Chris At Home

Iraq has mostly slid off the radar screens of bloggers these days, eclipsed by the Lebanese drama. Here's a summary (no links necessary; nothing has changed in months):
-Sunnis bombed Shiites
-Shiites bombed Sunnis
-Iran is providing weapons and support
-Baghdad is still a mess

Some views on the war:
Powerline notes that the murder rate in Iraq is only 4X higher than Washington D.C.'s peak murder rate. While awful, this doesn't point to a civil war. If you compare to civil wars in other countries, the number of deaths per year is very low.

RWN is unhappy. He calls for either more troops to control the insurgency or the courage to get out of the country, while blaming Iran and Syria for instigation.

This post explains the situation very well. We would like Iraq stable, which required cutting off the terrorists. We would like Lebanon to be a stable democracy and return to the Cedar Revolution path of development. But what is our overarching strategic goal? Stealing a long quote from Dean's post:

[T]he Korean War was not a total war, and a complete victory was not its goal. Korea was fought as a political war for political goals: initially to insure that the boundary at the 38th parallel would be maintained. (That policy was later changed to complete unification, but without success.) It was a limited goal and clearly within the framework of Truman's overall foreign-policy strategy. Korea was not the only factor Truman had to consider. It must be kept in mind that Truman's first priorities lay in Europe where the principle enemy was the Soviet Union — not Korea or China. He was much more concerned with building up the defenses in Western Europe and maintaining a cohesive NATO alliance. Being an ardent "Asia-firster", MacArthur was convinced that Communist China was the real enemy of the Western world, and the force behind the North Korean aggression. ... MacArthur did not seem to appreciate the fact that military factors had to subordinated to political considerations with which he did not agree. He publicly propagated policies that were directly opposed to Truman's. MacArthur advocated a four-point program that would have escalated the war and actively involved Communist China. His policy advocated a naval blockade of Communist China, unrestricted air and naval bombardment of Chinese military and industrial capacity, deployment of troops from Formosa, and removal of all restrictions on the Nationalist Chinese troops to engage in diversionary attacks on the Chinese Mainland. His policies stressed the military factors which completely overshadowed the political implications so vital to Truman. The idea of a limited war was anathema to MacArthur's military mind. On this matter, he did not mince his words: "War never before in the history of the world has been applied piecemeal . . . that you wage half-war and not whole war is appeasement." MacArthur clearly did not or refused to understand that the limited war concept was specifically implemented to insure that the war did not escalate militarily to involve China and the Soviet Union in massive ground actions in Korea.

He points out that Europe built its defenses, South Korea prospered, North Korea is a basket case. Was Truman's approach correct? Yes. MacArthur was wrong. Are we (pro-war bloggers) making MacArthur's mistake? Possibly.

What is the top strategic goal of the US? Keeping the oil flowing is my best guess. This requires stability, not idealistic goals. I would love to destroy Iran and Syria, revamp Pakistan, a total war on terrorists in Iraq and Lebanon. Would this bring stability and keep the oil flowing? Sadly, no. The likely outcome would be years or decades of Baghdad-style violence in each of those countries, sabotage of oil fields and refineries, more support for radicals. We can't attack every country in the Middle East and install pro-American regimes but that is what we would have to do to stop terrorism in the countries that we attacked.

It makes me yearn for the good old days of pliant dictators in a Kissinger-esque realist foreign policy. Too bad the Saudi Wahabbis chose to spread Islamism around the world, Saddam attacked Kuwait and developed WMDs, the Shah arrested and tortured too many dissidents, Pakistan decided to use Islamism as a weapon against India.

More on our strategic goals:

When the war began in the autumn of 2001, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair agreed that they would not wage it against the one billion Muslims in the world. Only a tiny fraction of Muslims are combatants; so why wage war on all of them if one can avoid it? Their strategy was to modernize the Muslim world. They would catalyze this reform process by removing or discrediting the most visible “bad” Muslims, the ones that were either inspiring or financing the tiny minority of troublemakers. Wars would be necessary in Afghanistan and Iraq; it was hoped that persuasion would work most everywhere else.

As an initial strategy, this seems like the wise choice. After all, sensible Muslims would stand a much better chance of eliminating the Islamo-fascists among them than would Westerners. As a first choice, it seems sensible to enlist them as allies, rather than go to war with them as one billion enemies.

Who are the bad Muslims? The imams in Western mosques preaching hate and Jihad? Hezbullah, Hamas and Fatah? The Baathists in Syria and the mad mullahs of Tehran? The ISS in Pakistan (which build the Taliban and supports terror attacks in India)? The Saudi princes who fund terrorists and export Wahbbi beliefs? Sadr and the other sectarian leaders in Iraq? The Islamists in Darfur and Somalia? All of the above? When will they be "removed or discredited"?

More on our inability to comprehend the enemy:

A half-decade after the definitive announcement of Islamism’s war upon us, we have seen the West (in which we must include Israel) engage in five major campaigns in riposte:
In Iraq.
In Afghanistan.
In Lebanon.
In “Palestine.”
In the banlieus and ethnic neighborhoods of its own cities.

Not one of them is won, nor even close to being won. This is something astonishing, especially with five years’ time to win at least one, and the superior resources and technology of the West to draw upon. Victor Davis Hanson has something of a cottage industry in his exposition of the superiority of the “Western way of war,” and the concurrent proposition that a democratic people once aroused will seek (and generally achieve) annihilation of the foe. There is much to recommend his thesis — but in the absence of the very capacity for moral provocation within a democratic people, it tells us little about our present state. The lesson of our failure to win in this half-decade of war, of which the Israeli failure against Hezbollah is merely the latest example, is that that capacity, if not wholly gone, is severely crippled.

In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question. See Andrew Sullivan for a shining example of this self-contradictory foolishness; or worse, see the President of the United States on Islam. Mark Steyn noted it well: these days, when Muslims slaughter our own, the political leaders of the victims generally rush to a mosque to make friendly overtures. We are assured that “real” faith does not do awful things, nor encourage them, nor give succor to those who do: and in the very hour of grief, as the bodies are lifted, or unearthed, or scraped, from the scene of the latest horror, that is what we must remember. We are not to believe the perpetrators, nor their sympathizers, nor the Palestinians celebrating the news of thousands dead in New York City. The true interpreters of Islam are not Muslims themselves — though they certainly deserve that basic respect — instead, we must listen to John Esposito, Juan Cole, Karen Armstrong, and George W. Bush.

Ben Stein on lack of will:

I keep thinking, again, that if Israel, with its back to the sea, cannot muster the will to fight in a big way, then the fat, faraway U.S.A. will never be able to do it. I keep saying this and it terrifies me.

We’re in a war with people who want to kill us all and wreck our civilization. They’re taking it very seriously. We, on the other hand, are worrying about leveraged buyouts and special dividends and how much junk debt the newly formed private entity can support before we sell it to the ultimate sucker, the public shareholder.

As an engineer, I am accustomed to problems with no obvious solution. One tactic that works sometimes is to attack pieces of the problem until an overall strategy can be found. At the moment, the West is floundering but not even trying to attack pieces of the Islamist issue. We are at stalemate at home and abroad, but Iran's nukes are getting closer and closer.

Update: fixed typo in Powerline cite.