What war?

David Horowitz and Peter Collier have an article today at FrontPage Magazine denouncing the anti-war left for, of all things, seeking to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” a victory that Horowitz and Collier seem to feel is imminent. I’ve posted a comment on this at FP, and also copied it below:

Name: Lawrence Auster
Subject: The fantasy of a “war” that we are “winning”

Messrs. Horowitz and Collier continue to indulge in the well-intended but false belief in a “war” that our side is “winning.”

First, what war? A war means a conflict the purpose of which is to destroy the enemy’s ability and will to keep fighting, and so bring about peace. But according to President Bush, our purpose in Iraq is not to defeat the enemy but to continue containing and managing the enemy while bringing up the Iraqi security forces to the level where they can take over the job of containing and managing the enemy. That is not war. It is conflict management—which, not coincidentally, is what the Israelis are also doing vis à vis the Palestinians, according to a recent article by Daniel Pipes.

Horowitz and Collier point to the recent statements by Al Qaeda in Iraq that they are “desperate.” Let’s say for the sake of argument that that is true. The fact remains that the majority of the insurgency is not foreign, but domestic. Further, there is not just one insurgency, there are plural insurgencies, there is ongoing quasi civil war among the militias of the various denominations and ethnic groups. There is no foreseeable prospect of this ending, nor does the U.S. have any strategy to end it. In fact, all the indications are that it is getting worse. See the cable from the U.S. ambaassador in Iraq, discussed at ParaPundit, about the desperate conditions of life for the employees of the U.S. embassy. That is the real picture of what is happening in Iraq that never finds its way into the articles of the Bush supporters.

To sum up, there is no war, and there no impending victory in this war.

Since Horowitz and Collier’s premise (a “war” that we are on the verge of “winning”) is mistaken, the specific grounds for their denunciation of the anti-war left—for seeking to “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”—is also mistaken.

I then posted this follow-up comment:

Name: Lawrence Auster
Subject: “It’s all the left’s fault”

I want to add that the belief that our problems in Iraq stem from the anti-war left has been a staple among the Bush supporters from the start. Somehow there is the notion that if the anti-war left did not exist, if the left supported Bush and the war, then everything in Iraq would be going great.

Given the evil and destructiveness of the anti-war left, the belief is understandable. Yet it is still false. If there were no anti-war left, the mess that President Bush has created in Iraq would not change in any essentials. The blame is all Bush’s. Without having gotten control of Iraq in the first place or imposed order upon it, he then set about on the utopian mission of reconstructing Iraq as a democratic society, indeed of making the creation of such “democracy” the be-all and end-all of all U.S. efforts, so that “democracy” became a substitute for defeating or crippling our enemies. This was arguably the most wrong-headed foreign policy by any U.S. president in history.

When we add onto Bush’s Iraq debacle his treasonous open-border proposal, he has pushed the two most destructive policy initiatives in U.S. history.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2006 02:16 PM | Send