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| When Hawks Run |
| 2006-03-14 |
| By John Podhoretz Can the War on Terror be won? America's inability to secure a victory in Iraq against the insurgency suggests to many people of good will and good sense that it really can't be. They believe the enemies of the United States are motivated by a force more powerful than we reckoned - by a religious ideology that has seduced hundreds of millions of people who prefer its stark certainties to the ambiguities and confusions of Western bourgeois life. We can't beat it, they say, and we can't join it. So what is left for us? Just to say "the hell with them." Richard Lowry's very important piece in the new issue of National Review is about the "to-hell-with-them hawks." They are, in Lowry's words, "conservatives who are comfortable using force abroad, but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable, or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem." They look at Iraq's decimated civic culture and they wonder at the naiveté of a president who believed he could bring Western-style liberty to the place. They look at the Muslim world and they see Hamas elected by Palestinians and months of rioting over supposedly offensive cartoons by people who are happy to celebrate suicide bombers. President Bush's prescription for ultimate victory in the War on Terror was bringing freedom to those who are not free, because the longing for freedom resides in every human heart. Ludicrous sentimentality, say the to-hell-with-them hawks. Muslims don't want it and they don't deserve it and we shouldn't be trying to give it to them. Lowry's answer is this: "Confident predictions about which cultures are or are not capable of democracy have the aspect of unassailable truth - right up to the point that they don't. Representative Arab government will be impossible until it happens." The project in Iraq is an effort to change the terms of the discussion in the Arab Muslim world. Lowry has come up with an elegant and original way of putting the visionary aspect of the Bush freedom doctrine in real-world terms: "The contemporary Middle East has featured a competition of radicalisms - who can be religiously purer, and more hostile to the West? The project in Iraq is an attempt to shift the terms of the competition to who can better deliver peace, prosperity and representation." The to-hell-with-them hawks - among them Lowry's own mentor, William F. Buckley - have found a middle ground between the merely partisan opposition arguments of the Democrats and the poisonous attitudes of the far-right isolationists. Their argument seems hard-headed and unsentimental. People are trying to murder Americans, and such people ought to die. Kill as many of the bad guys as you can abroad. Strike Iran from the air if you have to. Do whatever you must to secure the homeland. Don't let Arabs run the ports. Racially profile Muslims and Arabs out the wazoo. No crocodile tears for the excesses at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. What's missing here is what has been missing from the most hard-headed discussions of Iraq since the end of the 2004 election, and that is an understanding of just why President Bush formulated the freedom doctrine. The problem is that the policies advocated by the "hell hawks" and by defeatist Democrats offer no real possibility of an end to the war against Islamic radicalism. It will go on forever. And if it does, it seems certain that at some point in the next few decades, millions of people are going to die in a successful terrorist assault using weapons of mass destruction. Why? Because there is no way to stop the delivery of such a weapon if the delivery system is a single person willing to die to get it done. The only way to prevent it is to change the terms under which such people live, to offer them something to hope for besides virgins in paradise. Seen in this light, the Bush freedom doctrine isn't simply a starry-eyed exercise in ludicrous optimism. It's a real-world solution to a real-world problem. The only real answer to the Bush freedom doctrine is the one posed by those who believe there is no real War on Terror. They range from the Michael Moore, Bush-may-have-been-involved types to ex-neocon Francis Fukuyama, who states plainly that Bush & Co. overestimated the threat from terrorism. Fukuyama basically believes 9/11 was a fluke, a lucky shot. It would be nice if he were right. But it would be reckless to the point of insanity for any American policymaker to count on it. Just as it would be for any American policymaker to adopt the view of the to-hell-with-them hawks. |
| Posted by:Chetle Omath7541 |
| #4 STRATEGYPAGE.com article, i.e. NORTH KOREA: NUKES? WHAT NUKES", once more makes it clear that it doesn't matter what Iran aor the Norkies, etal. claim they have or want to do. THE BURDEN IS ON THE USA, AND ONLY THE USA, TO PROVE THE ROGUES ARE HAVE OR ARE DOING WHAT THE ROGUES CLAIM TO HAVE OR BE DOING - Iff the USA AND ONLY THE USA fails to prove/"justify", espec and only to the Failed Left-MSM, the USA does not have any justification or base for any GOP-led decision or action. NO matter how many nukes or WMDS Iran and NK, etc. truly have, or proclaim to have before the world, they are not to be held accountable to anyone for anything. The GWOT will NOT go on forever becuz the pre-9-11 STATUS QUO is no acceptable to anyone, either of the Right or the Left or Center or Inependent, and espec for the Failed Left and aligned anti-Americanists - for the flip-flop loving Failed/Angry Left, it ultimately does NOT matter whether America wins or loses as long as the Lefties get their way, i.e. anti-sovereign US, anti-American American Socialism and Socialist-Unitarian NPE, America under OWG, and American interests being controlled by a group of world states, includ Russia-China, where America's agenda is just one of many to be considered. Americans are allowed to unilater modernize the world and create global empire as long as its understood Americans must give up their nation, empire, and wealth-endowments to others, that these will be taken away from Americans either voluntarily or by force. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-03-14 22:25 |
| #3 The most bitter irony for me of this whole discussion is that, for the first time, an American president is actually trying to address the root causes....and all the bleeding hearts from whom we constantly hear the phrase turn on him like a pack of rabid Pit Bulls. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2006-03-14 17:00 |
| #2 Would you bet your life on that, Francis? You bet your ass you wouldn't... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2006-03-14 16:53 |
| #1 Let's hear it for Francis Fuckyomama. |
| Posted by: Ebbomoting Ulurong7258 2006-03-14 16:21 |