« Bad Timing, I Think | Main | Essay Worth Reading on Muslims in Britain »
August 10, 2006
Quote of the Day
"Bush certainly seems to have hit the sweet spot -- prosecuting the war vigorously enough to anger the antiwar left, but not vigorously enough to please the prowar right." — Glenn Reynolds
That's about the size of it. At this point, we are in very near danger of losing the ability to defeat the enemy conventionally absent another successful enemy attack on the scale of 9/11 or worse. We have not built up the force structure or public will to fight a fast war, and we have been losing the propaganda and proxy battles so one-sidedly that our victory in Iraq is in danger of being rendered meaningless: even if we establish a successful democracy in Iraq, and even if (unlikely) it becomes a liberal democracy, it may still be taken as a reason not to democratize by the regimes in the region. So our options are narrowing dramatically, right about the time that Iran is reaching the critical points on its nuclear weapons development programs.
I think President Bush's strategy, as I understand it, was the right strategy to adopt, far better than either an outright fast war (invasion of all of our enemies, at once or in sequence, with possibly millions of dead enemy and tens of thousands of dead Americans) or doing nothing more than the minimum against the enemy (Afghanistan). If the President and the Iraqis succeed at making Iraq an example of the good that an Arab democracy could do, there is a chance that democratic revolutions could sweep through the Arab/Muslim world, and moderate Islam could neuter Islamism. If it works, this is probably the optimal result.
However, there is a very good chance that the President's strategy will fail; it has always been a high-risk strategy. If we fail to make Iraq a state that other Arabs/Muslims want to emulate, or if we fail to remain engaged against groups like al Qaeda and Hizb'allah everywhere in the world, there will be no real pressure on Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia to change their methods. In that case, we must either invade Iran and occupy it, removing its government and establishing a new one as we did in Iraq, or we must destroy the governments of Iran and Syria, and leave their people to clean up afterwards. We do not have enough unengaged forces for either of these strategies. That means that we are purely defensive: we have ceded the initiative to the enemy and must await his move before we can alter our posture. It should be fairly clear that that is no way to win a war.
I feel that it is likely that the President's strategy will fail, clearly, within the next 18 months. If so, I really, really hope that the President, and his successor, have a backup plan. Right now, the majority of the Democrats seem to have a plan: ensure that the President's strategy fails, and hope everything turns out well after that. The enemy seems to have a plan: keep fighting proxy wars and planning big terrorist strikes. Both of these strategies are bad for America and the West. I'd like to see evidence that there is an intent to fight the war more aggressively, should Iraq fail, but I've yet to see any such evidence.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/1138