Stir Crazy

I suppose Corner denizen Andy McCarthy deserves some small amount of credit for at least taking pains to not impugn the patriotism or integrity of others. But these people persist in reaching some damned peculiar conclusions.

Many (but by no means all) of these people, also believe a major problem we face is Islam itself – i.e., that in its most authentic and dynamic form, it is fundamentally anti-democratic, anti-West, and anti-Semitic.

Consequently, these folks collectively believe that the imperatives the Bush administration has made of supporting the Maliki government and democratizing the greater Muslim world – Iraq being a test-case thereof – are unwise. They see popular elections (which the administration tries to sell as democratic elections) raising Islamists to power, they see Maliki supporting Hezbollah and making nice with Ahmadinejad, and they say: Why the hell are we putting our best and bravest in harm’s way for this?

Perceiving a lack of will to win that greater war, this camp says the smaller goals the administration has settled on in Iraq, and its dream of a democratic Middle East, are not important enough to U.S. national security to continue putting our troops in harm’s way.

These people now inflate the media’s count of those who oppose both the war and the president. But, in principle, they are not opposed to the “war on terror” properly understood, and their opposition to President Bush involves how the war is being prosecuted … not the decision to fight it in the first place. I think we are foolish if we don’t acknowledge these folks and listen to what they are saying. I think it’s particularly offensive to lump them in with the cut-n-run crowd. That’s not where they’re coming from.

This is a rather unhealthy conflation of several pernicious memes which plague the holdouts climbing the walls in their intellectual redoubts, not the least of which is that this administration is even capable of achieving the lofty idealistic goals the neocons have set. No Middle Eastern country is going to "democratize" in the near future, not to any level that would make any of this worthwhile. Period.

And they know it. They can point to Lebanon and Egypt all they like, but Egypt is not a democracy, and the Lebanese used their votes on what we officially view a terrorist group. So even the successes are failures, and there is no reason to believe that the acknowledged failures will turn around any time soon.

Even his attempt to differentiate these noble dissenters in the American political body from the "cut-n-run crowd" is clumsy. Who comprises that "crowd", and what are their precise opinions on this issue? Is McCarthy referring to the sizable number of people who were correct about this fiasco back in '02, who did the things that peaceable dissenters do in civilized societies, and were summarily shouted down by knuckleheads such as McCarthy and his colleagues? Has there ever been so much as a half-hearted apology from these tools for sliming everyone in their way with the effeminized epithets and cheap shots they traffic in?

They are engaging in rhetorical spelunking here, searching blindly for a palatable way to present the troop "surge" that will be the keystone of their New And Improved Super-Maximum Pony Plan. You can smell the desperation, the impending futility on their part. They have no plan; they have no timeline. They have no strategery.

They just know that they mustn't give up, because their Manichean world-view holds no other options. They are counting on Junior to have privileged information at hand that will confound the experts; what they forget is that even if he does possess such information, he has demonstrated consistently that he simply doesn't have the knowledge to process that info. This is an important distinction that has eluded them from day one.

So the "we need to listen to these folks and not lump 'em in with the traitors" schtick doesn't wash. It's a dodge. The numbers have incremented steadily, inexorably. If they were ever planning on "listening", they would have done so before this late date. They don't plan on "listening" -- they're trying to figure out a way to placate an increasingly angry center.

This sounds like it might be some sort of back-of-the-napkin preamble to what might anchor the few diplomatic sections of Maximum Pony Plan:

On Iran and Syria, I believe it should be the unmistakable, unambiguous, proudly stated policy of the United States that we favor regime change. We want Syria out of Lebanon – not just in form but in substance. We want the Iranian regime out, period. It is ridiculous after all this time that we do not have a settled Iranian policy.

Do we need militarily to invade these places? I don’t think so. But we need to make them know they are the enemy, that we see them that way, that we are committed to having them out, that we support their opposition, and that we will slap them around when they act against us. We need to make them understand that we are not going to be hamstrung by the Security Council when our national interests are at stake.

I mentioned a few days ago that Arthur Herman has a very interesting article in Commentary about how to deal with Iran – basically, don’t worry so much about the nukes; rather, deal with the regime and the conventional threat. I don’t feel competent enough in military affairs to say this is the way to go, but I sure think it’s worth considering. In any event, I think U.S. policy has to be reformulated around the principle that these guys are our enemies … not regimes we respect and are hoping, diplomatically, to bring around.

This is ludicrous. Is there something that makes McCarthy think that we haven't made those things quite clear to Iran and Syria? Are they supposedly under some bizarre misapprehension that we're not hostile to their governments?

These people haven't learned anything. Lesson #1 from Iraq should be that sometimes strongmen, as abominable as they are, are keeping a tight lid on some very dangerous internecine squabbles. Going in with no discernible idea whatsoever of how to control those things once the iron fist is removed is what got us into this mess.

And now they want to apply this ineptitude to two more countries -- even as Afghanistan is also steadily unraveling from underneath us -- because spending $250 million a day just isn't enough apparently. Okay, smart guys -- who replaces Bashar Assad, who by all accounts is pretty benign as despots go? What "democratic" leader do we install in Iran, a huge country with difficult terrain and 70 million people, most of them young?

I mean, I guess I can accept that they think that they mean well when they spout this confrontational puffery, but any sensible person should recognize it for the strutting nonsense it is. We are in no position to carry out a large-scale operation and occupation of Damascus, let alone all of Syria -- let alone Iran. You gonna tell a squad leader in the 3ID, on his fifth tour as it is, that he and his company get to go straight to Damascus because the 82nd Chairborne deeems it crucial, and we'll figure out the rest of the master plan once you're there? That's nuts. It's done. The only way the ops theater expands is with airstrikes, which would finalize our growing reputation as a rogue state, irresponsibly incurring thousands of civilian casualties in an insane "preventive" war.

The rest of the world -- including our heretofore beneficent friends at the East Asian central banks -- is watching and waiting to see what we do. The first thing should be to stop listening to these goofballs. No matter how seriously and soberly they present their manifesto, the inescapable conclusion is that they have no idea how to make it happen, nor any contingency plan when it fails. In any real-world occupation, that would be grounds for dismissal, if not charges of criminal negligence and depraved indifference.