Son of Wobbly

Sully shoots back at his critics, and seemingly me (though I flatter myself not that he reads this eyehole of a blog), regarding his stance on the war. His points are fair: he's a genuine supporter of the President and "fear[s] that he's going astray." I agree that this war, like most wars, is too important a matter to be left to the Democrats (Dean and Kerry, the most hawkish, have nothing to say but "we'd do it better," which is both unenlightening and unlikely), and that those of us, like Sullivan, who understand that importance need to make sure that Dub stays in office, and fair criticism is appropriate to that.


But giving into the hysteria isn't going to help Dub out, as all it does is add fuel to the Dean-Kerry bonfire. Whenever I get news of another explosion/death in Iraq, I run it through the prism of the last guerrilla war we successfully put down, in the Phillipines, 100 years ago. That particular war was 2 or 3 years in the finishing, after we spent a year making fools of ourselves with classically inept sweep-and-clear-and-stumble-into-ambushes-and-abuse-the-population tactics, against an enemy (Aquinaldo) who was far less of a beast than Saddam, and in a country whose ethnic map makes Iraq look like Idaho. There were many butcheries before we won, but win we did, because we gradually made good on our promises and became the better alternative to Aguinaldo, who gradually made himself inimical. The progress was slow and didn't make the headlines, but sure.


It's not a perfect analogy, but the point is that we have to be sure that we're seeing the forest for the trees. One of the best things about Sully during the war was his ability to grasp what was really going on as opposed to what the CNN/NPR/NYT axis was constructing. Let's not let the terrorists impress us with their infantile explosions, horrible though they be. Let's let the Anaconda work.


In conclusion, and in fairness to Sullivan: no, you haven't precisely gone wobbly. We only nag at you, old boy, because we dare not lose you.