hold on to your hats folks ...
i think this is what they call "fisking." Lee at Right Thinking from the Left Coast lauds Stephen Den Beste's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, Why We Won't Back Down. I so disagreed with the paragraphs that Lee quotes that I took a look at the whole piece. And, well, here is the result: [DenBeste in italics]
Opponents of American foreign policy in Iraq are attempting to focus the entire debate on one small and extremely unimportant event. They're trying to claim that the inclusion of one specific sentence in this year's State of the Union address is the total political issue, and since that sentence appears to have been based on faulty intelligence, they are trying to claim that this somehow shakes the entire foundation of the case for war.
(1) As argued and elucidated here and by many others more educated and informed than I, the “one specific sentence” is not the “total political issue.” The issue is that this one sentence brings into sharp relief the question of whether the administration was dishonest with Congress and US citizenry about the need to launch a preemptive war.
(2) I have yet to hear anyone claim that faulty intelligence “shakes the entire foundation of the case for war.” I have heard folks claim that they question the urgency of the war and/or the need for a pre-emptive strike. I have heard folks claim that there were plenty of humanitarian reasons for going after Sadaam’s regime. What I have heard folks say is that faulty intelligence shakes the administration’s case for war as it was presented to the world.
In fact, the real reason we went into Iraq was precisely to "nation build": to create a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation. To create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy and successful and not ruled by corrupt monarchs or brutal dictators. This would demonstrate to the other people in the Arab and Muslim worlds that they can succeed, but only if they abandon those political, cultural and religious chains that are holding them back.
Well, for the sake of argument, let’s just grant for the moment that this was indeed the “real” reason. In light of all the post “victory” operational challenges on the ground in Iraq, I fail to see how this makes the administration any less culpable. If we grant that the goal was to “create a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation,” then why on earth was the administration in such an all-fired hurry to invade? Why couldn’t they take the time to do the serious, in-depth analysis of what would be needed the instant shooting stopped in order to lay a solid foundation for a stable post-Sadaam transition. Why weren’t they prepared for civil unrest?Why were they so woefully unable to restore even basic services to the Iraqi people?
And, quite frankly, I can’t think of a person in the world who, if their goal was, “to create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy and successful and not ruled by corrupt monarchs or brutal dictators,” would choose the US military to achieve this goal. An occupation by the United States military is supposed “to create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy?” Can you even propose that with a straight face? If that was the goal, the administration should have taken the time and the care to ensure that there were thousands of civil support personnel mobilized and ready to move into Iraq as soon as the military was in control there.
Finally, the sentence, “This would demonstrate to the other people in the Arab and Muslim worlds that they can succeed, but only if they abandon those political, cultural and religious chains that are holding them back” is so dripping in racist and Eurocentric assumptions that the author should be embarrassed to have given us this ugly glimpse of his true worldview.
We are not doing this out of altruism. We are not trying to give them a liberalized Western democracy because we're evangelistic liberal democrats (with both liberal and democrat taking historical meanings). We are bringing reform to Iraq out of narrow self-interest. We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us.
Once again, I will concede the point about our motivations, for the moment, in order to make another. If one’s goal is “to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us,” then I will again point out that making a civilian population angry and fearful and withholding their autonomy is clearly counterproductive.
So why did George W. Bush and Tony Blair, in making the case for war, put so much emphasis on U.N. resolutions and weapons of mass destruction? Honesty and plain speaking are not virtues for politicians and diplomats.
The latter statement is so galling and reflects a world-view so fundamentally different than mine that I hardly know where to start.The assumption that the citizens of two of the oldest and most successful democracies on the planet are to be lied to and manipulated as a matter of course is fundamentally incompatible with the principles upon which are nation was founded.[Where the hell is that Jefferson quote when I need it?]
If either Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair had said what I did, it would have hit the fan big-time. Making clear a year ago that this was our true agenda would have virtually guaranteed that it would fail. Among other things, it would have caused all of the brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs in the region to unite with Saddam against us, and would have made the invasion impossible. But now the die is cast, and said brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs no longer have the ability to stop the future. Now this is an interesting point. Even if one agreed that it was wrong to lie to/manipulate the US and UK citizenry with regard to the need to attack Iraq, I can see that being “honest” about motives in this way would not play well in the international arena. And that highlights another fundamental difference in assumptions between the author and those on the left. Bush-era Cheap Labor conservatives have little or no regard for the court of world opinion or, indeed, in having the US be a good global citizen at all. Our way or the highway. We hold ourselves above the law, and above any common global principles of international good conduct. One can be sure our founding citizens would not approve. Again this attitude is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals of Western democracy. Rather it is the kind of attitude one associates with totalitarian and fascist regimes.
But does America have the stamina to finish the job? Yes. This kind of thing takes on momentum. Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a platform that essentially opposed the war in Vietnam. (The catch phrase was "Peace with honor.") But we fought for several more years before finally giving up.
I will only say that, at this juncture, it would seem unwise for an ally of the Bush regime to refer to Nixon within one paragraph of the sitting president. One wouldn’t want to draw unflattering parallels, would one?
Whenever Mr. Bush leaves office, whether in 2005 or 2009, whoever follows him will face a situation in which he'd take far more political heat for pulling out with the job half done than for continuing the process. There's another year and a half in Mr. Bush's current term, and by the end of it, the process will either be a complete shambles or else it will clearly be on the road to success, and I think it's unlikely to be a shambles.
Well. On that last point, we will have to agree to disagree, Mr. Den Beste.
Mistakes will get made, and there will be problems. We're going to be making a lot of this up as we go. But if there's anything you should know about Americans by now, it's that we're problem solvers. Americans have gained a reputation elsewhere for being flighty, mercurial; there's some truth to that, but it's also true that we can stick with things for decades if we think it's worthwhile. We stuck with the occupations of Germany and Japan for 50 years. I feel confident we'll stick with this, too.
Ummm … somehow the suggestion that we may be occupying Iraq for decades is not reassuring.
Much of the reputation we've gained in the world comes from how we act when we're not challenged. There's steel in us, too, but we don't show it much. It only really comes out in war, and when we've been at peace for several decades there's a tendency to think that we used to have that kind of steel, but that we don't any longer. That's wrong, and every generation the world learns that anew. Going into World War II, many in Europe said that Americans used to be willing to fight back in the days of Lincoln but had become decadent and soft. History proves otherwise, of course. That steel is still there, it's just that we don't feel any need to show it when it isn't needed. But when the issues are sufficiently important to us, we'll still make major sacrifices.
The memory of 9/11 runs deep. I'm becoming convinced that few in Europe truly understand just what that really meant to us, the anger and the hatred it raised. It's not the kind of thing we get over. We're not going to forget it.
Reading the above 3 paragraphs makes me feel like Mr. Den Beste and I live in different countries. [And if he writes for the WSJ, it appears we probably both live in the blue.] Certainly there are folks who feel the way he describes.No disputing that. But there are plenty of other red blooded ‘mericuns who – on a gut level – feel differently than this.9/11 did not evoke hatred in me. Anger, yes. Fear, yes. A need to better understand and re-engage with the world, yes. But I think there are plenty of folks who understand that hate begets hate and violence begets violence. Particularly if it is misdirected.[Anyone found that Al’Qaeda/Sadaam link yet?]
We haven't forgotten Pearl Harbor, either. That doesn't mean we consider Japan an enemy, but it does mean that we did what we needed to in order to make sure Japan would never do anything like that to us again. When we truly decide to solve a problem, we try to solve it permanently.
And we're not going to forget 9/11. On some level or another, it's going to be a major political issue here for the next few decades, until we're convinced that the danger is gone. Arab extremism is no longer something that happens a long ways away and that we can ignore, so we aren't going to. It is their problem, but 9/11 made it ours. Now we'll solve it.
In order to remove the danger to us that Japan represented, it had to be reformed. So that's what happened. Now we're going to try to do the same to the Arabs. And we'll do whatever we need to in order to make sure nothing like 9/11 happens again. We're not fundamentally cruel, and if we can we'd like to solve this for everyone's benefit. Japan is a better place now than it was before World War II. So is Germany. I hope that the Arab and Islamic nations will be better, too.
But the one thing we're not going to do is to surrender. We'll try to solve this as humanely as we can, but solve it we must, and I believe that this nation will do whatever it needs to in order to remove the danger facing it. If an American city gets nuked by a terrorist, things are going to get extremely ugly. So even America-haters in Europe had better hope that this works, because the alternative is much worse. (Which is a really good reason why they'd also better stop trying to make it fail.)
Again, I am deeply chilled by the above paragraphs. The across-the-board lumping of the entire Arab and Islamic world as a problem and one that is ours to fix.:Shudder: The casual and comfortable acceptance of the role of Imperial Dictator for the USA. I don’t know whether Den Beste sees the US more as Dirty Harry, Julius Caeser, or Don Corleone but I am not sure the majority of US citizens want any of those jobs.
The remainder of Den Beste’s piece can be found here. It is offers the usual critique of the Democrats and a final bit of John Wayne rhetoric. Looking forward to hearing what you think.
[re-formatted at 7:15 pm and again at 7:22 for ease of reading]
6:44:19 PM 
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