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Meanwhile, back on the planet Mars …
A reader writes:
What makes you think the situation needs saving? A messy little war against a minor insurgency has been progressing nicely. The big battles we had been fighting in places like Sadr City and Najaf no longer occur. Fallujah and Mosul and most of the Sunni Triangle are practically quiescent. The battles being fought are now being initiated by us. Much of Baghdad and Mosul are now under the control of Iraqi troops and policemen and our battles are now mostly in outlying areas. American troops are now installing sewage lines on Haifa Street for Heaven’s sake, the hotbed of the Baghdad insurgency a few months ago. And Iraqi troops are guarding them.Striking a similar note, Karl Zinsmeister at The American Enterprise has written an article entitled “The War is Over, and We Won”:
What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners [emphasis added], our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.Apart from the madness of describing the ongoing, virtually daily mass slaughter of innocents in Iraq as “periodic flare-ups in isolated corners,” what does Zinsmeister mean by “losing” the war—being militarily forced out of Iraq? No reasonable person ever saw that as a possibility. So to say that the proof that we’ve succeeded is that there’s now no chance of our “losing” the war is meaningless. The point is not that we have not “lost” the war, but that we haven’t won the war, and, further, that there is no reason to believe that we are on the way to doing so. Winning the war means that the enemy has lost the ability to wreak mayem on that country and thus make the survival of any successor government impossible.
Furthermore, people like Zinsmeister and my correspondent, by being so ready to dismiss an ongoing campaign of terrorist mass murder as nothing to worry about, as long as Iraq seems to have something in process of formation that we can call “democracy,” suggest by that attitude the possibility of something more disturbing: that if terror became common in America, they would accept that too, as an insignificant if annoying accompaniment of democracy. Email entry |