Friday, July 28, 2006
Strange New Respect
"Strange new respect" is of course the formula of praise with which the big media welcome any conservative who veers leftward. As in: "When Senator Joe Jones arrived in Washington, he was widely regarded as a wild-eyed ideologue. But as he has worked to support [fill in name of liberal sacred cow here], many have come to view him with a strange new respect."
Since I posted this item below, I've been receiving the blogosphere equivalent of that notorious strange new respect. Of course, it isn't literally "respect." The blogosphere (and especially its left-hand side) does not traffic much in the little courtesies of life. Indeed one blogger cites the article and then recommends I shoot myself. And I thought the left opposed gun violence.
The truly strange thing, though, is to read that has one "endorsed" an option that one has oneself labeled "second best." I thought the option I was endorsing was the one I called "best": (1) Reinforce Baghdad with additional troops from outside Iraq; (2) Seek out and defeat the militias that have rampaged through the city since July 9. To achieve that aim, it is essential (3) to ecognize that the Shiite militias are sponsored and supported by Iran and to respond accordingly by (4) supporting anti-regime forces against Iran, and (5) allowing Israel to break the power of Iran's tool, Hezbollah, and (6) continuing to build a broad international coalition to deny Iran a nuclear weapon by force if necessary.
There's more that can be said along these lines, but let's pause there for now.
But then arose this question: What if the Bush administration does not do those things or anything like them? When the new Baghdad security plan was announced, it quickly became apparent that the number of troops to be deployed to Baghdad would be small - "hundreds not thousands" was the phrase we heard from DoD - and that they would come from inside Iraq not outside.
The observation of Peter Galbraith's I most strongly agreed with was his observation that the current methods cannot achieve the current mission. I support the mission. But I also can see that the administration is not planning on changing its methods. I wish it would. I coauthored a book proposing some very different methods. But here we are, and the disparity between what we want and what we are doing is reaching a crisis point.
Galbraith proposed one solution: not a withrawal from Iraq, as proposed by John Murtha, John Kerry, and others, but a concentration of US forces on the part of Iraq where the US mission has succeeded. From there, the US could strike when needed at terrorist forces elsewhere in Iraq. It's not the formal partition of the country that Galbraith has suggested before, but a step back from direct involvement in the sectarian conflict which the US does not seem able or willing to end - and a staging area for more direct involvement at a propitious time.
It would be better to fight for the whole country. The president insists he will, and it's still not too late. But someday, traveling the present course, it will be too late. And then we'll need to do something else. And if it's not to be the Murtha/Kerry plan of accepting the complete loss of Iraq to warring terrorists and predatory neighbors, we're going to need some new ideas.
And, with respect to my friends on the left-hand side - not strange respect or new respect, but just respect - seeing the problems in Iraq as above all an opportunity for ventilating domestic political passions is neither a new idea nor a good one.
07/28 08:43 AM
