Lindsey Graham and Jim Webb went at it yesterday while under the watchful gaze of Tim Russert. One of my main beefs with both guys is that they refuse to (or more likely can't) put their arguments into any kind of strategic context. Webb keeps burbling "diplomatic solution" while expressing concern for our troops; Graham cracks that we'll be remembered by what we leave rather than when we left.
The latter is a nifty soundbyte, but it doesn't help explain the mission to a perhaps puzzled and definitely annoyed America. This morning, 150 miles north of Baghdad in the Kurdish city of Kirkuk, 2 suicide bombers killed scores of people. While tragic, this is militarily beside the point of the surge. The surge's purpose is to pacify Baghdad and its surrounding areas so the Maliki government can become strong enough to bring a bit of civilization to Iraq. Because the administration and its Senate supporters haven't adequately explained precisely what the surge is supposed to accomplish, the bombing in Kirkuk will dovetail neatly with the mainstream media's preferred narrative of Iraq being a Texas-sized area of rampant chaos.
As conservatives, we've asked the troops to redouble their efforts with the surge, a request that they've responded to magnificently. The political and chattering classes now have to respond to with similar honor. Offering platitudes about "winning" just isn't satisfactory at this point, unless an explanation of precisely what winning means accompanies the platitudes.
YESTERDAY, BOB SCHIEFFER ON HIS RELIABLY UNWATCHABLE Sunday talk show expressed some of his shopworn liberal sentiments, but this time with a twist:
I am still not sure that I believe it: The Iraqi parliament is going on vacation during the month of August.
The White House offers the lame excuse that, after all, Baghdad is hot in August – sometimes 130 degrees...
A sudden withdrawal could set the entire region aflame. The truth is there are no good options left. But from here on, we need to put aside the dream of building a democracy in Iraq and focus solely on what is in our national interest.
It won't be pretty, but for all our good intentions, about all we can do now is try to contain this mess, pull our troops back from the middle of this civil war, and concentrate instead on the terrorist threat that this country faces around the world.
As for what kind of government Iraq needs, let their parliament figure it out. They can get right on it when the Baghdad weather turns cooler.
I’m shocked! My world makes no sense. I always thought it was liberals who cared about the less fortunate. And yet here's Schieffer blithely allowing the whole region to be “set aflame”. This lefty betrayal of the hopeless comes hard on the heels of the New York Times urging a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq even though the Times’ editorial board conceded genocide was a likely result. It’s not only the Grey Lady and obscure anchor-stiffs who are saying “feh” to the Third World’s hopeless. The Kos Kidz are peeing their Kiddie pants in delight over Schieffer’s “Cronkite moment”. Once the region has been set aflame and genocides have gone down, maybe Al Gore can organize a concert to set everything right.
But Schieffer, however unwittingly, has latched on to something here. We are in Iraq primarily for our own interests. And we want to leave something decent behind in Iraq, something that doesn't completely reek, mostly because it would be adverse to American interests to do otherwise. In other words, it would be an unacceptable resolution to the Iraq situation if the Iraqi people settled on a Shiite theocracy as their preferred form of government.
What America needs, and what the Iraqis need, is a government that has its heart in the right place but won’t mind ignoring certain “niceties” when necessary. Think of a leader like Andrew Jackson. Or, more likely, someone like Augusto Pinochet, whose ruthlessness has obscured for history the free market reforms he imposed that saved Chile and the democracy he bequeathed to his previously misbegotten country.
Would the New York Times and other suddenly hard-headed realists like bob Schieffer happily tolerate an Iraqi Pinochet as an alternative better than anything else? Doubtful. I can already picture Sting composing tedious dirges on the subject.
But Sting doesn’t set the global agenda – the White House does. The time has long since come for the White House to make it plain what victory will look like in Iraq. Assuming the White House knows what victory will look like, aside from the implausible dream of the rise of an Iraqi political class that has memorized the Federalist Papers.
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