Mike

Let’s go back to August ’03. The mission referred to was to take out Saddam Hussein (and that man needed taking out), the ‘battle-tested’ Iraqi army ceased to exist as a cohesive fighting force in but a few days of combat and, most important, Libya, Somalia, and Pakistan made haste to join the winning side—us.

If we had quit right there and then, leaving behind a note to whoever grasped power in Baghdad that they could have a repeat performance anytime they felt so inclined, it is exceedingly unlikely that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia (all three democratically elected) and Kim Jong-il of North Korea, would have dared to snap their fingers in a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it gesture in Jonathan’s face.

But no, we had to go and try to impose a ‘democracy’ on a culture to whom the concept of a ‘loyal opposition’ is so absurd that it doesn’t even merit consideration, and that a man can differ with you and still be an honorable person totally incomprehensible, is a recipe for disaster.

What are we now doing in Iraq? Win a war? We won it. To put it plainly, Arab armies stand no chance in a slogging match against a Western army; it is simply not in their military tradition. The Arab military genius lies in light cavalry tactics—they skirmish an enemy to death.

We are now faced with the same problem that defeated General Bonaparte in Egypt, that defeated the British and French in their respective mandates in the Levant, that defeated France in Algeria, that defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, that defeated Israel in Lebanon and is defeating them in the West Bank. We are now facing a classical guerrilla war fought by a band of dedicated fanatics holding their own lives as well as Iraqi civilians of no account as long as they can kill us.

Right now our forces in Iraq face two enemies, namely Jihadists eager to earn their 72 virgins each (as an aside, what do the girl-jihadists get?), and the American media eager to play the “Gotcha!’ game who, in the full knowledge that should they be captured by the Jihadists and on video decapitated after being made to grovel and beg for mercy, are eager to trumpet on top of their voices any behavior of our troops which does not conform to their idea how to conduct a campaign in which there are no rules, at least not from our adversaries.

Let’s face it our adversaries no longer fear us and why should they.

E. David Litvak

This is not a rhetorical question, nor am I being sarcastic. The question of whether a more-or-less benign authoritarianism is the best some peoples can expect is one libertarians generally steer clear of – or deny the validity of altogether. [This libertarian never avoid 1) describing reality and deducing truths about it 2) illustrating the consequences of central-planning style interventions.]

I remember when I was doing research among the Filipino community in the midwest and asked what they thought of then-president Corazon Aquino. A typical response was, “Corrie Aquino is a saint – but a saint cannot govern the Phillippines. She is a woman and is not willing to shed blood.”

Sectarian violence is a misnomer as well. The extent to which clan and tribe affect the Middle East is utterly ignored (or unknown) by commentators and world leaders. Family, clan, tribe–ethnicity (even within the same race)–this is the foundation of a nation, always. Not ideology.

Iraq is not a nation.