Over There
More reflections from a recent perusing of comments from the hard left sites. It's useful to be able to see yourself as your enemy sees you, the better to discover the weaknesses in his arguments.
CONFUSION
We're criticized for confusing the War in Iraq with the fight against Islamist terrorism. Some of the folks on that side do claim to support the latter while opposing the former. But the degree of time and effort the put into the "support" generally pales before their "oppose" quotient.
Nonetheless, it's true that people on our "side" sometimes do blur the two issues. They are not certainly the same and it is intellectually honest to see the one as a distraction from the other. Ideally, it might be possible to marshall the forces of the United States into a fight against terror that somehow left Saddam intact and in power amid a crumbling and illogical regime of sanctions. I guess.
In part, though, I think our tendency to conflate the two wars is a reflexive defense against the "Bush lied" meme, which seeks to undermine everything done since Sept. 11 and part of which centers on the alleged lack of any connection between Saddam and Osama.
Whatever the degree of complicity between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida before 2003 (certainly it was less than many people suspected, much less than the more lurid stories), it never was one of my chief motives for supporting the war, and I suspect that's true of many others. The cooperation was more potent as a future likelihood. And it was one of only several suspicions and assertions the U.S. administration made at various times. A realist will accept that things were not as bad as some folks feared.
Yet Iraq definitely is a front in that war now. The organization killing citizens and soldiers in Baghdad and elsewhere calls itself "al Qaida in Iraq," and sends mail back and forth to Osama. So, you can carp about whether opening this front in the GWOT was necessary, but now it's a fact of the war. A realist will accept that, too.
This fact leads to the "I'd rather fight them there than here" comments by some of my allies, which make me uncomfortable. I'd rather not fight them here, true, but my vision for Iraq is a lot more hopeful than turning it into the permanent battlefield in the Middle East. The country can't be a show piece of democracy and freedom and an abbatoir at the same time.
And the fact is, we have our enemies both here and there. Old models of invasion and national defense don't work in this case. The enemies who did us the most harm in 2001 lived among us, and came from nations that we think of as friendly to us. They were directed from a nation that had nothing to do with the attack except allowing the director to function on their soil.
DOONESBURY
And a thought after reading comments from people I'm more likely to feel at home with. Many of the "Left Behinds" retain a degree of denial about it. Once you pull away from that pack you don't just leave behind hard political views but some old fondnesses. You can still enjoy, say, George Carlin comedy routines, if that's something that's built into your life experience (as it is mine). But you can no longer entirely embrace the political message that underlies it, which means you can never be quite as intimate with it as once you were.
People will say, "I used to laugh at 'Doonesbury,' but then it got too political," forgetting it was always political, it just happened to be a political you used to agree with, but no longer do. When you were on the same vibe as the humorist, that shared view would be a slide in to the joke; when you object to it, it becomes an obstacle.
CONFUSION
We're criticized for confusing the War in Iraq with the fight against Islamist terrorism. Some of the folks on that side do claim to support the latter while opposing the former. But the degree of time and effort the put into the "support" generally pales before their "oppose" quotient.
Nonetheless, it's true that people on our "side" sometimes do blur the two issues. They are not certainly the same and it is intellectually honest to see the one as a distraction from the other. Ideally, it might be possible to marshall the forces of the United States into a fight against terror that somehow left Saddam intact and in power amid a crumbling and illogical regime of sanctions. I guess.
In part, though, I think our tendency to conflate the two wars is a reflexive defense against the "Bush lied" meme, which seeks to undermine everything done since Sept. 11 and part of which centers on the alleged lack of any connection between Saddam and Osama.
Whatever the degree of complicity between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida before 2003 (certainly it was less than many people suspected, much less than the more lurid stories), it never was one of my chief motives for supporting the war, and I suspect that's true of many others. The cooperation was more potent as a future likelihood. And it was one of only several suspicions and assertions the U.S. administration made at various times. A realist will accept that things were not as bad as some folks feared.
Yet Iraq definitely is a front in that war now. The organization killing citizens and soldiers in Baghdad and elsewhere calls itself "al Qaida in Iraq," and sends mail back and forth to Osama. So, you can carp about whether opening this front in the GWOT was necessary, but now it's a fact of the war. A realist will accept that, too.
This fact leads to the "I'd rather fight them there than here" comments by some of my allies, which make me uncomfortable. I'd rather not fight them here, true, but my vision for Iraq is a lot more hopeful than turning it into the permanent battlefield in the Middle East. The country can't be a show piece of democracy and freedom and an abbatoir at the same time.
And the fact is, we have our enemies both here and there. Old models of invasion and national defense don't work in this case. The enemies who did us the most harm in 2001 lived among us, and came from nations that we think of as friendly to us. They were directed from a nation that had nothing to do with the attack except allowing the director to function on their soil.
DOONESBURY
And a thought after reading comments from people I'm more likely to feel at home with. Many of the "Left Behinds" retain a degree of denial about it. Once you pull away from that pack you don't just leave behind hard political views but some old fondnesses. You can still enjoy, say, George Carlin comedy routines, if that's something that's built into your life experience (as it is mine). But you can no longer entirely embrace the political message that underlies it, which means you can never be quite as intimate with it as once you were.
People will say, "I used to laugh at 'Doonesbury,' but then it got too political," forgetting it was always political, it just happened to be a political you used to agree with, but no longer do. When you were on the same vibe as the humorist, that shared view would be a slide in to the joke; when you object to it, it becomes an obstacle.
