Saying “Stay the course,” Powerline changes course

In a blog entry entitled “‘Stay the course’ within reason,” Paul at Powerline argues that we must crush the incipient Al Qaeda statelet in Anbar province, but that we don’t have an ultimate interest in the outcome of Sunni-Shi’te fighting in Baghdad; if suppressing such fighting is beyond our means or the costs would go beyond the number of casualties we are willing to endure, then let the sectarian killing continue. Though Paul calls this proposal “staying the course, within reason” (echoes of Ed Koch’s description of himself as a “liberal with sanity,” which is another way of saying, “an insane person with sanity”), he is in fact, though without admitting it, abandoning the insane Bush strategy he has loyally supported for the last several years and adopting a key element of the strategy that I and others have been suggesting for several years, namely to cease trying to engineer events in central Iraq, to have our forces stand back from central Iraq, and only have them intervene when something totally unacceptable to us is happening.

Powerline is starting to understand (though, again, having invested themselves so totally in Bush’s neocon war, it will be hard for them to admit it) that the goal is not to spread democracy, but to prevent the spread of jihad.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 23, 2006 05:20 PM | Send