The Oslo process, the Sunni Insurgency process—it’s all one process

The point I’ve been arguing for the last two years is becoming clearer to more and more people. The Bush administration and its “conservative” supporters thought that having elections and creating a government would make the insurgency disappear, without the necessity of our physically destroying it or otherwise rendering it unable to continue fighting. How could they have believed such a foolish thing? Because they are liberals. Liberals don’t believe, ultimately, in evil and enemies. They think that if you give Islamist enemies some reasonable inducement, like inclusion in a Western-style democratic government that happens to be the antithesis of everything the Islamists believe in, they will be won over to the peaceful ways of justice and civilization. Sixteen hundred American servicemen (and about 30 women, to our everlasting shame) have been killed in Iraq for the sake of that fatuous idea. And scores of poor Iraqis are being slaughtered every day.

A friend sent me something by John Burns in the New York Times today:

“American officials had hoped that the advent of an elected government, with a mandate from nearly nine million Iraqis who voted in January’s elections, would persuade wavering elements in the Sunni-led insurgency to join in the American-sponsored effort to establish a Western-style democracy.

“But so far, those hopes have been shattered by an eruption of violence that has carried the insurgency to levels rarely seen in the 25 months since American troops seized Baghdad, and left the new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari looking vulnerable only nine days after it was sworn into office.”

My friend commented:

From these two paragraphs we can discern two things. One, the “strategy” of US for winning in Iraq is that political process would vanquish terror, somehow. Two, although the election was pumped up as if it were final vindication of everything we wanted to do in Iraq, the obvious setback to our strategy represented in the horrendous wave of recent violence, is not resulting in any thoughtful reconsiderations on the part of Administration.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 12, 2005 11:08 AM | Send