Posted on 03/14/2008 12:30:45 PM PDT by Tolik
![]() By now everyone sees what he wishes in Iraq a disaster of many proportions, a necessary war that will still be won. Liberals who used to demand that we promote democracy abroad are fierce critics of Iraqi democracy; conservatives, who want an iron hand dealing with a hostile Middle East, support spending hundreds of billions of dollars in rebuilding Iraqi society.
So it will be left to historians, as has been true in the case of the far-more-costly Korean and Vietnam wars, to adjudicate the final verdict. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has entered yet another manifestation. The fickle American public and its media have switched and flipped on the war as much as they have on Hillary Clintons chances in the last two months shes been a shoo-in, a has-been, a comeback kid, a loser, and now a contender. In late 2003, Iraq transmogrified suddenly, from an overwhelmingly popular and brilliant three-week war to remove a genocidal Saddam Hussein, into a bitterly divisive effort of four years to defeat an insurgency that threatened to topple the postwar elected government. Now, despite the obligatory throat-clearing epithets used by journalists and politicians the worst, nightmare, disaster, fiasco, catastrophe, quagmire Iraq is beginning to be seen as something that just might work after all, as the violence subsides and a stable constitutional government hangs on. Once promised to be the singular issue of the current presidential campaign, the war has receded to background noise of the primaries. An ascendant Barack Obama pounded home the fact that, unlike Senator Clinton, he never supported the removal of Saddam Hussein and always wanted to get Americans out of there as fast as he could; it may well prove that a more circumspect Obama soon wont want to mention the war and, as hinted by aides, wouldnt jerk the troops out should he be the next president. Rarely in American history has a war been so often spun, praised, renounced, disowned, and finally neglected. And the result is that a number of questions remain not just unanswered, but unasked. We have not been hit since 9/11, despite the dire predictions from almost everyone of serial attacks to come. Today if a Marine recruitment center is bombed, we automatically assume the terrorist to represent a domestic anti-war group, not al-Qaeda a perverse conjecture impossible to have imagined in autumn 2001. In response to that calm, the communis opinio is that we hyped the threat, needlessly went to war, mortgaged the Constitution just collate the rhetoric from the Obama and Clinton campaigns when there was never much of a post-9/11 threat from a rag-tag bunch of jihadists in the first place. |
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As usual, rock solid analysis.
The only epithet he left out was civil war.
Far too little is made of Sadr renunciation of politics in Iraq.
So much ink and blood has been spilled on the premise that he was an impossible barrier to our success in Iraq. Now— poof!— he’s gone.
His vision is getting ever more acute.
VDH bump
Another superb piece from VDH. I hope he writes one of the histories of this war. At least somebody will have gotten it right.
From the episode “Mirror, Mirror”? (I swear I’m not a trekie, have a life and have never gone to a Star Trek convention.)
The characters in the Mirror Universe are generally the same as the characters in “normal” Star Trek continuity (for example, it has a James T. Kirk and a Spock), but their personalities are, on the whole, much more aggressive, mistrustful, and opportunistic. Whereas the Star Trek Universe usually depicts an optimistic future which values peace and understanding, episodes set in the Mirror Universe show it to be marred by continual warfare, and compassion is seen as a liability. Uniforms are often more suggestive, such as women baring midriffs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_Universe_(Star_Trek)
No doubt made by Haliburton
No doubt made by Haliburton
Yeah, the guy in red is Dick Cheny’s great-great-great grandnephew.
Superb.
IMHO, this is THE major benefit of going into Iraq.
Looking for WMDs, getting Saddam Hussein, making a democracy from a dictatorship and stabilizing the region were all secondary.
“Who really took his eye off the ball?”
A brilliant point
The lament that I'm hearing most often is "Why do we always have to be the ones to sacrifice our blood and money while others benefit but risk nothing?"
Are we being used? Are we too eager to to be in the middle of every crisis?
There is no doubt that is the case in the Balkans.
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