Ok, so I like
the New Republic. I really do. It's one of the few magazines I subscribe to, and I read the online version every day. I'm also, by and large, not a fan of "you won't believe what this crazy bastard wrote" diaries.
But the New Republic website is running a web only column so startling, so jaw-dropping in its assertions, that I can't help but diary it.
The title? Noble Cause, written by Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz. The subtitle? "Brief Wars Rarely Produce Lasting Results. Long Wars Often Do."
Yes. That means exactly what you think it does.
More on the flip...
Stuntz starts by noting that the struggle to keep the Union together in 1861 was over more mundane things than slavery. Things like customs duties, navigation rights and Forts. Thankfully, according to Stuntz, the War didn't stay focused on such trivial matters. No, the war turned to four years of blood and suffering. But the War also turned to a real, worthwhile purpose.
But there was a much bigger, much better, and above all much nobler dream waiting in the wings: "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom" (to use Lincoln's own words)--that the chains of four million slaves might be shattered forever, that freedom and democracy might prevail against tyranny and aristocracy in a world still full of tyrants and aristocrats.
Stuntz uses this history to argue that history teaches three things;
First, that Victor Davis Hanson is right--wars often change purposes after they begin. Second, that sometimes the new purpose is vastly better than the one it replaces. Few nations choose up front to sacrifice their sons for the sake of others' freedom. When such sacrifices are made, they usually flow not from design but from accident and error--just as the North's military blunders prolonged the Civil War, and thereby made it a struggle to bring that new birth of freedom to the war-torn land over which the soldiers fought.
The third lesson is the most important. Brief wars rarely produce permanent results, but long wars often do.
Think you can see where he's going? Think he can't possibly be arguing what you think he's about to argue? Well you can see where he's going, and he really is about to argue that.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is now officially a positive that the war in Iraq has become a protracted conflict. Remember that pipe dream that the Administration foisted on us at the start of the war? Greeted as liberators? Roses in the streets? Milk and honey, hugs and hot baths for all? Well none of that happened, and William J. Stuntz is here to tell you, that's a damn good thing.
Today, there is a real chance of a vastly better result--precisely because the insurgency survived, because it wasn't quickly defeated.
I'm being somewhat unfair to his argument, because I'm so utterly stunned he's making it, so I'll at least try to explain what he means. You see, Stuntz argues that this protracted clusterfuck of a conflict claiming lives left, right and center is finally showing the Muslim world what their extremists are all about. That this way they'll finally see the madness behind bin Laden, Zarqawi and their ilk, and ultimately throw off their extremist rhetoric, giving rise to a better, more free Middle East.
What's that you say? Bodies, bombs and beheadings in the meantime? Dead soldiers and grieving mothers and Iraqi civilians wondering what the fuck they did to deserve this, and oh by the way, could someone please turn on a damn light? Well that's not necessarily a bad thing long term either.
By prolonging the war, Zarqawi and his Baathist allies have drawn thousands of terrorist wannabes into the fight--against both our soldiers and Muslim civilians. When terrorists fight American civilians, as on September 11, they can leverage their own deaths to kill a great many of us. But when terrorists fight American soldiers, the odds tilt towards our side. Equally important, by bringing the fight to a Muslim land, by making that land the central front of the war on Islamic terrorism, the United States has effectively forced Muslim terrorists to kill Muslim civilians. That is why the so-called Arab street is rising--not against us but against the terrorists, as we saw in Jordan after Zarqawi's disastrous hotel bombing. The population of the Islamic world is choosing sides not between jihadists and Westerners, but between jihadists and people just like themselves. We are, slowly but surely, converting bin Laden's war into a civil war--and that is a war bin Laden and his followers cannot hope to win.
That's right. That Civil War that's been threatened for so long. We're not slowly slipping into one because of incompetence and chaos. We're CONVERTING the war into a civil war. Cause then we win. And oh yeah, team up with the underpants gnomes to make huge profits.
Stuntz goes on to pontificate about the flowering of democracy in the middle east, the need to resist the urge to "cut and run", and a variety of other things I frankly had trouble reading because of the blood spurting out of my eyes. And then he goes out with a bang. Or at least a threatened bang.
Either we fight the fight our enemies have chosen until they are defeated or (better still) dead, or millions of Muslim men and women may lose their "last, best hope"--and we may face a mushroom cloud over Manhattan, the work of one of the many Mohamed Attas that Middle Eastern autocracies have bred over the last generation. The choice belongs not to the president alone, but to all of us. Here's hoping we choose as wisely as Lincoln's generation did.
I honestly don't know. Maybe I'm being too harsh on the argument. Maybe the argument has some logic to it, if you ignore the dead and the wounded and the Pictures of daily grief seared into my consciousness. But this all seems a wing and a prayer and a dream, with maybe a dash of madness thrown in; this hope that things will get better, if only we put on our slippers and tap our feet three times. This war where a civil war is really just a sign of opportunity, and dead soldiers and Iraqis a sign that we're bringing the war to more favorable terms.
I just don't get any of it. Freedom in the Middle East IS a noble goal. And I am one who believes that looking ahead is more important than refighting how we got into this mess. But if we've come to the point where "Hey, the Civil War turned out all right in the end" is the argument of the day, then I fear we really are in a world of trouble.