Half a War

Or, Re-thinking the Morning's Post



Sully fairly gushed about the sudden hawkishness the Dems displayed at their convention, but now he seems to have picked up on the reality that they and their candidate have no credibility on Iraq, in the sense that we have no reason to expect anything like determined leadership from them. It's a shame, because one can fairly argue that the Administration has made errors in prosecuting the occupation. The on-again, off-again, Fallujah siege, which seemed to be a good model for introducing self-policing to the Iraqis, is now arguably the biggest blunder of the war. But it was a blunder of being irresolute, not being bloodthirsty, and all it really means is that we're going to have to fight there again, and alas, this time take no prisoners. Expect it after the election, if not sooner.


But that brings us back to the Dems' credibility. Bush enjoys the incumbent's advantage of being a known quantity, of having skeletons pretty well unearthed, policies pretty well known. Kerry, on the other hand, is a gigantic question mark. He doesn't even have any gubernatorial experience to give us a sense of his leadership style (aside from being Dukakis' Lieutenant G., which nobody talked about before they started comparing him to his boss). So the campaign has come down to war candidate versus maybe-war, maybe-not candidate, a choice between fighting the enemy and...um....


We know why Kerry can't do better than "....um...." He can't do it because his party can't do it. Dean was anti-war, and he fireballed like so much dry Icarus. Lieberman was pro-war, and he couldn't get made party dog-catcher. So they went with Kerry, not because he had the nuanced vision that could make sense of the great clash of our age, but because they thought he could beat Bush. Because, you know, there's nothing more important than that, or anything.


So instead of participating in solving the 9/11 problem, the Democrats are sitting on the ground, grumbling "not in our name." Instead of joining us to topple a movement that indiscriminately targets civilians, especially members of the wrong ethnic group, abuses women, beheads homosexuals, and justifies all this with a religious fundamentalism that makes Jerry Falwell look like Larry Flynt, they tell us that we're the problem, we're the evil, that we shouldn't even try, we can't win, we're only making it worse, et cetera ad infinitum. They have demonstrated neither perspective nor patience, nor courage, nor charity. All they've done is howl.


This is a real failure of the Left, one that we're all going to pay for. Many a conservative commentator has posited, as I have and do, that this election comes down to whether you believe we're in a war or not. They point this out with the unspoken suggestion that those who don't believe we're in a war are fools, and on the wrong side of history. But if almost half of us don't believe we're in a war, how well can this war be fought? And if almost half of us don't believe we're in a war, how can those of us who do trust their opinions of it?