June 24, 2008

Pigs Fly: NYT Praises Bush & Surge Strategy

David Brooks on why Bush's stubbornness has led to success in Iraq, a success that many on the Left still will not admit to. My lengthy comments follow, so I put it all below the fold.

NYT:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Thanks to Bill Quick for pointing the article out. Let me just respond to Bill by saying this: the argument in the article is not that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq, it is that once the invasion happened those calling for our immediate pullout based on the theory that our very presence caused much of the violence have been proven wrong.

Was the invasion a mistake? I think the answer is yes. But the invasion happened. It's history. That war was to topple a regime, and it worked.

Now we fight in order to ensure Iraq does not become the next Afghanistan, ruled by either Khomeinist or Salifist jihadis. It was not the central front in the war on terror when we went in, but it became that front once the country became chaotic. Yes we helped create the conditions which led to Iraq becoming a hotbed of Islamist terror, but simply ignoring those conditions since we are partly culpable for their creation is a recipe for disaster.

It sounds very Buchananesque, doesn't it, in its reasonable and almost academic like analysis of the initial mistakes? World War I was a mistake,and since the conditions created partly by us in WWI were a mistake then, by implication, WWII was also a mistake. The premise is correct, but the conclusions drawn from the initial premise do not necessarily flow from it.

Mistakes are always made in history. But actions have consequences, and the blame game does not help us deal with those consequences as they exist now.

Had we followed Harry Reid or Barrack Obama's advice and pulled out of Iraq in 2006-2007, we would now be facing three Iraqs: A sunni Taliban-like state, a shia Iran-like state, and a secular Kurdish state.

Only one of those states would have been even marginally an ally.

Worse, the Islamist worldview as articulated by Osama bin Laden, that the US lacks the nerve to fight the long fight, would have been vindicated. This is a long war we are in. It's a civilizational war. If we retreat we will only be doing exactly what are enemies want.

Contrary to popular belief, our enemies are not particularly interested in harming the US for the sake of harming us. The point of terrorism is not to terrorize for its own sake. The point of terrorism is to terrorize us so that we will do something they wish us to do. Think the Madrid bombings.

Sure our enemies want to hurt us because they hate us, but they hate us because of our foreign policy. What they are interested in doing is getting us to withdraw from the world stage so they can focus on replacing secular regimes with Islamist ones. They hate us because they see us as the major stumbling block to that goal.

Withdrawal from Iraq would have helped them in achieving at least one short-term goal. I'm not sure if the Islamic State of Iraq with its capital in Ramadi would have been able to control all of Sunnistan, but it should be remembered that the Taliban never controlled all of Afghanistan. The day before 9/11 the Taliban assassinated their greatest enemy from the Northern Alliance. At best Sunni Iraq would have been thrown into a long term state of civil war with pockets controlled by Islamists, at worst it would have become the new world headquarters of al Qaeda.

And for those who now see Iraq as a client state of Iran, what do you make of al-Maliki's government now taking on the Iranian controlled Shia militias?

Pointing out the many flaws in the al-Maliki government is a masturbatory exercise in futility, especially for those of us who are skeptical of the democracy project in general. The Iraqi government is a deeply flawed ally, but name another ally in the Muslim world--whether they came to power through elections, through heredity, or through junta--which isn't equally flawed? Again, remembering that we are talking about allies here, and not friends.

Winning this second war in Iraq against Islamist forces is critical to U.S. national interests, even if the first war against the Baathist regime was not. We cannot afford to lose this one, and its good to see that some in the MSM are coming around.