Bush speech

I happened to see President Bush’s speech tonight. He was exceptionally taut, somber, and serious, not a single smile on his face or even one of his annoying little reassuring half smiles, which was a relief. There was a sense of crisis, of “things are not good; we’re at the brink of disaster, this is our last chance.” I was struck by the fact that the country and this president have come down to this situation in which we have nothing to gain, but only to lose, and, according to Bush, must at all costs not allow ourselves to lose, and must brace ourselves to the task. And merely preventing a humiliating withdrawal from Iraq has become the main political project of the United States.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that the “surge” is successful and stabilizes Baghdad. That will not prevent the opponents of the regime from coming back as soon as the heat is off. So what’s the best hope? That things get stable enough to allow the U.S. troops to withdraw. However, after they withdraw, it’s still the same scenario I’ve rehearsed about 50 times: the Iraqi government will fall without our presence, bringing on the very events—an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq—that Bush says we must not allow. So nothing has changed, we’re still facing the same hopeless choice I outlined three years ago: we will either withdraw at some point and see the government fall, or have to stay there forever.

And this miserable situation, from which we have nothing to gain, has become the consuming political preoccupation of the United States, year after year after year.

There is no escape from this nightmare, short of a new way of conceptualizing the challenge we face.

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Paul Henri writes:

Bush’s strategy will work no better than our Vietnam strategy: fight someone else’s war for them. It is a grotesque situation if one dwells on it. The only viable strategies are either 1) to remain in a secure position in Iraq or a more strategic location in the Middle East in order to be in a position to eliminate Islamic aggression through technological warfare or 2) to use tactical nuclear weapons to eliminate Islamic aggression once and for all. We should try the first solution, but the second must be made known to the Islamic world in a moral but futile attempt to save lives. Muslims must be forced to choose abandoning their heretofore aggressive duty or to die.

Mark A. writes:

I’m not a military expert, but I think Bush’s speech begs the following question: If we needed 550,000 troops for Gulf War I, a war in which we didn’t even invade Baghdad, how will increasing an occupation force from 140,000 to 160,000 make a difference in keeping Iraq from breaking apart into civil war? This is a country the size of California. New York City has 40,000 police officers alone, and even they can barely keep order in that city. Amazing.

LA replies:

I just asked myself that same question a few days ago: 550,000 to drive the Iraqis out of tiny Kuwait, but only 160,000 to get control of all of Iraq?

Mark replies:

Exactly.

Sometimes I wonder if Bush is playing with a full deck. One thing he has proven about himself is this: he is a weak man with a fragile ego. Richard Nixon argued with Henry Kissinger extensively, despite the modern belief that they were foreign policy twins. But Nixon was an intellectual and a man and understood that Kissinger was highly intelligent and had a lot to offer. Someone once asked Nixon why he kept both Kissinger and Haig in his meetings despite the fact that they often disagreed. Nixon replied, “One is a man of thought, the other is a man of action. We need both.”)

Bush gets rid of anyone who disagrees with him. Gen. Shinseki and Colin Powell told him he needed 4x the manpower for this. Bush pushed them aside. Bush is almost childlike in this regard.

Dimitri K. writes:

I think I know one psychological reason why liberals cannot accept the Separationist approach. In the heart of their faith is the belief that modern people can do virtually everything, including changing the behavior patterns of whole nations and races. They cannot stand the idea that our society can be ruined by somebody. That would be a complete failure of their universe.

Randall Parker writes:

U.S. withdrawal would not lead to an Al Qaeda take-over. Remember the basics: Shia Arabs are well over half the population of Iraq. If we put aside already seceded Kurdistan then the Shia Arabs are somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the total population. How can Al Qaeda beat them? We can supply the Shia with arms and air support for a small fraction of the cost of our current burn rate of money and lives.

What is desperate here? Bush’s attempt to save his presidency’s biggest initiative from total failure. Invasion of Iraq is a bad investment. We should stop throwing good money after bad.

Another point: Suppose Iraq breaks up into three pieces, Arab Sunni, Arab Shia, and Kurdish. Suppose further that Sunnis friendly toward Al Qaeda get control of the Sunni piece. Is that the disaster we are trying to prevent? I do not expect that Sunnistan to operate Al Qaeda training camps ala the Taliban. But if they did we could go in and just overthrow the government there. If we kept bases in Kurdistan it’d be easy to do. We might need to spend a billion a year on the Kurds to maintain that capability. Affordable.

LA replies:

I wasn’t presenting that as my scenario, but Bush’s. At the same time, one of the possibilities is always that the ruthless Al qaeda could create such chaos that they could prevent a government from functioning and thus take effective power in the country.

Paul Henri continues:

I agree containment of Islam is theoretically possible. But containment assumes rational thought on the part of Muslims. We must remember that our rational thought processes are derived from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian ideas. Muslims do not share this heritage of ideas. They were sidetracked by a degenerate, Mohammed. No argument is going to persuade them otherwise. Tragically, brute force is the only argument available to the West. Hopefully, the promise of containment will allow many Muslims to avoid the fate of Carthage.

Larry G. writes:

Dimitri K. writes: “I think I know one psychological reason why liberals cannot accept the Separationist approach. In the heart of their faith is the belief that modern people can do virtually everything, including changing the behavior patterns of whole nations and races.”

But that is exactly what liberals have done to the West over the last 50 years or so: change the behavior pattern of whole nations and races. So their belief is rational, when coupled with their other belief that all people are essentially the same.

As to the speech, I couldn’t watch. The disconnect between Bush’s words and his deeds has been so complete for so long that I found it more worthwhile to watch “Mythbusters.” The only time the President matches deeds to words is when dealing with immigration, where the result of his actions will be our destruction as a nation.

LA adds:

That is a really good point by Larry G.

Gintas writes:

Larry G. said, “But that is exactly what liberals have done to the West over the last 50 years or so: change the behavior pattern of whole nations and races. So their belief is rational, when coupled with their other belief that all people are essentially the same.”

True enough. When you strip people of all loyalties and allegiances you get pretty much the same thing anywhere. It’s the High-IQ folks who are clever enough to concoct stories to convince themselves that that is a Good Thing.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 10, 2007 09:51 PM | Send