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The unravelling of American irrationality in Iraq
“Terrorism can be defeated in Iraq, it will be defeated in Iraq,” [Secretary of State] Rice said at the close of an 80-nation conference on the reconstruction of postwar Iraq.There’s no logical or empirical argument here, nothing connected to real-world facts. President Bush’s twin brain is simply stating her faith that somehow terrorism will come to an end in Iraq, and that somehow that will cause terrorism to end elsewhere in the Moslem world. Throughout the post-Saddam phase, all the Bushites’ arguments about our impending “success” have consisted of exactly the same kind of patently illogical leaps. Meanwhile, in line with Rice’s content-free hope that something will happen to save the situation, several high-ranking U.S. military officers in Iraq have been quoted in recent days saying things like (these are close paraphrases), “The question is, how long can the insurgency keep this up?”, and, “All we can hope for now is that the insurgency runs out of weapons.” This is amazing to me because, as VFR readers know, for a year and a half I’ve been writing that the U.S. has no strategy to win in Iraq, and that the only way we can win is if the insurgency somehow dies out on its own. I said this at FrontPage Magazine at least once and many times at VFR. And now our own military leaders are at long last admitting the same: that the U.S. has no strategy to win in Iraq, and that the only way we can win is if the insurgency somehow dies out on its own.
Obviously, I’d much rather have had my punditry confirmed in happier ways than this. All along, I’ve been looking for strategies by which we could win against our enemies, not hoping for a U.S. defeat. But President Bush has hopelessly confused the situation by defining victory as the spreading of democracy in Moslem countries. I will support a winnable war for national defense. I do not support an unwinnable war for liberal utopianism. Email entry |