Here is the
essay by conservative icon Bill Buckley in National Review that has gotten some
war hawks agitated, but not enough to call for charges of sedition by rabid war
hawks, as they did when the DNC’s Howard Dean suggested as much in December.
kwc
It Didn’t Work
Wm.
F. Buckley, National Review, Feb. 24, 2006
"I can tell you the main reason behind all
our woes — it is America." The New York
Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a
Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and
Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that
the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow
of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the
American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred
Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge.
He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being
attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by
an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for
civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but
they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the
shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that
Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And
so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the
Americans.
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against
Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are
"Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously
cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to
keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.
A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to
cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people,
whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to
get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious
freedom.
The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in
training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on
violence.
This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with
failure. It
can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the
postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa,
and in much of Asia.
The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and
antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the
question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the
absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler)
which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned
American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't
work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be
to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not
entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of
concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies
he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to
persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing
basic commitments in foreign policy.
He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected
to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on
the survival of strategic policies.
Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the
kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.p?ref=/buckley/buckley200602241451.asp
