We Get the Government We Want

The really important question of this election is Iraq. What to do? It will be interesting to see if the preelection prowar Republican/Democrat coalition holds together.

It might. A lot of Blue Dog Democrats got elected.

Davit Warren looks at national will with respect to Iraq and might mean for the future of Iraq.

In deposing the regime of Saddam Hussein -- now sentenced to hang with the enthusiastic approval of the overwhelming majority of his countrymen, though Iraq itself is first sentenced to endure a ludicrous appeals process -- the United States accomplished something well within her military means, in a few weeks of “shock and awe”.

But in trying to build a secular democracy over the ruin of Saddam’s regime, the Americans tried something they had not the stomach for. From the outset, they imposed upon themselves restrictions that would make that fight unwinnable. As in Vietnam, they adopted a purely defensive posture.

So far as President Bush can be blamed, it should be for showing insufficient ruthlessness in a task that could not be accomplished by half-measures. Alternatively, for failing to grasp that America was psychologically unprepared for real war, not only by the memory of Vietnam, but by the grim advance of "liberal" decadence in domestic life over the generation since.

So David may be overly pessimistic. The problem with his view is that Iraq is now much closer than Vietnam was 40 years ago. We are into the blog/internet age. Disasters and massacres can not be as well hidden. It limits the scope of warfare, but it also limits the scope of tyranny.

Maybe we will have a chance to pull back from the edge of the abyss.

H/T Reader linearthinker.