Who but Wretchard?
The falure by the Left to articulate an alternative vision of a post-September 11 world except in the negative has banished what should have been the most momentous public policy debate of the last 50 years into the outer dark. By declaring discussion of the transformation of the world illegitimate and then only belatedly presenting a Presidential candidate whose countervision consists of a “secret” but unstated plan, liberals have effectively left matters in the hands of President Bush. It is a staggeringly reactionary performance and a fundamentally unhealthy one. Because the one certain thing is that the antebellum world, the universe of September 10, can never be restored. The Clinton era, like the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, has been borne into the past.
It is unlikely that a meaningful national dialogue on the future of world can occur until the Left frees itself from the taboos which have stultified its intellect. The dead hand of Vietnam and its attachment to the cultic nonsense of the 1960s lies heavy on Democratic Party. That spectral limb will grip them by the throat until they shake free. Until then, forward to wherever. We’ll know where we’re going when we get there.
This guy has become an indispensable read on the Web. Want to cut through all the crap floating in the cesspool of American media, politics and war? Dial up a guy living half a world away.
Wretchard is one of the best, if not the best, time after time.
The post you’ve quoted from I think comes close to being “the shot that was heard around the world” – that’s how strong I think it is.
Max
I donít know that they will ever break free. The ìdead hand of Viet Nam and the cultish nonsense of the ë60sî is their own hand, and it may be attached to a body that is dead and hasnít quite toppled yet. Clinging to the dead past is the sure sign of a dead mind.
I wonder how much the huge numbers of Boomers and their increased longevity will affect the parties in the years to come. Will the Democrats essentially be hamstrung by idiots who can’t deal with the fact that it’s no longer 1968 and have 30+ years of voting still to go?
What kind of great debate is possible with the left or would be possible with the left if the left were to revive?
Socialism is the left’s vision. Socialism has been tried. It has failed. Were it to “suceed” it would mean the death of liberty.
If the American template is liberty what kind of debate is possible with those who would squelch liberty?
No. The future debate in America will be between centrists and the right.
Sad, reactionary, and very disconcerting.
After all, the best solutions are generally arrived at after vigorous debate, where assumptions can be challenged and errors refuted.
By essentially passing on a rational debate, the 68ers and their cohorts are ceding the floor to only a limited faction, whose efforts would be strengthened by rigorous argumentation.
As a result, our efforts to prevail in this conflict may be compromised, to the detriment of all in the West who have a stake in our victory.
Let’s take stock…
- Socialism died in ’89 when the Wall fell.
- Welfare statism received its intellectual coup de grace when Hillarycare went down in ’93.
- Anti-militarism died on the eleventh of September, twenty aught one.
- The grievance industry is slowly crumbling under the weight of its own triviality.
As someone once asked about James Cagney: “What’s holding them up?”
Wretch is unfair to the Dems. In reality, neither party has produced a good road map for the confusing and increasingly chaotic environment we now find ourselves in.
The neo-conservative vision of American pre-emption, coalitions of the willing, national greatness generally sounded, well, great– I buy into it– but Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al failed to grasp its corellary, which is a need to do nation-building on a grand scale. A small swift force can knock off Saddam and the Taliban but it cannot create the conditions needed for stable, moderate regimes in their stead. Kudos to the Bush admin for demonstrating that pre-emption is indeed a real threat, but shame on them for failing to take nation-building seriously.
As to the Dems, it’s as if their mesmerized by the light coming from dead stars. Vietnam is not IMO the most important of these; it’s more the grand Clinton-Strobe (appropriate name, eh?) Talbot vision of a postmodern NATO that battles not communism but racism, ethnic cleansing, and even war itself.
The Clinton-Strobe mantra, repeated ad nauseam through the ’90s, was “The Cold War is over.” Say it fast enough and you come up with the John Lennon formulation: “War is over.” This is what Kerry and the anti-Vietnam, postmodern Dems fervently hope and pray is true, and this is why they persist in thinking that postmodern European nations like France and Germany are natural allies of the US.
Repeat after me, fellow Democrats:
1) the Alliance is dead. It died in 1991, when the SU collapsed.
2) France is not our ally. France’s policy is to challenge and thwart us–especially in the middle east– wherever they can win multi-billion$$ contracts by doing so.
3) the crucial challenges of our century arise from ASIA– that is, the near and far east– and the rising Asian powers do not accept the postmodern verities of the pacifistic Europeans.
4) War matters, and we will probably have to fight wars in Asia– in the near and far east– repeatedly in coming decades. These wars will draw the opposition of France and probably Germany as well, as those nations seek commercial advantages by siding with our enemies. Iran is merely the first of many such cases.
Repeat 1-4, rinse and repeat.
Thibaud:
I agree with 98% of what you write. Good thoughtful entry. Your beginning re: the road map, suggests that there is some program or un-identified theory guy at the Brookings, CSIS or AEI who has a program for nation building.
Give the administration credit; it’s improvising fairly succesfully as it goes along and is better suited to do so than Kerry, Edwards, Jamie Steinberg [aka Mr. Amampour], Robin red breast Albright and the other Clintonistas. Better suited in toughness, plans, ingenuity and to change its tact to do nation-building [I did not say that word did I ?]
Thibaud:
In reality, neither party has produced a good road map for the confusing and increasingly chaotic environment we now find ourselves in.
It seems to me that one party (the Democrats) want to use the “trip plan” they got from a quick stop at Triple-A on their way from one 90′s era “End of History” cocktail party to the next.
The other party, represented by the current administration, seems to recognize that that some bridges are washed out, there are storms raging, and some folks don’t want us driving on their local roads and are fully willing to get nasty about it. In other words, we’re gonna have to set off on the journey with incomplete plans and figure a lot of it out as we go.
Given that there is precious little current experience in the arena of Nation Building and none to speak of in the arena of Nation Building in a hostile environment mired in 14th century religious beliefs and despotic regimes powerd by petro money (which they get by selling the west the one resource it cannot function without), what should the Nation Building plan have looked like?
jedrury,
I’m referring to the massive pre-war planning document put together by several experts inside the Bush admin itself that objectively, clinically demolished the notion that less than 200k troops could oversee Iraq’s transition after SH’s ouster.
I forget the names of those who authored this study for the Pentagon, but they were definitely not liberals and were in no means opposed to the war. They had great expertise in a variety of non-military areas, expertise that Rum/Wolf/Cheney/Feith disregarded at great cost to us and the Iraqis.
Thibaud:
Is there some evidence that a plan deploying more than 200K troops would have worked better? Is it even remotely possible that the a reasonable way to proceed, given US military commitments and threats elsewhere, was to make due with the forces we actually put in Iraq? Has anyone made any substantial analysis of how increased force levels may have impacted casualty rates or altered what has happened there so far in some positive way?
We only have the military we have. It takes years to make substantial increases in the size and changes in capability of the forces available. And the military we have, and had, is not designed (and I, for one, don’t believe it should be designed) for “peace keeping/nation building”. That was supposed to be the UN’s balliwick but hey, as it turns out they aren’t very good at it and want no part of it when there’s danger involved and good money to be made leaving things the way they were.
The problem with “liberal left” is that they are addicted to socialism. Socialism is like alcoholism, its a progressive disease. I, like many members of the VWRC, had hoped that socialism would die when the Soviet Union did. We were wrong. Yes, Socialists went into a funk for a few years but then they looked around and saw that they had conquered most Western cultural institutions. They started looking around for a replacement for their communist intellectual sponsors. Largely through the influence of Edward Said, Radical Islam became the new revolutionary agent. Not the radical Islam of reality, but the radical Islam transforemed by their imagination to the new revolutionary proletariat. How else could proponents of radical feminism, abortion rights and homosexual exceptionalism make common cause with an ideology of the opposite? Just as they are for anybody but Bush, they are for anyone who opposes capitalism. If not Marx, then Bin Laden will do just fine. The left shares the same impulse as radical Islam in that they have chosen suicide over defeat.
Knuck,
Time to rethink your attitude toward nation-building. If we’re going to destroy regimes as we did in 1945 in Japan and 2003 in Iraq, then we absolutely need to take on the responsibility for creating nations that, like postwar Japan, turn away decisively from the fascism and militarism that gave rise to the security problem in the first place. Perhaps we need a separate branch of the State Dept devoted to nation-building; regardless, in an age in which failed states threaten our security, we need to devote ourselves to building successful states.
Re the progress in Iraq, I’m not saying that half a loaf is not better than none, but the Joint Chiefs and the Bush admin’s experts themselves both urged putting well over 200k troops on the ground after the fall of Saddam. This was based on very substantial data and experience with military-to-poulace ratios derived from Kosovo, Haiti, hell, even the LA riots in 1992.
In that last case, I believe the number of national guard troopers called out to establish order was over 20,000! The population of the volatile regions of LA is what, 1 million? If the ratio is 1:50 military:populace, then the bad parts of Iraq– the Ba’athist strongholds in the center, at a minimum– would have required something like 1/50 x 10 million populace, or 200,000 troops.
That Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rejected the recommendations of the Chiefs and their own planners is deeply disturbing, and a major reason why this election is even close.
Thibaud:
I’ll have to take up your Nation Building Challenge another time. In the meantime let’s have a look at
Joint Chiefs and the Bush admin’s experts themselves both urged putting well over 200k troops on the ground after the fall of Saddam. This was based on very substantial data and experience with military-to-poulace ratios derived from Kosovo, Haiti, hell, even the LA riots in 1992.
If you be so kind please privide a cite for the this “urging” by the JC and admin experts. There is a difference between something being presented as an option and something that is “urged”. Additionally keep in mind that a good argument can be made that much of what the JC and other experts might “urge” would be based upon the “Powell Doctrine”. Other experts may well have won the argument that the Powell Doctrine could no longer be applied.
Also keep in mind that just because some members of the JC staff or other experts found the experiences in Kosovo, Haiti, and LA meaningful doesn’t automagically mean they had particularly good arguments. What they heck does NG troops on the ground in the LA riots have to do with Iraq?
Is there any evidence that the troops put into Kosovo, Haiti, or LA were ever seriously attacked by any portion of the local population or that, if they weren’t, there is any correlation between that fact and troop levels? These examples are very different than Iraq and you’ll just have to pardon me if I find it not the least bit surprising that some other experts may have found arguments based upon such data unconvincing.
The fact that other suggestions were made, or that the plan accepted was not unanimously cheered does not condemn the plan. I don’t have any idea who is right or wrong but I am not the least bit convinced that higher troop levels would mean anything more than higher casualties. I remain unconvinced that the Nation Building would be going any “better”.
Last, and maybe least, we surely weren’t “Nation Building” in LA, and neither Haiti nor Kosovo seem to be good examples of successful Nation Building to point to for any claim that we should be doing in Iraq what we did in those places.
Thibaud:
To try and summarize (why don’t I ever think of that as the first option?):
If I had been in a decision making capacity looking at the Nation Building in Iraq problem and assessing various plans regarding how to proceed, I would have taken anything based upon data from the LA riots and said something like, “Well, that’s nice. Let’s just put that over here so we have it handy the next time we have riots in LA.” And when handed stuff based upon data from former actions in places like Kosovo and Haiti I might well have looked up and said something like, “Has anybody got any ideas that don’t like like these?” If one keeps doing the same things one can expect the same results. Perhaps we were after different results this time.
Thibaud-
The notion that the State Department has “expertise” on nation building has always been very puzzling to me.
What expertise, exactly? I don’t know much about the career path of a foreign services officer, but from what little I know it goes something like this:
1. Attend college and take Foreign Service exam. Experience at nation-building gained: none.
2. Assignment to embassay in some remote nation as counsular officer. Day is spent processing applications for business, tourist, and family visas. Miscellaneous assignments include advising drunken American tourists who find themselves in the clink to get a local lawyer. Nation-building experience gained: none.
3. Assigment to multinational institution, such as UNESCO, as “deputy US liason to immunization project.” Day is spent organizing public health conferences for foreign physicians and introducing speakers. A paper or two is authored advocating increased funding for water purification projects.
Miscellaneous duties include attending lots of cocktail parties with other diplomats. Experienced gained: none.
4. Assignment to Moroccan embassy as trade officer. Day is spent organizing trade shows, trying to get American companies to show up at them, and answering letters on Moroccan import tariffs. Miscellanous assignments include giving a visinting delegation of Congressional staffers the $0.50 cent tour of the city and taking members of the local business community to lunch. Experience gained: none.
5. Assignment to Washington, D.C. at State Department HQ. Day is spent planning the State Department’s ’05 budget. Miscellaneous assignments include graduate work at Georgetown or Woodrow Wilson. Experience gained: None.
6. Assignment to major embassy as deputy charge d’ something or other. Responsibilities include the hiring and firing of cleaning ladies, gardeners, and waiters, and the remodelling of the Ambassador’s residence. Miscellaneous assigments include cocktail parties with local politicians and keeping problem junior FSO’s out of trouble. Experience gained: None.
…you get the idea. How does this qualify anyone to, say, run the Baghdad Police Department? From what I can see, a whole lot of the State Department’s so-called “experts” have not really had any significant responsibility in their entire lives. They are glorified clerks and members of the cocktail party circuit.
Contrast that with, say, a colonel in the Marine Corps. He’s commanded thousands of men and been responsible for tens of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. He’s used to making life and death decisions under pressure. In short, he’s had real responsiblities.
I know who I trust to run the Baghdad Public School system, and it ain’t the guy or gal from Foggy Bottom.
This is a somewhat difficult point to make, but what I am trying to say is that the State Department has a lot of talented and educated people with no practical experience whatsoever who have never held a position of real responsibility. They might do a good job at nation-buidling, but they’ve never proven their mettle at anything real. Organizing the 2002 Intenational Symposium on Public Heath Challenges just isn’t as challenging as commanding a rifle platoon.
That’s why I trust the military to do a better-job at nation-building than the State Department. At least people in the military have faced challenging tasks and borne difficult responsibilities. They might lack experience with the people and the culture, but they know how to get trains running and organizations staffed. I’m not so sure that the State Department is really up to the task. I do think it’s awfully arrogant for a bunch of cocktail circuit paper-pushers to claim that they’d do a better job than the military would.
thibaud
I have seen no evidence that we need larger forces in Iraq at this time. I’m sure we could make life easier for the forces that are there… but that’s not a strategic goal. We are using Halliburton to do some former military logistics and service jobs, increasing the head to tail ratio and giving us a larger effective force.
I do believe that we need a larger military – especially army and marines. Not for Iraq, but for the next domino, which could fall at any moment.
We will have to deal with Iran, a larger country than Iraq. If the Pakistan government falls to the Islamofascists, we will have an urgent need to do something about it (so will the Indians, which may be a helo),
Saudi could fall. Egypt could fall.
There are lots of potential nation-building emergencies out there.
thibaud,
I think you may be conflating the State Department “plan” and statements by a few retired generals with an actual DoD plan. Tommy Franks was the person in charge of the Iraq war plan, Rumsfeld detailed Jay Garner from State to assist in the post war planning and assume control after cessation of hostilities. You could read about it in Frank’s book beginning on page 382 and continuing through page 431 (it’s Chapter 10 – entitled ‘The Plan’.
Franks has a bit to say about the Chiefs meddling, too. It’s not particularly flattering. Or you can continue to assert the existence of a “plan” that does not now and never did exist. “I remember reading somewhere” (James Fallows in the Atlantic, I’d bet) doesn’t really hold up against Tommy Franks. BTW, most of Franks’ book is about planning – for Afghanistan as well as Iraq. I recommend it.
Joe:
Let me lend some support to your observations on State. About a month ago I was at a senior review panel looking at a particular War Plan. We were very much interested in expanding the DoD plan to include interagency participation so we could avoid the problems that we are now experiencing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unfortunately, DoD is the only Agency that does deliberate or contingency planning on any scale. Everybody else does it on the fly. The reason that DoD gets the call for these situations is our ability to plan. My experience is that unless you come from a planning culture you cannot possibly be effective in postwar situations or humanitarian crises.
Thibaud:
There is a political element to the equation of fault as well. What would have the American electorate accept then – in the face of a 200,000 troop level. The number may not have been palatable. Levin/Schumer/Biden/Times/Post would have been up in arms if that had been the decision. These calculations are not made in a vacuum. Think back to the Age of Clinton and his month after month of dithering and death while he sensed the political winds. Think back to Rwanda and Clinton’s evaluation for the same comparision. The Bush administration decides and acts; it may act with haste and without total success [as far as the New York Times wants] but it does decide, act and execute.
I shouldn’t put words in Thibaud’s fingertips, but I suspect he’s a recovering Lefty like so many here at Roger’s Place. He realizes the WoT needs to be fought but can’t fathom that it wouldn’t go better if we took it out of the hands of a president and the DoD and put in the hands of Diplomats.
The current world crop of diplomats and organizations devoted to diplomacy were developed to deal with different problems than we face now and, at the risk of seeming unfair to them, have precious little successful history at dealing with things after the stuff hits the fan.
Nation building isn’t anyhing the UN or Foggy Bottom can point to having any remotely recent success at. Diplomacy as a solution to problems has only limited usefulness and a very spotty record. It would be nice if we could send charm school grads to solve all problems, but that’s just not the way the world works sometimes.
Maybe part of the problem with postwar Iraq is perception more than anything. Occupations are bound to be chaotic.
I’m thinking of the embedding of journalists during the war which worked quite effectively. Just imagine the number of unsubstantiated war crimes charges that would have been filed had reporters not been along to observe the well disciplined amd professional behavior of the troops. I think it also gave them a greater appreciation of just what the process of fighting a battle entailed.
At war’s end these reporters unembedded themselves (if there is such a word) and scattered to hotels in Baghdad. I get the feeling many of them are not out and about the country side much. Rather they are relying on sources bringing the news to them. More worrying, lately the combat shots have been coming exclusively from behing the insurgents — in effect from reporters embedded in enemy units.
I don’t know how well the occupation is really going, but I do think it is going far better in many areas than it is currently being represented. I think in the future it might be wise to extend the careful handling and involvement of reporters in the nation building as well as the war fighting stages.
Thibaud, I’ve got to say I don’t know what the “right” solution would have been, although the argument that nation-building in Iraq has somehow “failed” seems pretty darn weak, all in all.
However, I do have some knowledge and expertise in planning in DoD, and I can promise you two things: first, there is no event in which DoD is or might be involved for which there are not at least a half-dozen plans, all making different assumptions and leading to different predictions; second, when one of those plans is used, every last one of the authors of the other five is convinced it would have been better if their plan had been followed, and most of those authors are more than willing to let a reporter buy them a drink and explain at length what fools the bosses are.
Again, I’m not saying that you’re wrong — just suggesting you need to increase your salt intake just a tad.
It seems all the best embeds (Robert Alt) have departed for home. Those reporters relaxing at the Bahgdad Hotel are the reserve component, many of whom have still not been under fire.
Thibaud
Take it from a life long Jewish ex-liberal. Your analysis unfairly weighs Bush’s War up against the perfectly loaded straw man. By historical standards we have just witnessed the most successful waging of wars in our History. If you don’t realize this then prove me wrong with a historical analysis to counter it. You speak like we have already failed, when in fact our successes are just beginning to mount.
You sound very familiar to me, like the typical liberal trying to be reasonable but missing the point. Historical blindness is constant among many, especially liberals as they pick through what is before them. I don’t know how old you are but you sound somewhat like me talking about Reagan in the 80′s. Everything he did was dangerous, if I agreed with him then he just did them the wrong way.
The point is Bush has done what no one else dared yet has been successful beyond what could have been reasonably foretold. I don’t expect those who lack his guts and kutspe (chutzpah) to do any better. Mistakes are going to occur but having the will to carry through is what matters and this guy has it. The nuanced arguments over what if or what might is fine, but as my “Driving Miss Daisy” Jewish Father from Atlanta would say, “If your Aunt had balls she’d be your Uncle!” The Democrats aren’t in charge and won’t be before 2008. I expect to see your criticism grow more irrelevant over time, just like mine did concerning Reagan. Fortunately history ignores you and me and such narrow focusing on small things that have little to do with success.
People who work for me often say after the fact, “I would have done it differently than Johnny.” To them I say, “Look, work hard, gain my trust and then maybe I’ll let you make the mistakes because you will make them. Johnny has proven to me his mistakes don’t keep him from achieving.”
Thibaud, be patient the positive outcome is coming. This Carter-Mondale-Dukakis-Clinton-Gore voting Jew is not about to pass the buck to someone else. This President’s mistakes aren’t fatal by a long shot. They are certainly well within the bounds of reasonable expectations (in fact more so). Not one nay saying Democrat has proven to me they have what it takes to overcome their own mistakes let alone someone else’s. Keep criticizing if you must, but they are very small in the face of the large challenges we face.
I am grateful we have a leader that sees and understands more than you or I. I don’t assume he is so limited as for me to bear some great counsel to save him from a bereft political fault or blindness. Our perspective is small by comparison and counseling in darkness helps no-one, but in effect that is what we do when we counsel without all the facts and angles. Be careful to not do this, you may end up looking silly. Honesty causes me to accept my own silliness in thinking I was perhaps smarter and wiser then Reagan, arrogance is the first step towards faltering, I have ceased to counsel this President in darkness.
Interesting that Kosovo and the LA Riots would be used as examples…
The LA Riots, where the National Guard were used mostly to contain the riots, not to quell them. Destruction in the billions of dollars, something like 60+ dead, and I don’t know how many injured.
Kosovo, that one year Clinton adventure which we are still mired in. And why is that? From what I’ve read it’s because the Kosovites weren’t given any responsibility for their own security. We didn’t stand up a local police force to handle their security and so they are still dependent on us, and NATO.
Compare this with Iraq, who’s history is still in the making, which can no more be called a brilliant success as it could be called a dismal failure. There are hopefull signs, and there are discouraging signs. I believe what people feel about Iraq are based on whether you are basically a pessimist or an optimist. I believe that the hopefull signs outweight the discouraging ones.
We can debate the shoulda, woulda, coulda’s for ever and not reach any consensus. What we should not loose sight of, is that the troops and commanders performed admirablly in a very difficult situation. No plan survives combat is one of maxims of military planning.
For an adminstration “without a plan” they have accomplished in a little more than a year, the rebuilding of infrastructure, standing up a force of Iraqi police and guards, building of an independent judiciary, and kept the majority of the country under relatively stable conditions. And handed over sovereignty to the Iraqis ON SCHEDULE. Damn, if that’s not one hell of a performance for people who “didn’t have a plan or a clue.”
Keith:
The reason that we haven’t given the Kosovars full control is that they would have massacured all the Serbs by now and have set a safe have for Al Qaeda.
“If you want a good example of the ‘long march through the institutions’ undertaken by sixties leftists after they left school, look no further than the career of Orville Schell, dean of Berkeley’s School of Journalism,” writes Bruce Thornton at Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Papers:
Fighting the last anti-war
I strongly recommend Amy Zegart’s _Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC_ in the context of post-conquest nation-building. Her bureaucratic model for political analysis seems spot on.
For a real hoot, read _Flawed by Design_ and Laurie Mylorie’s _Bush vs. the Beltway_ back to back. Mylorie unintentionally confirms Zegart’s analytical model.
Here’s an excerpt from the most recent Amazon review of Zegart’s _Flawed by Design_:
“… Unfortunately, Zegart clearly and incontestably demonstrates that a major reform of the U.S. intelligence system can only occur if a cast of dedicated, powerful political actors combines with a unique set of compelling circumstances to force change on that system. At best such a combination is highly improbable.”
Sadly I am a man too far ahead of my time.
I blogged this over at Winds of Change on 16 May.
2003.
http://windsofchange.net/archives/003485.php
I go a little farther than Wretchard. I’m predicting the colapse of the Republicans too.
“It is unlikely that a meaningful national dialogue on the future of world can occur until the Left frees itself from the taboos which have stultified its intellect.”
No, I think it’s *easier” to have a rational debate without the Left, which doesn’t have a single idea left that hasn’t proven a failure in practice.
Once Kerry finishes dragging the “Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party” [which sadly includes most of the press] into ruin and disgrace, then the rest of people of this country can have a sensible debate.
Thibault – your entry pretty much made Wretchard’s point: the Republicans have a flawed road map while the Democrats have *nothing at all!*
Seppo,
You are missing the big picture.
The rational ’68ers by now have mostly changed sides.
I got to tell you though you righties missed some very good parties. Well I alone have returned to tell the tale. Well maybe not alone.
In any case it is good to clear old wrongs.
Form 180. Release the records.
Thibaud, you sound like a typical liberal who only grudgingly recognises the ‘rightness’ of the war and therefore has to find fault wherever possible. What seems to be glibly passed over mostly by the left is the immense task of turning around a situation such as existed in Iraq. To compare it to the riots in LA just serves to point up the disconnect in thinking on this. It is one of the most admirable attributes of Americans that they don’t sit and wring their hands and very cleverly [nuanced-ly?!]tell you how something is impossible, like the wimpy, sophisticated Zeropeans, they set to and bloody well do it. How could there not be mistakes made, did you ever read the history of WW2, both the battle in Europe and the occupation of Germany? And do you know how long it took after VE day to ‘stabilize the situation’?
It is no less than disgusting that France and Germany who have free loaded on defence all these years are now sitting out our current fight agains fascism, but then they invented it, didn’t they?
M. Simon
Well you are gone by now of course. But….
No, not alone, did some pretty good parties myself, even though I was a 69′er myself. I was still doing the war thing in 68.
“The rational ’68ers by now have mostly changed sides.”
You are certainly correct about that of course. Even if quite a broad brush, or perhaps a narrow one? And, yes, it is good to clear old wrongs, but I still feel guilty about my deluded past.
lignaeus
“It is no less than disgusting that France and Germany who have free loaded on defence all these years are now sitting out our current fight agains fascism, but then they invented it, didn’t they?”
Even at my advanced age, well not really, but over 50 anyway. I am still a naive SOB, I just can’t understand how those bastards can do nothing. Not just nothing, but actively work against us. Must it all come down to greed and inflated egos. I guess it does. We take the big step, and once again sacrifice with the lives of our patriots, and they curse us.
You are right about the ‘fascist’ part, they do believe they know better than myself how to live my life.
Response from thibaud
I’m not in the habit of referring to myself in the third person, but cince there werer so many replies to my observation that the Rum/Wolf/Chen/Feith team did a brilliant job winning the war and did a less-than-brilliant job with the postwar, I’ll respond generally to the points raised.
First, to those who seem to think it acceptable to, as one poster said, “put words in [my] mouth”, it’s not acceptable. Straw man arguments don’t deserve a response from me.
Second, the ad hominem attacks– calling me a “former lefty”, etc– are as stupid as they are offensive. Are you people trying to turn Roger’s chatboard into a partisan screed-sheet? Or are you just incapable of making a fact-based argument?
My argument is clear and is fact-based. I’ll state the obvious, again: Paul Wolfowitz, for whom I have great respect, said prior to the war that the number of troops could be drawn down within a matter of months–I believe he said by October 2003– to 30,000. This is fact.
Powell and Bush have for the last several months been going around first Europe then the middle east asking for another 30,000 troops to supplement the 140,000 or so we have there. This is fact.
Obviously, the administration recognizes now that we have too few troops in Iraq. Either this was not the case a year ago, or else the admin has belatedly recognized what the Joint Chiefs and many other pro-war, sympathetic analysts have been saying for a year. If the former is true, then teh situation today must be worse than it was a year ago. If the latter is true, then the only question is why it took so long for the Pentagon civilian leaders to recognize the obvious.
And now for an argument based on appeals to conservative authority: across the conservative spectrum intelligent analysts have recognized that postwar Iraq is, in Charles Krauthammer’s tart description, “a mess.” Not a disaster, not (yet) a failure, but clearly a bad situation with poor security and characerized by, in Bill Kristol’s words, an “inexcusable” failure to restore basic infrastructure such as electricity.
If we’ve learned anything from the fall of the Soviet Bloc, it’s that Stalinist regimes destroy the basic props of civil society, leaving only the Party and the military as well-functioning institutions capable of delivering basic public goods. In non-Kurdistan Iraq, the only entity aside from the Ba’athist party leadership and the army with any capability to lead and get things done was the religious hierarchy, most of them fundamentalist. As Reuel Marc Gerecht has said again and again in The Weekly Standard, Sistani’s support and cooperation is crucial to everything we do.
Did anyone in the admin recognize this simple, basic, obvious fact of contemporary Iraq prior to the war? I think not. Wolf, Rum, Cheney and Feith were totally focused on Chalabi and the INC and paid no attention to Sistani and the powerful clerics. A colossal mistake borne of a deep ignorance of Iraqi society and an unwillingness to learn from our experience with post-Stalinist eastern Europe.
Thibaud,
Hey, relax. I don’t think lignaeus is one of our regular visitors anyway.
I won’t make any comment on the war planning itself.
But I do think you are wrong in saying that planning or the lack thereof is the reason this election is close. At least, that is not what is fueling the rage of the far left.
I think that the war in Iraq is indirectly an assault on long-held ideas of the Left, and the Left is correspondingly desperate to return to Sept. 10, 2001.
But that’s just my take on it. It’d be nice to be able to look back on it 100 years from now.
But I do think you are wrong in saying that planning or the lack thereof is the reason this election is close. At least, that is not what is fueling the rage of the far left.
It’t not the “far left” that’s making this election close. It’s the bizarre way in which each party has managed to alienate a very large percentage of its core.
In the Republicans’ case, the deficits, and in many cases the war, have annoyed the hell out of the traditional white shoe northeastern and midwestern Republicans. George Will, WF Buckley, Brent Scowcroft, Georgie Anne Geyer… the list of Republicans who will have to hold their noses to vote for W is quite large.
As for the Dems, the idiocies of Howard Dean, Mikey and the MoveOn crowd have alienated traditional national security Dems like myself. Had Kerry adopted Lieberman’s stance on the war, I’d be sure to vote for him in November.
What’s so profoundly annoying to those of us in the middle– who I believe are far more numerous than the polls indicate– is the way partisans in this country castigate anyone who differs from them as traitors to the cause. In my case I’m disgusted with those liberal chatboards on which anyone who points out Kerry’s flaws is flamed as a Republican “troll”.
I see the same behavior starting to rear its scabrous little head on this board as well. Not a good trend, and one that should concern a fair-minded, reasonable guy like Roger.