Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Mercurial predictions

Victor Davis Hanson:

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Political prognoses in wartime are notoriously mercurial, hinging on the weekly eddies of the battlefield. But these are sometimes poor indicators of larger strategic currents. If one thing can be said with confidence about Iraq, it is that the story is not over, since so far the daily bombings have neither prompted American withdrawal nor derailed scheduled elections and reforms. In World War II, the bloodiest moment of the Pacific theater was at Okinawa, finally declared secure a mere nine weeks before the Japanese surrender, while in Europe the Battle of the Bulge, a slog that cost more American lives than the drive to the Rhine, was not finished until only about 100 days before Germany collapsed. What can be seen in hindsight, and only in hindsight, is that while Americans were being butchered in Belgium and on Sugar Loaf Hill, larger forces were insidiously working to doom Germany and Japan in short order. The last gasps of resistance are sometimes the bloodiest and most unexpected.

Just so, Afghanistan a year ago was supposedly a hopeless case, torn apart by warlords and Taliban resurgence, and unfit for elections; today the country is mostly on the back pages, as if democracy were de rigueur for a nation recently dismissed as a relic of the Dark Ages. Similarly, with all the news of bombings and beheadings coming from Iraq, the larger picture, not so easily deciphered, shows signs of real progress in most of the country. The long overdue retaking of Falluja and ancillary military operations have sent their own signal: that a reelected George Bush intends to ensure the installation and the survival of a legitimately elected Iraqi government. The specter of that constitutional authority sending troops to quash mercenaries, Baathists, and Wahhabi jihadists is precisely what frightens al Qaeda and other avatars of Islamic fascism, who have rightly grasped that their failure in the Sunni triangle will constitute a bitter defeat for global Islamic fundamentalism itself.

The American persistence in Iraq under difficult circumstances might also explain why potential enemies farther afield, from Teheran to Pyongyang, have so far decided not to seize the moment to press their luck with the United States. Meanwhile, the world at large appears more, rather than less, disposed to stand up to Islamic fascism and the terror it wages. Even less ambiguously, Pakistan, though often playing a duplicitous role in the past, has remained a neutral in the war on terror if not at times an ally, while its nuclear guru, A.P. Khan, is for the moment in retirement. On the issue of the dangers posed by Islamic extremism, nearly 3 billion people in India, China, Japan, and the former Soviet Union are more likely to favor than to oppose American counterterrorism efforts. Libya is suddenly coming clean about its own nefarious schemes and even opening its borders to African aid workers. Murmurs of democratic change are rumbling throughout the autocratic Gulf. Terrorists are not so welcome as they once were in Jordan, Yemen, or much of North Africa. Even Europe, stung by charges of profit-driven appeasement, and even the UN, reeling under financial and humanitarian scandals, are reconsidering their habitual modes of reflexive accommodation.

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There are lessons here for those who claim that American flexibility has become increasingly constricted and American choices all but foreclosed. In fact, as Iraq comes slowly under control, the opposite prognosis is at least as likely to be the case. Precisely because of proven American resolve in Iraq, the United States now commands both military and diplomatic options—well short of another Iraq-style invasion—that were not at its disposal previously.

The new stature enjoyed by America is especially germane in the Middle East itself. There, the first place where diplomatic and political initiatives could usefully be exercised is in the problematic triad of Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. The U.S. might, to begin with, pressure the UN Security Council to go beyond its recent call for Syria to end its occupation of Lebanon by demanding internationally supervised elections, to follow immediately upon the departure of the Baathists.

Both Iran and Syria, through their terrorist ganglia on the ground in the Bekaa Valley, can be counted on to try to strangle any such effort. But this is not 1983, when America retreated after Marines were murdered in Beirut and later bargained for hostages. Today the Lebanese, returning to their wonted entrepreneurialism, are tiring of the Baathist Syrians. Yasir Arafat is dead. And the Iranians are leery of American strikes against their nuclear facilities. It is thus a singularly opportune moment to stir worries about principled democratization; for nothing could be more dangerous to an untested dictatorship like Syria’s than to ring it with an enlarging circle of autonomous countries with free elections, unbridled radio and television, and uncensored Internet service. To Arabs in Syria and elsewhere who are increasingly aware that they enjoy neither the freedoms nor the prosperity that billions elsewhere take for granted, the appeal of such reform is potentially explosive.