The Big Picture

...it's not pretty, but it's not yet finished.

In this poorly titled article (found via Miss O'Hara), American Thinker 'gets' much more about the current jihad than most people do, but misses a couple of points as well:

Conventional wisdom these days is rotten to the core. Every one of its articles of faith is at loggerheads with reality. It is grounded in the failed ideology of the left, which can neither solve a problem nor win an election but which still dominates the Democrat Party and most of our cultural, journalistic and political elites... The left has yet to assimilate the collapse of communism. People who didn’t learn anything when the Berlin wall came down aren’t likely to learn much from the destruction of the twin towers...

The most important example of this problem has to do with the ongoing war in Iraq which is responsible for most of the President’s political difficulties. Iraq poses a problem for the President only because conventional wisdom is holding his presidency hostage.

Iraq is not a political liability because there is or has ever been any realistic prospect of failure there. The “insurgency” has been a deadly nuisance, but it has never mounted a real challenge to us or to the government we are sponsoring. The mass hysteria of the left notwithstanding, the terrorists and dead-enders have never been poised to take over Iraq any more than ants have ever been poised to take over my kitchen.

Agreed. Totally.

People aren’t frustrated with Iraq because they accept the hysterical prophesies about doom and disaster there. They are frustrated because President Bush has failed to establish any clear link between what is happening in Iraq and our strategic goals in the absurdly misnamed Global War on Terror. (Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt proclaiming a Global War on Naval Aviation after Pearl Harbor.)

Despite the spot-on criticism of the name of the war, I think people have a somewhat wider variety of reasons for being "frustrated with Iraq".

The conventional understanding of how history unfolds is still fundamentally Marxist. Conventional wisdom views every human conflict as pitting oppressors against the oppressed. The oppressed struggle to throw off the oppressor’s yoke; the oppressors fight to keep that yoke firmly in place. Cultural factors such as religion are invisible. Religion is the opiate of the masses, mere cultural superstructure obscuring the material realities that shape societies and individuals. International law and the institutions that administer it are vital because they provide principled restraints on the oppressors.

This view of history makes both September 11 and the war that followed it utterly incomprehensible. The scum that turned passenger jets into cruise missiles and screamed about Allah as they crashed into their targets weren’t poor or oppressed. They weren’t protesting against neo-colonial exploitation of Middle Eastern oil wealth or globalization or anything else the conventional mind might understand.

They were self-consciously opening a new offensive in the 1370 year old war between Islam and the unbelievers... They didn’t do this out of desperation. They did it because they believed, with considerable justification, that the West is no longer Christian enough or tough enough to resist Islamic competition.

If we cannot convince the Islamic world that they grossly underestimated us, the offensive they began may very well lead to the destruction of our civilization. As long as the Islamic world sees no reason to fear us Muslims will attack us and, when they acquire the means to do so, they will destroy us.

Scary thoughts, but probably correct.

Throughout the 2004 election campaign (Bush) hammered the theme that the example of a prosperous, democratic Iraq would transform the Middle East from a hot bed of implacable enemies into a place that poses no special threat to the United States. This is what he meant to convey when he talked about the “forward strategy of freedom.”

The idea that we can turn enemies into friends by introducing them to the joy of free elections and backyard barbeques is dangerously naïve. The foundation of that idea is pure conventional idiocy. It assumes that our difficulty with Islam arose because Middle Eastern Muslims see us cooperating with their autocratic governments to oppress them. It supposes that we can solve that difficulty by rejecting the oppressors and bringing relief to the oppressed.

However, that idea may at least be useful to the extent that:

1. it demonstrates to the mullahs' potential minions an attractive alternative to suicide,
2. it shows that "the West" - i.e. America and its real allies - are committed to that ideal, and
   
3. it helps "convince the Islamic world that they grossly underestimated us".

Our enemies in the Middle East don’t hate us because their politics are autocratic and they don’t hate us because they are poor. The roots of their hatred are invisible to conventional eyes because they are theological.

Christendom and Islam have been bitter enemies since the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 A.D. In all that time, hardly a century has gone by without some major bloodletting between Christians and Muslims. Equally bloody conflict has been been the experience of other neighbors of the dar al Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, animists, and others. Expansionist Islam has battered the borders of Christendom whenever it has had the means to do so. In our own time, oil revenue has given it the means.

Muslims attack us because they can. That won’t change anytime soon, regardless of what happens in Iraq over the course of the next few decades. Doing what we can to help Iraq become freer, more prosperous and more peaceful is noble and probably worthwhile. Claiming that renovating Iraq is a sufficient answer to the challenge of September 11 is delusional.

I don't remember anyone claiming it is a sufficient answer, but it is a much more achievable answer than immediately plunging into yet another Crusade. (I'll admit it might eventually become something like a crusade, but just how much support would that have had?)

The Iranians apparently believe that their proxies in Iraq have us fully occupied and that we lack the will to shift our focus eastward. Why wouldn’t they? They have goaded us by openly sponsoring and supplying the “insurgency” that has murdered so many Iraqis and Americans. So far our leaders haven’t even mustered the courage to issue a strongly worded protest.

On the home front, our most influential newspapers are acting as Al Qaeda’s intelligence service and the Bush administration is too flaccid to stop them or even punish them. Prominent Democrats agitate for a “redeployment” that would prevent our troops from killing terrorists at the same time it would encourage terrorists to kill us. Nobody in the Bush administration is willing to point out that this is either treasonous or drooling stupid...

George W. Bush tried to fight a war that even the conventional left could love. Predictably, he satisfied almost nobody. The next time Republicans go to the well to select a leader for the nation they need to find somebody with the independence of mind, and the courage, to give the editorial page of the New York Times precisely the attention it deserves. This is the essential prerequisite for both political success and successful policy...

For better or worse, Republicans are stuck with the burdens of power because the Democrats are stuck on stupid trying to win American elections as the anti-American party.