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War supporters still hopelessly confused
Alan Dowd writing at FrontPage Magazine typifies the combination of well-meaning patriotic intentions with paralyzing intellectual incoherence that has characterized the Bush supporters ever since the toppling of Hussein. He writes:
Yet we can still lose this war, because we—the American people and our elected officials [meaning the Congress and everyone in the government undercutting Bush]—are losing the will to wage it.The statement, “We can still lose this war,” implies that there is a war that we are currently waging. Dowd supports this war and wants us to win it. He also criticizes the Iraq Study Group for saying that we ought to talk to Iran and Syria, who, he says correctly, are our enemies. However, later in the article Dowd writes:
Any real war against jihadism and its terrorist offspring has to recognize that regimes like this—regimes which support the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Mahdi Army, and Hezbollah—are enemies.Since, as Dowd himself acknowledges, the Bush administration does not recognize regimes such as Iran and Syria as our enemies (though the administration is also resisting negotiating with them about Iraq), it follows that we are not waging a real war. This has been the unexamined confusion all along that has made all conservative discussion about the war into a fun house of absurdity. Bush supporters cheer for the war. But the war they are cheering for does not exist. They imagine we are in a grand crusade against jihadism, and expend endless energy attacking the leftist critics of this crusade. But this grand crusade does not exist. Yes, it is what they would LIKE to exist, but it DOESN’T exist. They have never been able to face the fact that their hero Bush is not doing what they are applauding him for doing.
What would a coherent position for the war supporters be? Instead of cheering a non-existent war, instead of reacting constantly against leftist critics of that non-existent war, and instead of bemoaning America’s lack of will to continue waging this non-existent war, they should have been calling on Bush to wage the war that needed to be fought. Alternatively, if they were to determine such a war was not possible in reality (because it is not possible for a non-Muslim country to impose its will on a Muslim country) then they would need to re-think their entire approach. For example, instead of pursuing the impossible, useless, and counterproductive goal of spreading democracy into Muslim lands, they could think about pursuing the doable, helpful, and vitally necessary goal stopping Islam from spreading into Western lands. Then we could have a “war debate” that would be worth following. Email entry |