Americans Born in the Wrong Place

MW said: "if it doesn't prove to you that Iraq can work ..."

It doesn't "prove" anything.

There's only one thing preventing Iraq from "working": the Iraqi people. We've done all the heavy lifting, over and over, for years.. and they've demonstrated over and over, for years, that they're more interested in settling sectarian scores than living together peacefully and democratically.

We should get out of Iraq and move from an internal security role to a border security role; isolating Iraq from outside influences and letting the Iraqi people and the Iraqi "government" (term used loosely) figure it out for themselves, which is what they'll ultimately have to do anyway.

Mark, that's utter lunacy. When has that approach ever worked? Where is the historical precedent? You want us to run away, thereby encouraging our enemies and raising the likelihood of future attacks. And you want us to stand by idly while the people who supported us in Iraq are slaughtered, thereby teaching the world how dangerous it is to be our ally. You are willing to let thousands upon thousands die so that your side can gain a little political advantage in Washington, and so that maybe you won't have to see scary pictures on TV any more.

There is no security in retreat. There is no security in abandoning your friends. There is no security in permitting mass slaughter. Maintaining a great nation is often an ugly, bloody, and expensive business. But there's no other way to do it. There is no magical path to prosperity and security that doesn't involve getting your hands dirty. And sitting on the sidelines out of squeamishness or cowardice only makes things worse. You would have thought that the first and second world wars would have taught us that.

BB: Your criticism of my opinion would be more poignant if it were based on what I actually said instead of an interpretation thereof. I never said we should completely abandon Iraq or "run away". I said we should isolate Iraq from the many negative outside influences but we should stay out of *their* civil war. We've led the Iraqi horse to all the water in the world, but we can't make that horse drink it.

There is no security in creating more enemies and training them to fight us and how to fight us. There is no security in placing value in friendships that aren't. There is no security in taking sides in another country's internal struggles.

Squeamishness or cowardice has nothing to do with it. It's about repeating the same mistakes over and over and expecting a different result. It's about common sense. It's about putting our efforts into actions and initiatives that may actually work.

This isn't WWI or WWII. Dealing with Islamic extremists and fanatics is a wholly different ball game.

The Iraqi people are going to either be happy with their government and willing to be governed by it or they're not. The "government" (term used loosely) in Iraq is either going to make decisions that bring Iraq together or they're not. These things will happen whether we're there or not. The sensible thing to do with our military is to, as I said, isolate Iraq from negative outside influences instead of being the sole provider of Iraq's internal security. We're not providing security necessary for something good to happen because those good things require political decisions and agreements that *they* will have to make.

What will our military accomplish without the political/social solution that Iraq needs? All it can do is get in the way and/or take sides. Neither is acceptable because neither brings Iraq closer to success.

The violence in Iraq is a symptom of the overall problem, not a cause.

Mark: We can't isolate Iraq from outside influences, and it would be inhuman to just sit back and watch them kill each other. Again, do you know of any historical example where your approach has worked, or even been tried? Does it even have a name? If half the country hates us now, then how would we secure this perimeter, exactly, once we retreat and ensure that both halves hate us?

And how would such an approach in any way discourage our enemies or encourage our friends? Clinton already tried your strategy in Mogadishu, and Bin Laden said that our retreat there had encouraged him to attack us.

I don't see any coherent plan for foreign policy from the Left. Most seem to want to just run home and not worry about the consequences, like we did in Vietnam. You want to establish this impossible perimeter. Obama wants to attack Pakistan. No matter what silly plan the libs come up with, they'll all fall apart and degenerate into full retreat.

In fact, I seem to recall that Vietnam did start out as a full-scale retreat. I seem to recall that it started out with much the same rhetoric that we hear from libs today: We weren't surrendering; we were just turning the responsibility over to the South Vietnamese, where it belonged. We didn't directly tell them to go to hell, we just pretended that they could survive a full attack from the north, when we knew they couldn't.

The predictable result was to condemn million of Vietnamese to Communist hell, all thanks to those goodhearted and humanitarian American liberals. Everything they want know will produce exactly the same result: mass slaughter in Iraq, a reduction of American influence abroad, and a major victory for the jihadis.

Edit: "I seem to recall that Vietnam did NOT start out as a full-scale retreat."

BB: We can't isolate Iraq from outside influences, huh? How do you know that? What makes you so sure our current plan can succeed and a plan of isolation won't? How do you know? What's going on in Iraq is already inhuman. They're going to kill each other whether we're there or not! Our military is achieving reductions in violence, but that's no more to the point than the fact that a misbehaving child doesn't misbehave when the parent is watching.. only to start misbehaving again when the parent gets distracted by other duties or concerns. Do the moles in the whack-a-mole game stop coming up because you whack them?

Our enemies cannot be discouraged. They can only be killed. While we're killing them in the areas where they're significant (read: not Iraq) it would be helpful if we didn't breed future generations of terrorists as we've done a lot of already because of our failed strategy in Iraq.

You don't see any coherent plan for foreign policy from the Left? That's funny, because I see *no* plan for foreign policy from the neo-conservative Right. Neo-conservatives, who have been wrong time and time again about Iraq specifically and the Middle East in general, have *no* basis for pointing the finger at anyone but themselves.

"What makes you so sure our current plan can succeed and a plan of isolation won't?"

History, Mark. Again, what you're describing has never been tried. What we're doing now has been done before, and it has worked before. It hasn't worked every time, but it has worked.

"Our enemies cannot be discouraged."

But Mark, we have intercepted communications among Al Qaeda leaders showing their discouragement. Do they know that it's impossible for them to be discouraged?

"You don't see any coherent plan for foreign policy from the Left? That's funny, because I see *no* plan for foreign policy from the neo-conservative Right."

Here's a plan: Let's fight for our national interest. Let's make our enemies fear us and show our allies that they can trust us. Let's stick by the government that we helped create, and finish the job. Let's do whatever it takes to plant and maintain a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. And in the process, let's establish and maintain some bases near Iran to help contain its apocalyptic nutjob president who will soon have nukes, if he doesn't already.

"Our military is achieving reductions in violence, but that's no more to the point than the fact that a misbehaving child doesn't misbehave when the parent is watching.. only to start misbehaving again when the parent gets distracted by other duties or concerns. Do the moles in the whack-a-mole game stop coming up because you whack them?"

See, utopianism doesn't work any better in foreign policy than it does in domestic policy. There will never come a time of fuzzy bunnies and singing bluebirds in which we don't have to go whack the bad guys on the head.

And here's some more bad news: Even though the police caught some criminals yesterday, they'll still have to catch criminals today. And the forecast for tomorrow doesn't look so hot, either.

In other news, it turns out that even though you brushed your teeth yesterday, you still have to brush them today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. Some may view this as a complete failure of our dental policy, and they may demand that we stop brushing our teeth entirely until the government can prove to us that we will soon never again need to brush our teeth. But the rest of us should understand that life is full of unpleasant tasks that never end, and that fact is no reason to surrender and declare that life isn't worth living.

You utopians can go gnash your teeth and complain that the world isn't perfect yet. But I think that the rest of us are prepared to do whatever it takes to survive in an imperfect world.

BB: I'd say creating a democratic country out of and in the middle of Islamic extremists is something that hasn't been done before, either.

"But Mark, we have intercepted communications among Al Qaeda leaders showing their discouragement. Do they know that it's impossible for them to be discouraged?"

Is their purported discouragement resulting in a reduction in the threat they pose? Are they any less likely to attack or seek out the means with which to attack? No. That's the basic situation.. and that's not going to change until or unless there's fewer terrorists being born to replace the ones that are killed.

"Here's a plan: Let's fight for our national interest. Let's make our enemies fear us and show our allies that they can trust us. Let's stick by the government that we helped create, and finish the job. Let's do whatever it takes to plant and maintain a democracy in the heart of the Middle East. And in the process, let's establish and maintain some bases near Iran to help contain its apocalyptic nutjob president who will soon have nukes, if he doesn't already."

It doesn't matter if our enemies (terrorists) fear us. The danger they impose remains. Our friends would be more likely to trust us if we learned from our mistakes instead of repeated them. The rest of your plan, about doing whatever it takes to establish the kind of democracy we want, etc. is a neo-conservative pipe dream. Classical conservatism should have taught you the limits of government to create other successful governments in other countries, especially one as unique as Iraq. Those limits have made themselves perfectly clear and are staring us right in the face every day. *No* free country with free people was ever created without the will and consent of those people. There is no will or consent, and that's the primary problem.

As for the rest of your post; a long and boring diatribe about my purported "utopianism".. it couldn't be further off the mark. This isn't about "utopianism", this is about making the right decisions, about recognizing failures and learning from them, and about recognizing the reality that our current policy appears to ignore or reject. The violence in Iraq is, as I said earlier, a symptom of the real problem, not its cause. Treating the symptom in an effort to make the disease go away is wasteful and foolish. The host does not have a willing immune system to fight the disease on its own. This disease isn't going to go away anytime soon; soon enough for the military alone to be the primary treatment, which is why other options have to be seriously considered, planned for, and implemented.. the sooner the better.

I guess I figure that as long as we're willing to keep fighting, we can't lose. Our Islamist enemies are weak, poor, backwards, scattered, harried, and increasingly unpopular even among their ideological base. They're uneducated, nihilistic, ignorant, and largely delusional. Compared to the threat the pose if they remain unopposed, fighting them is cheap and easy. Despite the left's hysteria, there's just no reason not to fight the Islamofascists.

MW: Obviously we need to keep fighting them, but that was never seriously in question. The real questions here include where and how to fight them. Pursuing a nation-building strategy while also pursuing a "flypaper" strategy has proven to be counter-productive. It's time for a different approach.

Mark: I've always been extremely skeptical of "nation building" too, and one of the things I liked about Bush when he was running in 2000 was that he said he was against it. I guess I've changed my mind since then because I believe now that we're fighting against an virulent ideology that doesn't respect national borders (unlike the Cold War, say, which was ideological but much more Westphalian).

For some reason we're as a culture are unwilling to directly fight the Islamic ideology (thanks to "tolerance"), but we're really good at fighting Westphalian wars. That's our strength, apparently, and I figure we need to use it. One of the best ways to do that, with an ideological impact, is to create a Western-inspired democracy in the heart of Islam.

What's more, I think it's working. It took 12 years to rebuild Japan and Germany after WW2, so I don't see the recent few years as a sign that the strategy in Iraq isn't working. It takes time, and there will always be missteps. It's not the way I'd prefer to fight, but it's what our culture is capable of doing at the moment. I don't see any better alternatives with as high a chance of working.

MW: The people of Japan and Germany were more than willing to rebuild their nations and govern themselves justly after WW2, whereas the people of Iraq are more interested in settling sectarian scores than making a democracy work.. that's the key difference here and the key reason our current strategy isn't getting anywhere.

Without popular support, a democracy in Iraq will never occur and survive. The people of Iraq elected their current "leaders".. and those leaders aren't willing to work together, which is, logically, a representation of the wishes of the electorate. The disagreements and refusal to cooperate that takes place in the Iraqi "government" is a mirror for the violence and unrest taking place in the rest of the country.

We've given the Iraqis a "democracy".. and they're doing exactly what they see fit with it; fighting amongst themselves. How is that something we can hope to solve with our military as the primary tool?

MW: How does one directly fight the islamic ideology without at the same time attacking other monotheisms? In the end they all rely on appeal to the divine authority, which makes it a bit hard to argue with one without arguing with them all.

Mark: I agree, like I said what we're trying now isn't my ideal solution. I just think this is the best way our culture is currently capable of fighting theirs. It speaks poorly for our culture, in my humble opinion.

jez: C'mon, you know that's an easy question for me! The answer is simple: Islam is wrong, Christianity is right. Now ask me something hard :)

Oh yes, I was forgetting that!
But one of the things that defines America to me is that the state does not sponsor any particular religion. Is this strictly non-state, non-military fighting you're thinking of, something the culture or individuals should be doing? Should I be nailing an itemised list of my objections to the doors of a mosque? Should I be excluding devout muslims from my dinner parties? Should I insist that every muslim portrayed in hollywood be made a fool of? Should I somehow discourage islamic immigration?

Tell me, how intolerant I should be!

jez: It's not merely about religion. Do you think our culture and civilization is superior to the Wahhabi Muslim culture from which come most of our enemies?

Yes I do.
But I'm not sure how to sensible fight an ideology such as conservative Islam directly. Protestantism emerged from within christianity, and I think it was a necessary development for Western culture to become democratic and free. I've not got the expertise to judge whether a similar movement might grow from within Islam, but I'm fairly confident that it cannot be imposed from the West. I'm interested: what would you like to see us do? Is it an academic critique of conservative Islam you're after? Is it a more propagandist attempt to sour the hearts of Arabic populations towards their religion? Is it economic favouritism towards christian / secular governments?

jez: From what I've read, a reformation similar to Protestantism is impossible for Islam for various institutional reasons. I'm not sure what the best way to fight Islam is, but I do believe that we are in a cultural war. A good first step would be refusing to allow Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in America until they allow our missionaries to build churches in Saudi Arabia.

The term "cultural war" is a bit oxymoronic to me. I think it's possible to argue rationally for tolerance as practiced in the west without it being warlike. The fact that you can freely be an openly practicing muslim in America, but perhaps not a christian in certain arab lands, is a strong indicator that the Western way is better.