Breaking Contact.
It's not a retreat. Yet.
By Moe Lane Posted in War — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
It's not exactly being done graciously, but here and there various groups fighting against fighting the war are starting to remove themselves from the rhetorical front lines.
War is Over, If You Want It
Is the war in Iraq moving from folly to victory?
Brian Doherty | October 26, 2007Have you heard the word? The war in Iraq is won.
Sure, we’ve heard “Mission Accomplished” before, but that was 3,699 American military deaths ago. But now, many insist, all signs are positive. The WMDs that triggered the war have been, of course, eliminated so totally that it’s almost as if they never existed at all. But that’s old news. There is fresh reason to cheer Iraqi developments, post-Petraeus surge.
From the pages of the Los Angeles Times to Fox News, from on-the-scene freelancer Michael Yon to the Wall Street Journal, facts and arguments about progress in Iraq of late paint a picture that’s no longer stained with blood and smoke stretching to endless horizons.
[There are links, but I'll be damned if I give the anti-Semites over at antiwar.com any more traffic than they already have. So I'll just give a separate link to Michael Yon, and call it good.]
To extend the military metaphor, this isn't a retreat. It's a fall back to a fortified position. The difference? In the latter, you haven't given up fighting yet; you just want better ground on which to do it.
Read on.
Let me introduce you to the new meme:
Judging whether the Iraq war and occupation was a good idea or the right thing to do based on the principle that things are, or seem like they soon will be, better there than they were before treats war as merely a neutral policy tool. The question preceding any decision to go to war shouldn’t be as simple as: “Might some long-term good occur out of this?” (especially when any attempt to wonder whether or not things might or could have been better in Iraq in 2012 than they were in 2002 even if we never invaded will be dismissed as childish sci-fi thinking, and the costs of likely more than a couple of trillion by 2017 thought of as all in a day’s good work, and for our kids to pay off anyway). The real question before a war needs to be: “is this absolutely necessary given a fair consideration of the horrors and unpredictability of war and the purpose of the U.S. military?” Which is not: “make the world a better place, somewhere down the line, killing lots of people on the way.” For America's future, this kind of victory in Iraq could really mean defeat.
[See above for my reasons not to favor The Nation with a link.]
Remove the petulance, the breezy assumption that Doherty's opinion on root causes are settled truths, and the reflexive loathing of the neoconservatives, and you have - well, about three or so paragraphs, but somewhere in there is the signal that portions of the antiwar movement would really like to stop talking about concrete interventions and instead return to having abstract discussions on the need for intervention.
This is welcome for two reasons. First, this is a discussion that we should actually be having anyway. It looks increasingly like Iran will be a foreign policy headache that could potentially stretch into the next few Presidential administrations, and now indeed would be a good time to discuss what we need to do about it (and before somebody starts shouting: yes, that does include discussing whether anything needs to be done about it at all). Contrary to the antiwar movement's belief, we are not actively conspiring to invade Iran - this President wouldn't be shy about saying so if he was - but we may have to. Or the next President may have to. It'd be nice to work it all out ahead of time, particularly since we were given that rude surprise by all of those "progressives" who suddenly realized that their commentary about supporting freedom and democracy didn't count if a Republican could take credit for it.
And there's the second reason. If various people and groups are falling back from "We can't win this fight" to "Fine, we won, but should we have fought?" or "Just because we won there doesn't mean that we should get into the bad habit of fighting," then it's going to get very, very lonely out there for the people who won't retreat. Personally, I hope that the antiwar movement sticks it out to the bitter end.
It's a shame that I picked an infantry military metaphor for this post, because All the way to the ground would have been a great way to end it. Ach, well.
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Breaking Contact. 11 Comments (0 topical, 11 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Every thing they say is calculated to either
(1) inflict damage on Republicans
(2) minimize any success that might be attributed to Republicans
(3) steal credit for something that should rightfully be credited to Republicans.
The 'truth',or 'what is good for America' doesn't even enter into their thought processes.
Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie
...they're not anti-war, they're rooting for the Other Side.
I've long since ceased being charitable. Where's the fun in being compared to Nazis if one doesn't get to dress up in the way-cool black leather overcoat and act like one?
--furious
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
And that's the fallacy of that line of argument.
Most of the wars we've fought and won, when you get right down to it, were wars of choice more than wars of utter survival. That doesn't make them good or bad policies, on their own. But this idyllic notion we had that "until Vietnam....we only fought wars as a last resort, and only when we were directly threatened, etc."
It's a lie, or at least an untruth. Heck, it wasn't long after Fort Sumter that Lincoln's advisers were telling him that the War Between the States couldn't be won and that it wasn't worth fighting anyway...he should seek a ceasefire and craft an agreement to share the continent.
But we never curse the Civil War, in retrospect, as bad policy....despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of American perished, etc. The "good guys" won, slavery was abolished, the country was reunited, and that makes it all worth it to most people.
Pat Buchanan argues, to this day, that we shouldn't have gotten involved in the European/North African theaters in WWII. And his argument does have some merits (although I ultimately disagree with him).
It seems that the anti-war activists have little choice but to move away from Iraq as a discussion point and on to Iran. It's hard to be taken seriously when your talking points are a war or two behind the times.
Hopefully, they (and our enemies) are finally realizing that once we enter a place like Iraq, we are committed to it until the bitter end. No matter what, we will stick it out until we win. While making all the noises their constiuents want to hear, in the end, even a Democrat-controlled Congress won't back down. It has become clear that America, Republican and Democrat, will defend itself against all threats.
The anti-war crowd has no safe harbor. That leaves nothing left to discuss but the nature and ferocity of future threats.
While the commie-left has retreated, they are regrouping around the theme 'we did good, let's bring our boys home'.
As Jeff Emanuel has made clear, the great gains we've made with the surge are fragile. We know it, and our Iraqi allies know it. To pull out, draw down now would be to allow a disaster of epic proportions to take place -- Iraq would descend into a hell worse even than Saddam's hell, and we would just GIVE the Middle East to Iran's evil mullah-cracy.
Therefore it is crucial on the home front that we not allow these people to set the terms. Continue to press for our military to fight and stay until the Iraqis can win on their own.
Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie
for the record, Sherman didn't drive anyone into the Sea. Once Hood disengaged before Atlanta, Sherman was essentially unopposed in Georgia. He faced the old men and young boys of the State Guard at Griswoldsville and some PACS cavalry. The only infantry he faced and the only events that could really be called battles, albeit small ones, were Griswoldsville, the cavalry battle at Waynesboro, and the attack on the landward side of Ft. McCallister, the key to Savannah. When Ft. McCallister fell, Savannah was abandoned and Sherman's troops walked in. The famous/infamous March to the Sea was essentially a walk in the park, although a tremendous engineering undertaking to clear the paths and especially to corduroy through the Ogeechee River swamps.
In Vino Veritas
And I knew the majority of that, but thanks for the detail. Definitely know your stuff.
The idea was the same as we should employ against the commie-left -- ruthless, unrelenting, slash-and-burn, and the goal of complete conquest. If they abandon any opposition, that'll work for me.
Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie
It is very hard and often unprofitable to take them on head on. Much of the time it is better to take the strategic offensive but the tactical defensive and let them throw themselves at you. That's where knowing your Alinsky comes in; they want you to react, preferably over-react, so why would you give them what they want? When they don't provoke you, they do ever more radical things trying to provoke you. When they do something awful enough, you smash them like a bug. You don't have to do it often. I can tell some good stories about turning Alinsky tactics on radical public employees.
In Vino Veritas
I like that, and you've got a good point.
Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie
...I always look foward to the "sloughing-off" arguments from Reason, Nation, and their ilk.
And the "Victory is Defeat" meme sounds so much like "Ignorance is Strength". Talk about moving the goalposts.
Like the "kids" (sailors, soldiers, airmen, Marines, in no particular order) aren't paying NOW for the fecklessness of prior adminstrations (Tehran Embassy, Khartoum Embassy, Beirut Embassy, Beirut Barracks, WTCI, Khobar Towers, Lockerbie, Riyadh Training Ctr, USS Cole, Nairobi Embassy, Dar es Salaam Embassy). What's the meter read now on cleaning up/re-building lower Manhattan? What would a couple more smoking craters in the middle of a couple more American cities -- or a couple more airliners blown out of the sky -- cost us?
The kiddies at Reason fail to realize that the US can avoid the world's bad neighborhoods, but the world's bad neighborhoods will still come to us.
--furious
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
"...absolutely necessary given a fair consideration of the horrors and unpredictability of war and the purpose of the U.S. military?”
After all, we could always just roll over and die. Or give in and join the muslims in slaughtering Jews. Lots of options. Do people on the left really deny that weighing the costs and benefits of war against the other options is irrational? Has anyone ever argued that it is sufficient that there be some benefit?
I have this problem: almost every time I hear opposition of the war from the left, the principle of charity forbids me from thinking that the objector really believes what he says, since no one smart enough to chew food would be stupid enough to believe the things the objector is averring. So, I'm left wondering what the person really means and feeling bad that I have been left out of this conversation where the words don't mean what they mean in ordinary English.