A wonderful piece in REDSTATE today.
The dawn.
redstate.org
By: trevino · Section: War
Nothing is worse than war?
Dishonor is worse than war.
Slavery is worse than war.
-- Winston Churchill
The justifications for war in Iraq were many, and the official one -- WMD -- has been invalidated by the course of events. Looking back, it is difficult indeed to conceive of a war launched to secure weapons that did not exist in meaningful numbers from a regime that possessed no meaningful intent to use them against us. This in itself does not invalidate the war, nor the need to win it. (It may, by the bye, invalidate the credibility of those who advanced this line, but this is hardly indisputable.) One wonders whether the present-day antiwar left, transported back to summer 1945, might gripe and complain also about the wastage of that era's transformative effort due to the nonexistence of a free and independent Poland. That's how history runs, and it's simple naivete -- or disingenuousness -- to pretend otherwise: the casus bellum and the stage of victory are not ipso facto cause and effect.
I was privileged to spend time this weekend with an old comrade from my ROTC days: she was recently back from Baqubah, Iraq, and was embittered and a bit weary as a soldier has the right to be. She was against the war, as war is terrible, and had no desire to see it again -- indeed, she voted for John Kerry, which is surely a rarity in my experience of the officer corps. But in the day to day horrors of dismembered men in which she worked at her forward aid station, her perspective, and her vote, altered accordingly. It is indeed as Eisenhower said: "Men acquainted with the battlefield will not be found among the number that glibly talk of another war". We listened to her speak and asked her questions. Then something interesting happened: another old friend (and another Kerry voter, at that) from cadet days who did not make it to war asked, "So do you think Joe Iraqi is better off now?" Her reply was sharp and swift: "I know he is." She shifted from a recounting of combat's horrors to rattling off all the ways in which the American presence -- her presence -- in Iraq had made life better for Iraqis (and, she noted especially, for Iraqi women). As firm as her conviction that she never wanted to go to war again -- and that this war in particular is bad -- was her belief that concrete and transmformative good was being accomplished there. There was pride in her words. Justified pride. And in that pride, you could see the realization that she accomplished more there than stitching up hajis, saving young soldiers, and staying alive.
If WMD was the official justification for the Iraq war, then the unofficial justification was surely the neoconservative vision of a democratized Middle East, birthed by the example of a free Iraq in its midst. It has become commonplace for the lazy left to assert that this or that vision or tendency is the work of "the neocons"; but the abuse of the term does not mean they do not exist. For the original neocons were indeed the best of the American left: men and women whose moral vision informed their ideology to a true love of liberty, and a belief in the state's role in promoting it. One may well hope that future generations may see the neoconservative projects of the past quarter-century -- eradicating the Soviet Union; democratizing the Muslim world -- as triumphs of the better nature of the humane left. More likely those generations will see the left's rejection of that better nature as symptomatic of its moral degeneracy.
For herein lies the paradox for those who denounce war in the false belief that peace and justice are synonymous: that neocon vision is working. The specific events we now see in motion have been recounted well enough elsewhere, but a brief survey will suffice. What has happened since America oversaw the first free elections in Iraq in a half-century? In Saudi Arabia, local elections have been held, and local Shi'a are asserting their public identity for the first time in generations. In Egypt, the local autocrat has felt compelled to allow, at least in theory, competetive elections for the first time since the British presence. In Lebanon, "people power" of the sort once seen in Manila and Kiev has compelled the beginnings of a Syrian withdrawal -- and the fiercely anti-American Druze potentate Walid Jumblatt has directly credited the American occupation of Iraq with enabling it. In Syria itself, the rumblings of popular opposition are seen now as they have not been since Hama rose in revolt a quarter-century past. It is a long time coming before we can say that freedom is sweeping the region; and it is a long time coming before the definitive strategic lessons of Iraq are known. But it is enough to be able to say now that this war has set events in motion: good events, and hopeful events in this erstwhile squalid, dusty environ of tyranny.
The question before the left now is how to deal with these things. Does it embrace the process of change and liberation, and that which caused it? It seems improbable: we only need look to the Cold War to know the myths that will evolve to exculpate and deny. Just as the demise of Soviet Communism inevitably became the product of economic determinism and the wisdom of Gorbachev (little to do with the United States, and certainly not Reagan), so too will the hoped-for impending liberalization of the Muslim world, should it come to pass, be purely the work of local visionaries and the impersonal churning of the god of history. In divorcing the effect from the cause, they will save their self-respect at the price of denying credit to those who sacrificed so dearly to bring it about. It is their way, and if there is dishonor in it, so be it. But it is not ours. We can look at the millions shaking off their chains -- liberating themselves from themselves, as it were -- and think of the dead we know who helped make it happen. My own erstwhile comrades who paid this price: Kim Hampton. Eric Paliwoda. And we can think of those still living who fought and may well fight again: Ben. KJ. Colin. Ken.
And in thinking of them, and in watching these events unfold, we can do the one small thing in our power to do -- the one small thing we each did in that room after listening to our Kerry-voting, antiwar soldier friend this weekend tell us all the reasons Joe Iraqi was better off for all the things America has brought to his country:
Thank you, Rachel. |
