The impatience of the former hawks
Roger Simon:
In Iraq, the enemy has done some things to make it harder to turn Iraq into a peaceful democratic society. They still lack the capacity to stop that from happening, but they do have the capacity to make it messier. The only way they can win is if our politicians decide it is too messy to finish the job. Friedman and Sullivan seem to be backing the candidate who is most likely to reach taht conclusion--Kerry. But that is a political decision, not a military one. Militarily, the insurgents are losing and do not have the capacity to defeat the US forces. In every engagement of US forces with the enemy the results has been a lopsided US victory.
The Friedman's and Sullivan's need to decide if they are going to take the position that the existenance of an insurgency means a failure of US planners and US forces. If that is their test, they make it possible for the very weak to indeed rule the world. What the US is facing in Iraq is a very weak insurgency with little to no political support. The insurgents are incapable of mounting a company size attack, and if they did they would be wiped out.
Just becuase an enemy continues to fight after he has lost the war, does not mean it was wrong to have fought it. The Iraqi insurgency is very much like the Ku Klux Klan after the US Civil War. That they exist is not President Bush's fault. We should just deal with them.
Roger Simon:
The mistake that Friedman and Sullivan make is the presumption that in a war you always know what your enemy is going to do and you can always manage it. It is a belief that war is like a math problem that only has one answer. The problem is that war is a dynamic experience where your enemy makes decisions that respond to what you do.
Tom Friedman accuses the Bush national security team of "criminal incompetence" in his NYT oped this morning. The article is approvingly cited by Andrew Sullivan who seems particularly eager these days to find backing for his contention that things were badly mismanaged in Iraq. Maybe these men are right. I don't know. But I wonder how they are so sure.
In Iraq, the enemy has done some things to make it harder to turn Iraq into a peaceful democratic society. They still lack the capacity to stop that from happening, but they do have the capacity to make it messier. The only way they can win is if our politicians decide it is too messy to finish the job. Friedman and Sullivan seem to be backing the candidate who is most likely to reach taht conclusion--Kerry. But that is a political decision, not a military one. Militarily, the insurgents are losing and do not have the capacity to defeat the US forces. In every engagement of US forces with the enemy the results has been a lopsided US victory.
The Friedman's and Sullivan's need to decide if they are going to take the position that the existenance of an insurgency means a failure of US planners and US forces. If that is their test, they make it possible for the very weak to indeed rule the world. What the US is facing in Iraq is a very weak insurgency with little to no political support. The insurgents are incapable of mounting a company size attack, and if they did they would be wiped out.
Just becuase an enemy continues to fight after he has lost the war, does not mean it was wrong to have fought it. The Iraqi insurgency is very much like the Ku Klux Klan after the US Civil War. That they exist is not President Bush's fault. We should just deal with them.
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