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Foreign Relations Committee considers the Iraq disaster
On C-SPAN this afternoon, the deputy assistant Secretary of State for Iraq, whose name I forget, was before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, and Sen. Biden, the ranking minority member, just took the administration apart on its unreal Pollyannish descriptions of what’s going on over there. Biden indicated that the whole reconstruction enterprise is close to falling apart. And how could it not be, given that people are being blown up en masse every time they get on line to apply for a job as a policeman? Biden has some credibility on these points because he has more or less supported the administration in the past. I’ve never respected Biden, but most of his points today seemed valid to me. Then the State Department witness began to speak, and, apparently ignoring Biden’s concerns, said things like: “To create hope in Iraq, there must be employment.” He said that we are spending money there, inter alia, in order to help create an ideological climate that will be amenable to a business economy; he seemed to be referring pro-free enterprise think tanks. So we are now responsible for the entire Iraq economy as part of the war on terror! And as part of that, we are responsible for creating the underlying belief system for a free economy! This is a nightmare. Though I am just one person and this couldn’t have been expected of me, I still kick myself for not having persisted, prior to the war, in my questions about what would happen after the war. The thought did occur to me that we could end up in our own version of the West Bank. But I didn’t pursue the thought, since the raging, all-consuming debate on the justifications for the war itself crowded out all other topics. At least I never signed on to the Iraq democratization project and consistently opposed it (though I did not deny it had a reasoned basis). As far as I was concerned, if we determined that reconstructing Iraq was beyond our abilities, and if we accordingly set up a reasonably civilized strong man and left, that would have been fine with me. I say this for the nth time—if the Democrats as a party had been on board with the basic purpose of the war (as Biden was), they would have been in a position easily to defeat Bush this year. But get this. There is a poll, quoted today by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, that 51 percent of Democrats believe that wrongdoing by the U.S. was the cause of Al Qaeda’s attack on us. Yes, wrongdoing. Not that we supported Israel. Not that we had a few thousand troops defending Saudi Arabia. But wrongdoing. In other words, a majority of Democrats are anti-American. That’s the reality we’re dealing with here, and it’s why the Democrats are unable to offer any plausible opposition to Bush.
Since the administration is deep in denial, and the Democrats are deep in anti-Bush insanity, a rational strategy for the war on terror must come from other sources. Mark Helprin’s recent articles in OpinionJournal and the Claremont Review may not be to everyone’s liking, but at least he is offering a logical framework for the war entirely different from that of the administration’s incoherent and failed policy, and this is what is so desperately needed. Email entry |