Sniping at Paul Krugman's morning column
TigerHawk
There are at least 30 bloggers who do a better job of fisking Paul Krugman than I do, but this morning's column requires a couple of rifleshot responses.
The column asserts that George W. Bush "actually wanted to go to war," did so "wrongfully" and thereby committed "an unprecedented abuse of power," that the Downing Street memo is smoking gun evidence of this, that Iraq is a "quagmire" that we can't win, that conservatives claim that "anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic," and "that we have to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism."
In short, you need not just a bath but a purging fast and a colonoscopy to feel clean again after reading Paul Krugman this morning.
Most of this reveals such a transparent ignorance of history and even current events that it isn't even worth discussing. The claim that Bush wanted to go to war in the abstract is ridiculous and does not hold up in any reading of any of the contemporaneous accounts (see, e.g., both of Bob Woodward's books, neither of which suggests that Bush "wanted" war apart from believing that it was the best course for American policy). If Krugman refers to the war on Islamist jihad narrowly defined, al Qaeda attacked us, not once but repeatedly. Even after the American defeats in Somalia, the USS Cole, Kenya, Tanzania, and Saudi Arabia, George Bush did not even understand that we were at war until September 11, 2001 (continuing the Clinton administration's policy of turning the other cheek). If he refers to Iraq, he is simply assuming the liberal criticism of the war, which is to deny that it has any bearing on America's grand strategy in the struggle against militant Islam. As we have argued in this blog to the point of tedium (most recently here), the invasion and occupation of Iraq was essential to that war even if there was no connection between Saddam's government and al Qaeda.
I'll let others tackle the "quagmire" allegation, and whether Iraq is a success or a failure. Regular readers know that we think the war has been an astonishing success, and that the fact of our intransigence in the teeth of a ferocious insurgency contributes every day to an essential American war aim, which is the restoration of American credibility in the Arab world.
I do, however, want to respond to Krugman's assertion that "moderates and even liberals" are "intimidated" because "anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic." This is, of course, slander of the worse sort. The accusation leveled at such people is not that they are "unpatriotic" -- this charge was invented, or at least promoted, by the Kerry campaign to deflect criticism of his Vietnam era campaign against that war. It has since morphed into a general liberal response to criticism from hawks: "It is outrageous that you are calling me unpatriotic!"
Did we once say that? No, sir, you are not unpatriotic. You are so blinded by your hatred of the President that you are simply unable to see the strategic victory unfolding before you. It would only be unpatriotic if you in fact understood that victory was within our grasp and you were deliberating denying it to undermine the President. Living as I do in Princeton, though, I know that you and your ilk simply do not understand.
Obviously, I gotta go take a chill pill."
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