Via the itinerant Bill Ardolino, who spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and whose book will hopefully be out soon), Bill Kristol says give war a chance:
We’re at war. We need to succeed in that war. By all means, be generous with the constructive criticism. (For example, it seems ridiculous for the United States not to be arming the Libyan opposition.) Note for the historical record the Oba…ma administration’s dithering and double-talk. But don’t carp and cavil in ways that suggest America can’t prevail, or that America shouldn’t prevail. Don’t revel in every administration misstep. Don’t chortle at every misstatement. Don’t exacerbate the administration’s failure to build domestic support for the mission. Put the mission, and the country, first.Which means, to some extent, that we might consider biting our collective tongues, wishing the president well because he is our president, and helping him get it right rather than pointing with glee to everything he’s doing wrong. Which in turn means that we might want to cool it with the 24/7 criticism. Let’s support our troops and their mission, and give the war a chance–even though it’s a war that’s not being perfectly conducted by an administration that offers plenty of cause for frustration.
You go to war with the president you have. This isn’t the one we conservatives preferred. We have a good chance to remove him in 2012. We should work to do so. But first let’s remove Qaddafi, help get Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen right, and–who knows?–despite our reluctant president, push the administration to have the backs of those fighting for regime change in Syria and Iran.
It’s sort of funny, in a beautiful way, to see the neocon dream coming true only a short while after it had been widely written off as a fever-swamp imperialist fantasy. In 2006-7, few would have believed in just a few years the Mideast would be in the grip of fervent, massive grassroots democratic revolts across the region. And it’s good to see honest pro-freedom ideologues like the much-maligned Kristol are backing Obama’s actions and telling righties to keep criticisms constructive rather than opportunistically partisan.
Comments
12 responses to “Mideast Freedom: From Fever to Fervor”
Excuse me for a minute, I just got sick after reading this account of Herr Kristol’s give war a chance screed.
Does he have a memory? From the Wiki article on Operation Cyclone:
“U.S. support for the native Afghan mujahideen contributed to the radical Islamization of Afghanistan as well as the weakening and near-disintegration of the Afghan state, which ultimately led to the Taliban takeover of most of the country in 1996.”
Ah, didn’t Osama bin Laden have a hand in that?
Let’s get Ollie North off the talk circuit and back in action. Maybe he can arrange a secret arms deal for the Al-Qaeda operatives working to turn Libya into the next Afghanistan or Somali like training ground for terrorists and pirates. After he helped get them started in the first place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone
I ain’t buying it.
He sets up a nice strawman to look all bipartisany and stuff.
Most of the criticism has been along the lines of “What the hell are we doing? What are the goals? Who are our allies? How is that legal?”
And all we’ve got in return are doublespeak and blatant lies.
We have an open-ended committment (we’ll be there for years or we’ll leave while declaring victory but accepting defeat) and the president said we’d be there for “days not weeks”.
Criticizing Obama for what he does is not the same as viciously attacking Bush for some fevered “community based reality” fantasy.
Frank,
But that’s sort of like arguing that the U.S. shouldn’t have intervened in Europe in WW II because it led to the Communist takeover in Eastern Europe.
The proper lesson from Operation Cyclone isn’t that a Communist takeover is better than an Islamist one, it’s that democratic values and institutions require more than a few Stingers to develop and we need to be more engaged, not less.
Remember, the situation in Afghanistan didn’t develop in a vacuum — the Pakistani ISI and Saudi oil money were the major factors in the Taliban’s rise, much more that any particular indigenous love for theocratic repression. The triumph of evil requires only that good men do nothing,
If I were young I might be convinced this is a good course; but I am getting old and I have seen good intentions spawn corrupt, and abusive power too many times to be anything but wary. Professional protesters and radicals are sure to love it.
http://euobserver.com/9/32064
Finally, some proof that Barack Obama is a NeoCon trapped in a liberal’s body!
I’m wondering whether there are any implications for Frank Rizzo’s definition of a conservative as “a liberal who’s just been mugged.”
🙂
Going after bin Laden, or trouncing Saddam because we were convinced he had WMD’s, is one thing. But an open ended war throughout the Middle East is nuts. Expanding into Libya or anywhere else is out of the question without a proven risk to this country or our vital interests.
This is oh so reminiscent of our entry into the VietNam War. I will never forget listening to Lyndon Johnson give a political speech outdoors before thousands of people in downtown Reno, Nevada in the fall of 1964. Snipers on the roofs, and that SOB telling everyone that “no mother’s son will trudge through the jungles of Vietnam doing the job of Asian boys” all the while planning otherwise.
There’s a weekly “peace vigil” in a town near me.
The people are usually the same crowd of old hippies, & school teachers, with a few monks from the monastery near by. But last week driving past I saw a white haired couple off to one side holding a small banner that said: “My Grandson’s Life Isn’t Worth One Raghead’s – End Obama’s Wars”
Passing cars were honking in support.
This crap has gone on long enough. And our country is broke.
Our entry into Vietnam wasn’t the mistake, the exit was.
If we hadn’t fought in Vietnam, Thailand would probably have gone Communist, perhaps along with Malaysia or even the Philippines, and the horror might have claimed tens of millions more. Had we intervened in China, tens of millions across Asia that did perish might have been saved.
Of course, the “open-ended war” against Communism has pretty much ended today.
Dave, I don’t think we could have (politically OR practically) intervened in China, but I otherwise agree with you.
UN PRESIDENT TIM KALEMKARIAN, US PRESIDENT TIM KALEMKARIAN, US SENATE TIM KALEMKARIAN, US HOUSE TIM KALEMKARIAN: BEST MAJOR CANDIDATE.
Politically it might have been a tough sell before 1950, but keep in mind the Chinese civil war spanned three decades — we only really became engaged after the start of the Korean War, after which point we prevented the PRC from invading Taiwan (the Formosa Resolution). China went Communist due to the dedicated efforts of the USSR and the relative indifference of the USA. U.S. air power could have at least kept a larger portion of China free than just Taiwan.
Remember, during this period we sent massive military aid — to the USSR, which was also dismantling and appropriating the Manchurian industrial base. At one point 2/3 of the 6-wheeled Soviet infantry trucks in service were built in the U.S.
The reality is FDR was badly misled by leftist advisers into believing much of what Communism claimed about itself. In terms of the number of lives affected, failing to intervene sooner and more extensively in China was perhaps the biggest mistake in our country’s history.
Tall Dave:
It isn’t that it would have been nice to do all the things you mention, from stopping communism in China, to helping install democracy in the Middle East now. It’s that you must pick what is possible given available resources, and choose what is in our national interest.
I strongly believe it is in our interest to defend Israel. The reasons are many:
1. It is a modern democracy.
2. It is an ally.
3. It is home to millions of displaced people who fled from prejudice and Holocaust.
4. We share a common Western cultural heritage.
5. We have a large Jewish population in this country which is part of our fabric, and Israel is THEIR heritage. We would be letting millions of our own citizens down by not defending the fountainhead of their culture, and the current home of their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and the sites they have held sacred for over 2000 years.
6. As Ayn Rand, an atheist Russian Jew herself, said years ago, Israel is a tiny beach-head of freedom on the frontier facing 7th century tribal barbarians. She viewed it as an outpost worth defending. It is very much like divided Berlin. The joy of living is so apparent in Israel, that the religion of death surrounding it can’t stand the proximity.
Now, give me one God Damned reason that it is in our national interest to defend the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaida, or any of the other groups fomenting violence and government overthrow in that region. The leaders of most of those countries have been educated in the West, including Moammar Gadhafi, the Saudi royal family, etc. and they continue to embrace a backward religion and culture of death. In fact the Saudis are spreading it worldwide with our oil money. They have all been exposed to Western culture, and have rejected it. Invading their countries in some vane hope of installing democracy is useless.
It is a quixotic quest.
All good points Frank. My answer is that there is only one process by which all these pathologies can be remediated, and its name is liberal democracy. Anywhere we see its green shoots, we need to be there to shelter and nurture them from those who would trample the rights of free people.
It may seem quixotic, but many said the same about rewriting the constitutions of Japan or Germany. Now we are seeing people rise up across the Mideast, and the great mass of them are not seeking theocratic death cults, but the basic freedoms we take for granted.