I posted this to the Pagan Conservatives list as message 10300. There's a general semantic point about some of the commentary made about involvement in Iraq which I felt was worth mentioning out in a more open location.
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Cutting and pasting my way to general confusion,
I
> > but opposing this war is the
> > Conservative thing to do.
>
> Why? Because you said so?
> Measured by that standard, Michael,
> police work could not
> be justified.
A little cryptic, I suppose -
insert this passage which I
cut, between those two lines:
"Our troops swear to support and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, but to do that, they need a clear and achievable goal."
and perhaps all becomes a little more clear.
Consider the circumstance of a Police
Department. It wages an unending war
of sorts, against a series of enemies
(various criminals and criminal groups),
many of which have as little or even
less regard for human life as the
so-called Iraqi insurgents (many of
whom, on capture, turn out to not even
be Iraqis), are at least as crazy, and
will scream up a storm about how the
police are an occupying army, oppressing
them by denying them their imagined right
to run wild, Given the free reign it
desires, this criminal element would,
in short order, first destroy all freedom
and then civilization itself. The police
have no exit strategy from this war, in
that they have no prospects of ever
fully eliminating the criminal element.
Using the language as Michael and his war
demonstrator friends have abused it, we
would have to conclude that this domestic
army or ours (the police force) has no "clear
and achievable goal", and thus must withdraw
and give the streets over to their enemy.
Well, that would just be asinine - we would
be signing our own death warrants, based on
an argument one could use to do away with
trash collection. I mean, after all, what's
the point to your garbage can being emptied,
when its only going to get filled again
the next day?
In a case that extreme, obviously I'm being
facetious, but this points to the logical
absurdity of the argument advanced by Michael
et al, and why it is a gift to his faction
to speak of what is taking place in Iraq as
being a "war". It is not. It is, like police
work, a series of squirmishes in each of
which our forces most decidely do have a
clear and achievable objective - kill or
capture the specific offending parties
responsible for the specific incident,
something that our forces have successfully
done time and time again. This simple reality,
the peaceniks try to obscure by lumping all
part and future engagements together as if
they were a single event, thus defining the
possibility of victory out of existence. It
is nothing more than the rhetorical equivalent
of blue smoke and mirrors, glossing over such
minor issues as whether or not the intensity
of the engagements is likely to be maintained
on an indefinite basis.
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End of post. This is, of course, precisely the issue that our good friends, the demonstrators, try to "settle" by posturing, acting as if their position that the insurgents would come in infinite numbers could be made into fact, merely by their willingness to be assertive enough on this point. In point of fact, rear guard support for what's left of the Hussein regime is anything but a holy war - Hussein was a military strongman, not a cleric or other religious leader and certainly no holy man. The war, if one wishes to dignify a series of violent criminal acts by such a title, is one waged against the Iraqi people in order to bully them into not taking control over their own lives; it is wholly illegitimate, devoid of anything noble, and we are expected to believe that the passion behind it will prove inexhaustable, indefinitely.
I suppose that we are then to conveniently forget that the Islamic world has, itself, been under the heals of a series of conquerors - Mongol, Turkish, European - a number of them engaging in what can legitimately be called "imperialism", often brutalising the conquered. There was no higher purpose to the incursions of the old empires; they were ruthless, self-interested grabs for power and wealth - oh, and what do you know - those (again, illegitimate) aquisitions were consolidated. One does not see an unending bloodletting on the part of the occupying forces. What one does see is the spirit being beaten out of the people by one conqueror after another, and Hussein was merely a continuation of that bad tradition.
The people of Iraq didn't choose him. Geopolitical considerations chose him as a counterweight to Iraq, and some of our sorry excuses for allies then armed a madman to the teeth, so tilting the balance of miliary power in Iraq that several dozen insurrections against Hussein were crushed with ease. Why should the West be there to help the people of Iraq, first against the larger local bully (Hussein) and the smaller bullies that have followed? Because what happened to those people was not their fault, because so many of them fought so heroically to escape it, and because if our compassion is to be anything more than an act, it must force us to see that there must, finally, come rest for the weary.
What is the clear, overall objective of US involvement? To understand this, one must remember one basic truth. While many of our ancestors may have come from Europe, we as Americans are not Europeans, and we don't want to be; our world view is not theirs. By and large, we're the descendents of those who were smashed into the dirt back in our respective old countries. When we see the rear guard action on behalf of Sunni minority privilege, the outgoing upper classes using terror to put the Iraqi people 'back into their place', we look back at our own historical memory, and realise that we've seen this before.
What is our clear and achievable objective? When terrorist attacks on the Iraqi security forces being a wave of recruitments the next day, at a time when the Iraqi government is hardly the most secure of employers, we see a little of that objective being realized. We see the Iraqi people - not the Sunnis, not the insurgents, not the sociopathic darlings of American protest movements that some liberals might love to praise just to be controversial and win their 15 minutes of fame - no, we see the Iraqi people rising up, dusting themselves off, and seeing that they can take control over their own futures, that they don't have to bow and scrape to some faction just because it's depraved enough. Freedom, kids, is more than an idea, it's a habit, one that one has to get into before it starts to mean something, and that takes time, but bit by bit, it does happen, and every time yet another Iraqi stands up to the savages who've made life for him and his so very much harder than it needed to be, our side wins a little more. Victory, like defeat, can come in increments.
Is democracy a new thing in Iraq? Perhaps. And it wasn't a new thing in Russia during the early 1990s? Or in Germany during the late 1940s? Or in ... a long, long series of countries before. Well, now it's Iraq's turn, and they've waited and suffered long enough, so let's be there for them.
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