Voting Ourselves Off The Island
Mark Steyn looks at the threat to the nation that a withdrawal from Iraq would entail. His assessment is exceedingly bleak.
The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson — that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia — a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election — you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections — 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada — but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.
Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.
Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.
Make no mistake, this would be seen as a victory for the Islamists and a major defeat for not George Bush, but for America. As Steyn says, we can vote ourselves off the island and go back to watching television. Unfortunately, there are other people in the world who will not let us do so. Go read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Others: Fausta, A Large Regular, Cold Fury,
By directorblue, November 12, 2006 @ 9:51 am
Consider this a manual trackback, since Haloscan’s trackback feature can’t handle the captcha…
By Gaius, November 12, 2006 @ 10:02 am
Yeah, sorry about that. But the comment spam hit new highs (or lows, depending on your outlook). I had to do something when it started hitting 50 an hour.
By Arlo, November 12, 2006 @ 5:33 pm
What is this guy Steyn? A movie critic? This is the kind of stupid discourse about war that the public rejected.
By mokus, November 12, 2006 @ 6:20 pm
Mark Steyn is a Canadian who’s columns are published in the UK and in the English speaking countries of North America, and his work is well known among the chattering classes. He’s considered rather influential, something of an iconoclast, and among Conservatives he’s held in high regard.
But, he’s not for you, don’t bother reading him, or you’ll end up with high blood pressure and talking to yourself.
By Not Saussure, November 12, 2006 @ 7:20 pm
Steyn, I think, misrepresents the reason the Spanish voted as they did; the Spanish government, it should be remembered, initially fell over themselves to blame ETA (who were then observing a ceasefire) or, indeed, anyone but Al Qaida for the Madrid atrocities, presumably because they feared they be punished by the voters for taking Spain into Iraq. Many Spanish voters, I would imagine, were disgusted by their government’s self-serving cynicism when the truth came out.
Certainly here in the UK we aren’t so much angry with Blair because of the 7/7 attacks on London as because he refuses to admit that his policies might have had anything to do with them. Had he said at the time something to the effect that the bombings were, in part, a result of our involvement in the occupation but this was a price we have to pay for doing the right thing, people would have had a great deal more respect for him. If he’d have tried to blame the attacks on the Provisional IRA he’d probably have been lynched when the truth came out, and deservedly so. I suspect many Spanish voters felt the same way.
By Jed, November 13, 2006 @ 12:36 am
“Cut and run” is a linguistic invention of the republicans, and, as such, they are responsible for any idea given to al Queda that this is what is being planned.
In reality (a sphere entirely removed from the place where republicans live) the democrats want to fight a more effective fight against the terrorists. It’s not surprising that Republican sissies too cowardly to admit their own mistakes would try to spin this against Democrats with false characterizations like “cut and run.”