We are reminded daily not of the birth of the first consensual government in the history of the Arab world, but only that nine months after the military defeat of the Baathists, there is still resistance to the American reconstruction; and that the number of American soldiers, killed in major combat operations and afterward, has now surpassed 500.
Things in the Middle East are hard precisely because the stakes there are gargantuan. But so are the rewards: The sanctuaries and patrons of murderers, suicide bombers, and terrorists are shrinking with the destruction of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Autocracies like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria are terrified of consensual government in Iraq precisely because they are aware of its implications for their own deprived citizens.
Meanwhile millions — from Libya and Pakistan to North Korea and Iran — watch intently. They wonder whether this new United States is about to run out of gas and return to the old appeasement of the last twenty years, [... or] is this new — and often unpredictable — United States going to completely change the rules of engagement, to prevent the conditions that would lead to another September 11?
We are winning a difficult peace. It is not surprising that we have made scores of mistakes, since nation rebuilding in the Middle East has no recent pedigree — not targeting and storming into the Sunni Triangle from the very beginning, distrusting and defaming competent and patriotic Iraqi exiles, allowing thousands to stream in from Iran, dismantling the Iraqi army and police, restraining Americans in war from harming vital infrastructure only to allow Iraqis to ruin it in peace, lax security on captured weapons caches, keeping Iraqis in the shadows while we spoke about their reform, and trying to create a political utopia when the avoidance of tyranny was our real chore.
Surely someone in the administration should have been explaining to the American people daily the historical nature of our victory, the critical issues now in play worldwide, and the humane nature of our sacrifice — if only to offer some counterweight to the monotonous negativism of National Public Radio, Nightline, the New York Times, and the Democratic contenders. Instead we have had mostly silence — reticence seen not as Olympian magnanimity, but rather as a sign of weakness that only emboldened critics and fueled the hysteria.
Yet throughout this tumultuous year, what amazes is not that we made errors, or major blunders even — but how quickly we reacted, adjusted, and learned from our mistakes. So we press on, learning as we go, combining power with justice, determined to leave behind something better than we found. We are comforted by knowing that for all the current yelling from Democratic candidates, our own intelligentsia, and the European mainstream, this has not been a war of conquest or exploitation, but something altogether different — a needed effort that, if we see it through, will end up doing a great deal of good for everyone involved.
Our efforts in Iraq to remove a genocidal murderer and inaugurate democracy are not a "quagmire," but one of the brightest moments in recent American history — and we need not be ashamed to say that, again and again and again.
Maybe they're smarter
than we give them credit for.
Maybe they look at
us, and realize
"consensual government"
gave us eight long years
of Clinton. Just think
what the "consensus" choice there
might put in office...
The US citizenry need only to hand more power to the Democrats to slip-slide into a self-phophesying reality. Dims injecting all this quagmire-type rhetoric directly translates to lost American lives. Treasonous!
HF