The Id of the Right

The insurgency in Iraq is getting nasty.
Baathists killed 12 US Marines in Ramadi. And Shi’ite fanatics took over Najaf.
These people are idiots. They are minority factions disliked by the majority. Now they’re going to get themselves killed and conveniently remove themselves from the scene. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, if they want to be martyrs, we’re here to help.
That said, thank heaven John O’Sullivan at National Review is not in charge. According to him, one way of dealing with this problem is

…to establish order by bringing in massive numbers of U.S. and allied troops, imposing a regime of surveillance and supervision that is widespread and almost totalitarian but not brutal, using both human and technical intelligence to track down and remove the terrorists from society, and settling down to stay in Iraq for at least 30 years. In that way terrorist resistance might be administratively smothered over time. But since the U.S. has decided to reduce troop levels and hand over power to Iraqis in three months, this option has been foreclosed. [Emphasis added.]

Mr. O’Sullivan is the id of the right. I’m surprised to see that mainstream conservatives still think totalitarianism in other countries, so long as it serves our own ends, is something to be patted on the back. But apparently it is so.
Look. If the US is going to go around setting up totalitarian systems in other people’s countries, (“not brutal” or otherwise) you can count me out right now. I’ll have nothing whatever to do with it. I’ll go back to the left because the left would be right.
I don’t believe for a minute that O’Sullivan was being sloppy when he wrote “totalitarian.” When he saw the word on his screen he must have paused. I mean, come on, is there any more loaded word in our political lexicon? He meant it very deliberately. Someone once said a political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. The same goes for pundits.
O’Sullivan just can’t seem to help himself. He looks at the same nasty insurgency in Iraq that I’m seeing. I think to myself: They’re a threat to democracy. O’Sullivan thinks: Impose totalitarianism. A hundred bucks says he thinks General Augusto Pinochet, who promised to strangle even the memory of democracy in Chile, is a hero.
It’s one thing to do business with a dictatorship that is already in place. We worked with Stalin against Hitler and with Uzbekistan’s Karimov against the Taliban. But you don’t have to be an Allendista or a cheerleader for Islamofascist nutjobs to see that imposing a totalitarian regime on foreigners at gunpoint is not only profoundly immoral but a stain on our flag.
If O’Sullivan is the id of the right, Wretchard at The Belmont Club is its ego. He gets it.