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From our Unfortunate Analogy desk
The neo-con blogger formerly known as Will Franklin bravely answer's WizBang's challenge to envision how things might have been had Bush not invaded Iraq, and Franklin comes up with this beauty:The Bush Doctrine is an Alka Seltzer tablet tossed into the gurgling cauldron of resentment that is the Middle East. It fizzes and snaps and crackles and pops, then, suddenly, the acid is neutralized. Going into the war on terror was never supposed to be easy.
This nifty little analogy also works with Preparation H suppositories. Suddenly, the raw, throbbing veins of Islamofascism magically shrink, allowing for the free movement of oil.
I'l like to see those who opposed the war from the start write more about how the war on terror would look if Bush and his pals didn't lie us into invading Iraq. What would Saddam be doing today if his country wasn't occupied? Would he still be in power, rattling sabers? Would Syria still be in Lebanon? Would the Dixie Chicks be welcomed in Opry Land?
Eric at TIA accepted the challenge, and rightly points out that the US was riding a wave of international support and sympathy after 9/11, and enjoyed wide support for the invasion and subsequent liberation of Aghanistan. But all that was squandered when Bush decided to invade Iraq, a country with no WMDs and no known ties to Islamofascist idealogy that spawned The War Against Terror.
For the most part, the "What If?" game is meaningless. History is driven more by chance events than in a straight march toward some defined objective. Saddam post 9/11 could have been murdered, exiled, put on trial by his own people, or perhaps had a Khadaffi-like epiphany ending in cultural exchanges with the US. But when addressing Bush's ruinous invasion of Iraq, What If? gives liberals an opportunity to nail down a vision of how the US should relate to the Islamic world, both the megalomaniac rulers and the oppressed street. Bush convinced the American people to support his war because he had a vision. A flawed, ingnorant, asinine vision that depended on foreigners acting like Americans, but a vision none the less. Liberals (and some conservatives like Pat Buchanan), could only point to the status quo. But nobody in their right could support the status quo, because it involved maddrasses, Saddam's rape rooms, and wealthy Muslims funneling a fortune to "charities" that were no more than fronts for terrorist organizations. In a war overflowing with ironies, the supreme irony is the "liberal" position for avoiding war in Iraq was really conservative, in that it relied on the validity of the status quo.
It wasn't just liberals in denial about the sleazy status quo. Every American administration, going back to FDR, really, traded human freedom for cheap oil. What really pisses off the middle easterners is the American duplicity of talking about freedom, and advancing it where possible, while supporting tyrants. I wonder if Al Qaeda would even exist if American administrations stopped pretending to be pro-freedom, and just openly announced we're only in it for the oil. Everyone already knows.
Bush and the neo-cons saw an opening: profess to change the status quo. Not only would it get the base excited, affirming such magical thinking as American exceptionalism, but it would put the Democrats on the defensive. Without an alternate plan, running against the Iraq War is perceived the same as affirming the status quo. It worked. Democrats now have no choice but to support the war. Not doing so casts them as traitors, cowards, or worse, anti-military.
So where do Democrats go from here? I have my doubts about setting a timetable for withdrawal. It would let the enemy, whoever that is, wait until the 11th hour to mount a major offensive, thus creating the appearance of a military victory over the Great Satan. Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc. At the same time, Bush has to do better than tell us the war will be over when it's over. How about a list of achievable goals, and a timetable for achieving those goals, sort of like what they teach in MBA school? There's an opening for the Democrats, who probably have a few MBAs in their ranks. Develop metrics that don't involve number of insurgents killed. This has never been a war of attrition, and with a major infusion of additional US troops, we'll never be able to hold all the territory we take. But we can still develop metrics: 200,000 trained Iraqi security personnel, electricity that works 24/7. There's plenty more. The goal is not to recreate Eden, since that's up to the Iraqis. It's to reassure the Islamic world that we don't plan to make Iraq our 52nd state.
They already think Israel is the 51st.
5.7.05 20:42