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| Iraq |
| Derbyshire: "Apologizing for Iraq -- allow me to eat crow" |
| 2006-06-13 |
One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left. As it is, the shock value has all been frittered away. Far from being seen as a nation willing to act resolutely, a nation that knows how to punish our enemies, a nation that can smash one of those ramshackle Mideast despotisms with one blow from our mailed fist, a nation to be feared and respected, we are perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by teenagers with homemade bombs—that lets crooks and bandits tie it down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail, trickery, lies, and petty violence. Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his honest answer be? We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It's not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it's not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson. Read the whole thing. Agree, disagree, Rantburgers? |
| Posted by:Jerert Uleter5090 |
| #13 Now, now. John Derbyshire isn't half-bad. Prime Obsession is a great book! |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2006-06-13 22:54 |
| #12 Derb is and always was a nutter. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-06-13 20:45 |
| #11 Derb is a nutter. |
| Posted by: JSU 2006-06-13 20:32 |
| #10 I have gotten VERY tired of the so-called conservatives (I don't know if Derbyshire is among them) who simultaneously decry the current administration as imperialist while at the same time decrying them as incompetents for not following the standard imperialist doctrine of setting up a minority government as tyrranical tribute farmers and leaving. The idea that just because we can't be 1820's Agrarian Virginia we must therefore be The Conquering Romans Raping Thrace Thrice is to me not just a bad idea, but potentially a disastrous one. |
| Posted by: Phil 2006-06-13 14:18 |
| #9 Derb can be a very penetrating analyst but he's got a streak of gloom in him and he's not really capable of looking beyond the worst case. I used to like him in spite of the gloom, but no more. Over the past year, Derb's also come out in full-throated defense of Michael Schiavo and written a Kos-worthy verbal assault on fellow NR author Ramesh Ponnuru's new book Party of Death, in which he describes those of us who oppose abortion as "cult members." Oh, and he opposes legal immigration on grounds of eugenics, which seems a deuced odd position for the immigrant father of two biracial children to take. Now, either he's taking all these positions because he enjoys being the skunk at the garden party--in which case he's being frightfully immature--or because he actually believes in eugenics, abortion, and euthenasia--in which case I fear for his soul. |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-06-13 13:20 |
| #8 ZF: The US way is "kill the violent and make deals with everybody else." It is a technique used when teaching a small child. That is, when they do the innumerable things that they can do without being bad, they are allowed or encouraged to do them. When they do bad, they get a gentle (hopefully) slap and a raised-voice "No!" It accepts that the violent are always a tiny minority of any group of people. And if you can imprison, segregate or kill them, then everyone else tends to cooperate. For the vast majority, the US wants to project the image of wealth, prosperity and charity, not intimidation, control, and exploitation. It does this so as not to turn the moderates into makers of violence. Moderates who, by the way, tend to be far more ferocious to fight than the avowedly violent. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-06-13 11:57 |
| #7 I think Derbyshire's whole theme was this - after an American invasion of an enemy nation, mothers should be able to get their children to behave by threatening to hand them over to a GI for punishment. In their current role as social workers and bringers of candy, GI's are severely diminishing what was once a fearsome reputation, which does have a negative effect on deterrence. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2006-06-13 11:36 |
| #6 DanNY: Same old, same old. Lefty hand wringing at its best. Obviously a guy who doesn't keep up on Iraqi view of things. This is righty handwringing. Lefty handwringing consists of saying America is to blame. Derbyshire is saying that we should have turned Iraq to rubble and left. This would be the classic Roman punitive expedition. Instead we muddled the situation by sticking around to rebuild the area while taking unnecessary casualties, and tying troops down that could be used against Iran (to do more or less the same punitive expedition all over again). His whole proposal was to rubble the area and let the Arabs fight it out. The ideal scenario would have been a re-enactment of the Iraq-Iran War, where 1 million died on both sides. This is what conservative strategic thinking is all about - inflicting maximum damage to as many of the nation's enemies as possible while using a bare minimum of the nation's resources. What Bush has done is gotten a huge chunk of the nation's ground troops tied down in Iraq for what may turn out to be a decade. Derbyshire's complaint is not that the administration's incompetence is what's keeping the insurgency alive, but that we should have bailed out as soon as we had killed enough Iraqis. More importantly, his take is that sticking around to fight insurgencies is simply too resource-intensive to be sustainable, and both terrorists and America's enemies are encouraged by what they see in Iraq, because they see the likelihood of another such invasion - of another country - as low, because we have knowingly tied ourselves down. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2006-06-13 11:30 |
#5 It’s hard not to think, though, that if wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper. This is as dumb an assertion as one could say. Firstly, it is assumed that we would know in 2003 what we know now in 2006. Knowing that, we'd have played up the liberation of Iraqui people angle more, eliminate the real WMD threat of Saddam Hussein, AND would have deployed our people differently and with uparmored Hummers before, during, and after the conflict. We'd have gone after tater and been more agressive along the borders. We'd have stationed a platoon at the bridge where zarky jumped out of his truck and captured him then. but then, if we had that knowledge THEN, then it would have been a success, and Derbyshire would be crowing and boasting and preening himself about his good advice, instead of whining and carping and taking potshots like a critic who'd blanch at being invited to STFU, get his ass out of the stands, and onto the field, because his MOUTH is bigger than his character. We still did a good thing in getting rid of Saddam, who killed Iraquis at a clip of 3000 per day, and carps about "international law" comes from neo-stalinist pharisees who would do as their hero did, who didn't hesitate to feed human bodies into a legalistic meatgrinder to meet the goals of a postulated utopia. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2006-06-13 10:20 |
| #4 Derbyshire has fallen victim to the "TV solution" syndrome. If something can't be started, finished and wrapped up in a tidy bow within an hour or two at the most, it's a dismal failure. Notice he doesn't point out exactly how leaving a pile of rubble in Iraq was going to improve the situation, beyond shocking a few people. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2006-06-13 10:17 |
| #3 Derbyshire is actually quite conservative (it's National Review's blog, after all). It's just that he hoped for something quick and shocking and wasn't prepared for what was basically inevitable -- a long war. Derb can be a very penetrating analyst but he's got a streak of gloom in him and he's not really capable of looking beyond the worst case. |
| Posted by: Jonathan 2006-06-13 09:50 |
| #2 Derbyshire is a vomit-brained "peasants need to be kept in line" Tory, thatisall. |
| Posted by: Ernest Brown 2006-06-13 09:48 |
| #1 Same old, same old. Lefty hand wringing at its best. Obviously a guy who doesn't keep up on Iraqi view of things. |
| Posted by: DanNY 2006-06-13 08:46 |