The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve (A response to Messrs. Buckley, Will and Fukuyama)

A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed from the outset. Or so the argument goes.

The war is lost. "Our mission has failed," Mr. Buckley wrote earlier this year. "It seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly," saith the man (Mr. Fukuyama) who once declared "the end of history" and in 1998 signed a letter to congressional leaders stating, "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place."

These critics of the war are demonstrating a peculiar eagerness to declare certain matters settled. We certainly face difficulties in Iraq--but we have seen significant progress as well. In 2005, Iraq's economy continued to recover and grow. Access to clean water and sewage-treatment facilities has increased. The Sunnis are now invested in the political process, which was not previously the case. The Iraqi security forces are far stronger than they were. Our counterinsurgency strategy is more effective than in the past. Cities like Tal Afar, which insurgents once controlled, are now back in the hands of free Iraqis. Al Qaeda's grip has been broken in Mosul and disrupted in Baghdad. We now see fissures between Iraqis and foreign terrorists. And in the aftermath

Personally I relish the opinions of Will, Fukuyama, and Buckley because it's going to be so much fun to remind them five years hence of who blinked and who stayed the course. Maybe even two years hence.

The "insurgency" as such has scarcely the power left to blow up schoolchildren, and the action has definitely moved toward Baghdad for what seems to me to be the end game. A U.S. presence that has acted to take pressure off the nascent Iraqi government - by design - now finds that it is time for some of the pressure to be taken up by that government lest it fall into the near-stalemate we've seen the past few weeks. It's a delicate balancing act in the face of a great many well-funded and violent men who are hostile to democracy per se and doubly so in an Iraq that may prove to be an inconvenient success. Too much pressure too soon and chaos happens; not enough and stalemate does.

Should it walk the tightrope to success, and I am optimistic that it will despite it all, then it will have done so despite the ill will of liberals and internationalists the world over who will be stuck in denial and dismissal. To their names we may now add Buckley, Fukuyama, and Will. I plan on reminding them of it.

The problem with Iraq, Mr. Will said in a Manhattan Institute lecture, is that it "lacks a Washington, a Madison, a [John] Marshall--and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout." There is no "existing democratic culture" that will allow liberty to succeed, he argues. And he scoffs at the assertion by President Bush that it is "cultural condescension" to claim that some peoples, cultures or religions are destined to despotism and unsuited for self-government. The most obvious rebuttal to Mr. Will's first point is that only one nation in history had at its creation a Washington, Madison and Marshall--yet there are 122 democracies in the world right now. So clearly founders of the quality of Washington and Madison are not the necessary condition for freedom to succeed.

Americans have debated matters of creed and culture before. John C. Calhoun believed slavery was a cultural given that could not be undone in the South. Lincoln knew slavery had deep roots--but he believed that could, and must, change. He set about to do just that. Lincoln believed slavery could be overcome because he believed human beings were constituted in a particular way. In the "enlightened belief" of the Founders, he said, "nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows." Lincoln believed as well that the self-evident truths in the Declaration were the Founders' "majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man."

This is a good piece, effectively slaps down the three. Tears apart the elitism and disdain of certain peoples toward universal concepts of Freedom and Liberty. To consign people on this earth to enslavement, poverty and tyranny because they supposedly "can do no better" frankly makes me sick. As detailed in this piece authors of that concept are not new, the same premise was used to justify slavery in this country. Among others said to be incapable of functioning as a "civilized" people. I could say some of the people that hold this view make me sick, and some of them do, but more than that the attitude sickens me. It doesn't matter if it comes from Will, Buckley to his discredit, or Michelle Malkin. They should be ashamed to hold it at all.

I've read two of the three before today. I expect better of Buckley. His column based around the faulty premise Iraq had fallen into civil war to begin with showed a lack of understanding of the situation on the ground. Even the MSM has retracted from their glee, recognizing it did not occur. Not that he was ever really onboard, but usually his columns show more logic. Agree or disagree on Iraq, that piece would have changed no minds. Far too many holes or untruths.

George Will is no conservative. I expect no better from him. An elite that has a bias against this administration, for quite sometime.

I don't know the other, judging by his words, I'm glad I do not.

The three have all made legitimate points refreshingly untainted by the seething Bush-hatred permeating even the highest intellectual reaches of the Left. I would not fault anything in this piece which is informative and inspiring. However, I would say it answers those three critics; it doesn't annihilate them. Nor should it. This is in the category of debate we should be having instead of whatever you would call the exchange of ideas that we have now when one side (the Left and the MSM) doesn't accept necessary first principles.

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