind throughout history until just yesterday. Their own contemptible views on women were formulated many centuries ago and were rejected just as long ago by medieval Westerners and even by most of the Southeast Asians who became Muslims.

As I understand it, the whole effort in Iraq — both defeating the “terrorists” and nation-building — are all part of the same strategy to insure America’s future security. Bush often says that “Free nations do not start wars. Free nations do not build weapons of mass destruction.” While we can cringe at such simplistic rhetoric, building a “nation” is supposedly an integral aspect of American security. Unless freedom and democracy take root in Iraq, and ultimately spread to other parts of the Middle East, America will live in constant fear of another 9/11.

So tranferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people, improving the infrastructure, setting up democratic elections, are all part of the War on Terror. I don’t expect to see any results of our nation-bulding in Iraq, nor do I think it will enhance America’s long-term security, but if you buy the arguments coming from the Bush Administration more traffic lights now mean less bombs in America’s in the future.

Annalina is basically re-stating the case for Bush’s strategy. But I don’t think she sees my point, which is that nation-building is not, as she imagines it, being treated as one aspect of the war against our terrorist enemies, it has become in effect the entire war. I’ll say it again for the nth time: We could create a new government in Iraq, and we could keep killing insurgents and Al Qaeda forces, but if more insurgents and Al Qaeda forces keep coming at us and keep blowing up people and keep making ordinary life and functioning impossible, then we obviously haven’t defeated them. We will have to keep our forces there indefinitely, just in order to keep the government from falling. So we will not have succeeded in creating a viable government, because we reversed the cart and the horse. The horse is the defeat of our enemies. Only when that is done, is there a chance to build a stable new government.

I fear there is some mental block, like a mesmerism, that keeps people from understanding this basic point. Maybe Bush really is the fiendishly clever manipulator of men’s minds that some of his opponents imagine him to be.

Not a chance Mr. Auster. Your approach is the reliable approach, principled and thinking. Mr. Bush is so far from a talented or a great leader that it was wildly inappropriate to use the word might. That is not to say he is not a good man.

A reader writes:

“Seems as though you have joined the group who are complaining about the war and giving no positive options to win it, and using the comparison between Vietnam and Irag to do it. The Tet offensive was a last ditch effort by the enemy to win the war and it worked because the politicians wouldn’t let the military (Gen Westmoreland) do his job and they were listening to the carping of the media just as they are today. The American people are much safer today than we would have been had we not gone into Iraq and removed Saddam. Would you rather have the UN handle things? They can’t even take care of themselves. What would you have Mr Bush say regarding how soon there will be a turn around when we are fighting a shadow enemy that is everywhere and have been in this country for several years? Is Iraq or Iran or Egypt or Saudi Arabia or the Philipinnes or anywhere else in the world safe from terrorism? Is Israel not supposed to defend herself from a group of people who teach their children to hate and to martyr themselves before they reach adulthood. I think the administration is doing a pretty good job. (a whole lot better than Gore would have done)”

My reply:

I don’t think you’ve understood me. I am pro-war. I want America to defeat our enemies so that they cannot harm us and our allies any longer. My criticism of Bush is that I don’t think that he is waging such a war. When I said “worse than Vietnam,” I was not using the defeatist Vietnam analogy the way Kennedy and other anti-Ameircan leftists do. I meant something very specific: that our leaders are not even laying out a case purporting to show that we are succeeding in a war, if you define war as an attempt to win victory over your enemies, and if you define victory as destroying the enemy’s will and ability to wage war against you. Bush is literally not making such a case. He’s only making a case that we’re making progress toward a new government in Iraq.

So Bush is only pretending to wage a war, but because the left is so anti-war and anti-American, the conservatives think, “Oh, that Bush, he’s great, doing the hard things that need to be done, not taking any guff from those anti-American leftists.” But it’s not true. Bush is not ultimately serious. Pro-war people have defined a good war policy as anything that the anti-war left doesn’t like. They define their own beliefs according to whether it is different from the loony left. But they haven’t worked out a rational serious strategy of their own.

Because of this fake debate between the anti-war left and a pro-war right which is really not pro-war because Bush is not really fighting a war, there is no real debate going on and it’s very difficult for an individual like myself to get a clear picture of the problems and challenges we face. But I do entertain every reasonable argument that is presented. Most recently, I’ve written the below item in which I list a range of options and consider “Kemalization”—i.e., the forcible constraint of Islam from within as distinct from the democratic reform of Islam from without—as the only way that the Moslem world might become something that we can safely co-exist with.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002362.html

Mr. Auster wrote: “My criticism of Bush is that I don’t think that he is waging such a war.”

You’re not alone.

Juan Cole meditates on some poll results today. The poll’s from the Washington Post, so take it with as many grains of salt as necessary.

“52% of Americans say that the Iraq War was not worth it.”

“It cost too many US lives, according to 70% of them, and 51% thought that it had not made Americans any safer.”

“President Bush’s approval rating on the war on terror fell to 50% and the public now prefers Kerry to handle terrorism, 48% to 47% (Bush has lost 20% on this issue since March).”

“A majority of Americans disapproves of Bush’s job performance over-all at 51%, while 47% approve.”

“Kerry would win the election if held now by the same margin, even factoring in the Nader vote, the poll found.”

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/91293/1/.html

Cole says, “Bush hit the trifecta: Fallujah, Najaf and Abu Ghuraib. This brings us to the issue of Bush’s flip-flops. He tried to hang the charge of flip-flopping on Kerry. But Bush said he wanted heads to roll at Fallujah, and then had to bring in the Baath to run the city. Bush said he wanted Muqtada al-Sadr dead or alive, and now Muqtada is set to be a prominent parliamentarian. Bush said he would bring decency to the White House, and now his DoD is purveying pictures of Arab men being made to masturbate in front of prancing servicewomen.”

Lawrence Auster writes, “But I don’t think she sees my point, which is that nation-building is not, as she imagines it, being treated as one aspect of the war against our terrorist enemies, it has become in effect the entire war…”

This is more of a political failure on the part of the Bush Administration to make a persuasive case for the post-war mission in Iraq. While it was easy to skate to war over fears of weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, making a case for a prolonged occupation in Iraq in light of these failings is difficult.

We were ready to take Fallujah house by house and then apprehend Muktada al-Sadr, but the rising death toll of US servicemen last April sent support both for the war and President Bush plummetting. Now instead of being an outlaw, al-Sadr is poised to become the face of the new “democratic” Iraq.

If we don’t successfully build a functioning democracy in Iraq the war will be seen as an obvious failure because what other justification would the war have. You cannot say that it was about terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, so the nation-building effort will be a humane gloss over a failed foreign policy.