The Free Thinker

"Americans Have Come Full Circle on Iraq" (CBS)

Six years after the start of U.S. military operations in Iraq, American optimism about the situation in Iraq has returned to levels last seen in 2003, according to a new CBS News poll.

Still, most Americans continue to believe the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq in the first place. And Americans are now far more pessimistic about the situation in Afghanistan than they are the war in Iraq.

Sixty-four percent of Americans now say U.S. efforts to bring stability and order to Iraq are going at least somewhat well. That's the highest percentage since December 2003, shortly after the U.S. capture of Saddam Hussein.

Just one year ago, only 43 percent described things in Iraq as going well. In June 2007, the percentage who said as much was just 22 percent. Americans began feeling more positive about the situation in Iraq last fall...

Despite the increased optimism, more than half of those surveyed – 55 percent – maintain the U.S. should not have entered the country...

Asked what the U.S. should have done about Iraq, just 29 percent say the U.S. strategy of removing Saddam and rebuilding Iraq was the best plan. A nearly identical percentage – 28 percent – say the U.S. should have removed the Iraqi leader and then left; another 40 percent say the U.S. should not have gotten involved at all.

That the same article says that "55 percent maintain the US should not have entered the country," then two paragraphs later, that "40 percent say the US should not have gotten involved at all"-- which is it?-- is a reminder of how problematic public opinion polls are.  29% + 28% = 57% who think we were right to remove Saddam; do 17% also think that we could have removed Saddam without entering the country.

What's interesting, though, is how little credit Bush has gotten for what no one bothers to deny anymore was turning things around and winning the war.  I don't blame them though.  Too many pundits and politicians invested their whole reputational capital in failure in Iraq.  They have mouths to feed, whereas Bush is set for life.  Not giving Bush credit is a way of redistributing reputational capital from the guy who doesn't need it to those who desperately need what's left of their eroding stock.  Fair enough.

The pundits' punishment, and I think deep down they know it, is that instead of writing history's first draft, they are destined for history's dustbin.  No doubt there will be plenty of campus leftist professors who will write books, purchased only by students required to read them for classes taught by other campus leftist professors, who will treat the writings of pundits of the Bushitler school as evidence rather than neurosis.  But ordinary people won't buy them because they just won't make sense.  Even to understand them, you'll have to know the weird code-language of the liberal counter-narrative, according to which the idea that the Iraqis "welcomed us as liberators" is a neocon fantasy rather than, what irrefutable video evidence easily proves, a fact.  Or that Bush's proclaimed goal of making Iraq a democracy was either a cynical cover for imperialism ("blood for oil"), or else the impossible dream of a starry-eyed "ideologue," whereas it is now obvious that the war objective was quite practicable (that it was sincere should always have been obvious).  People might also be puzzled by suggestions that Iraq was a distraction from the war against al-Qaeda-- wasn't it in Iraq that we dealt the crucial blows to al-Qaeda?-- or by criticisms of Bush for trading the unwinnable quagmire in Afghanistan for the manifold strategic advantages of the Iraqi battlefield.

Oh yes, and remember those long-ago olden days when Bush was mocked from all sides by declaring "Mission Accomplished" after US troops had achieved the stunning feat of removing from power one of the world's most bloodthirsty dictators and fiercest enemies of the West in a mere three weeks?  I can't remember what the critics' logic was, but apparently 27% of Americans agree with Bush that it was at that point that we had accomplished the main mission.  

The Long War of Ideas

A Newsweek article claims that "Bush is losing hopelessly in the war of ideas." (With the flagrant addendum: "What the terrorists can teach him about strategy, propaganda and ideology. We'll focus on the first part.) What does the author (Christopher Dickey) mean?

“Ideology” is a word that President George W. Bush likes to use almost as much as “terrorist.” In presenting the lack-of-progress report about Iraq yesterday, he justified the negligible and negative results of the surge in troops by arguing “we are at the beginning of a great ideological conflict.” In fact, he used variations on that word and that theme a dozen times in an hour. But if you listen to the president, it’s hard to tell just what he means.

As Bush puts it, the struggle is “between those who yearn for peace and those who want their children to grow up in a normal, decent society, and radicals and extremists who want to impose their dark vision on people throughout the world.” But the sad irony is that this is precisely the argument, in reverse, that Al Qaeda and its many spinoffs use to justify their fight. And Al Qaeda’s people, as leading counterinsurgency strategists admit, make their case much more effectively. [my emphasis]

What is worth noting first  of all is that Dickey is not writing about the US political arena. He is not saying that Bush is losing the war of ideas to the Democrats. Liberals would, I suppose, like to think of this as a three-cornered war of ideas, with two sets of "bad guys"-- the Bushies, and the radical Islamists-- and one set of good guys: Western peaceniks, the Democrats and most west Europeans, the defenders of international law.  But Dickey doesn't even mention these good guys, because they're not part of the war of ideas.  They don't have ideas.  They don't have a strategic vision.  They haven't thought it through partly.  All they have is escapism clothed in resentment: escapism from being part of the same world as the tortured, desperate Arab Middle East; resentment that the Bush administration has embroiled us in its problems.

The other point to note is the phrase: "as leading counterinsurgency experts admit."  Admit suggests a reluctant acknowledgement, as if the experts would be more likely to say that we're winning, thus supposedly making their point stronger.  It's the opposite.  Counterinsurgency experts are paid to look at the worst-case scenarios with a worried eye.  Kremlinologists always thought we were losing the Cold War.  We weren't.

[T]he basic idea used by Osama bin Laden’s fellow travelers to justify their actions is that they’re under attack and on the defensive everywhere just because they’re Muslims.  They could raise their families in peace and with dignity if it were not for the “dark vision” of the Bush administration and the forces of godless globalization that it represents.

Bernard Lewis exposed this myth.  The radical Islamists don't just want the West to stop meddling.  They have a totalitarian vision they want to impose on their own region of the world.  The Muslim rulers are the "near enemy," while the US is the "far enemy."

The proof of American intentions, they argue, lies in Washington’s support for the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, as well as its own occupation of Iraq. And it’s not like the people of the Middle East, Africa and Asia haven’t seen this sort of thing before—and hated it deeply. In much of the world, Bush’s rhetoric rings less of freedom than the rationalizations of the old British Empire.

A revisionist historiography of colonialism is desperately needed.*  "The people of the Middle East, Africa and Asia" didn't unanimously "hate [colonialism] deeply."  Some Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners were loyal to their colonial rulers to the very end.  Often these have been branded "collaborators" by triumphant anti-colonial nationalists.  Sometimes they have been slaughtered, an event for which the former colonialist powers have never expressed adequate shame.  But anyway...

David J. Kilcullen—an Australian who is the senior counterinsurgency adviser to the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus—lays out the enemy ideologues’ advantages:

• They integrate “terrorism, subversion, humanitarian work, and insurgency” to support propaganda that influences global and local audiences.

Islamists have been doing that since long before the war in Iraq.  That's how the PLO, and later Hamas, built support in Palestine, and how Hezbollah builds support in Lebanon.  Iraq has interrupted this strategy, forcing al-Qaeda to engage in a lot more terrorism, while the humanitarian work is mostly being done by the US.

• They’ve been able to create grass-roots movements pulling together people from many different countries into a whole that’s greater than the parts, “with dispersed leadership and planning functions that deny us detectable targets.”

Again, this characteristic predates Iraq, and has been interrupted by Iraq.  Slaughter of Muslims has undermined al-Qaeda's grass-roots appeal.  It has created conflicts among the "dispersed leadership," between a bloodthirsty Zarqawi and a Zawahiri worried about reputation.  It has given us plenty of "detectable targets."

• They exploit the speed of modern communications to mobilize people much faster than any government bureaucracy can do.

Not sure what that means.  The US government can mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers in days if not hours.  Can al-Qaeda mobilize people faster than that.

• They play on deep-seated beliefs founded in “religious, ethnic, tribal or cultural identity” to create what Kilcullen describes as “extremely lethal, nonrational reactions.”

Nonrationality is a strength?  Sometimes, maybe.  But most often these "nonrational reactions" are more lethal to their perpetrators than to us.

• They use high-profile symbolic attacks that provoke nation-states into overreactions that damage the states’ long-term interests.

But no, the war in Iraq [the "overreaction"] has not damaged the US's long-term interests.  It has-- as Nato once put it-- given al-Qaeda enough rope to hang itself, while simultaneously creating a precedent that makes every tyrant in the world sleep less soundly.  In this way, it points the way towards "the end of tyranny in our world," as Bush put it.  The deaths of the soldiers who have given their lives in the conflict is a source of grief to their families, but they constitute a very small share of the US armed forces.  And since the US military has a history of learning from the challenges it has faced, the war in Iraq will be a critical stimulus to the development of just the kind of capacities-- counter-insurgency; nation-building-- that will likely be most useful in coming decades.  The cost in money is minor relative to the US economy.

• They mount “numerous, cheap, small-scale challenges to exhaust us by provoking expensive containment, prevention, and response efforts in dozens of remote areas."

But since these "challenges" typically involve murdering civilians they are anything but propaganda successes.  And our containment efforts, though not especially successful so far, are not cripplingly expensive for a country with a $13 trillion economy.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq that Bush now describes as the beginning of this ideological war was carried out, in fact, with utter disregard for the ideological consequences.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is precisely at the ideological level that the Iraq gambit was so brilliant.  It immobilized the left-liberal internationalists by heightening the contradictions between their humanitarianism and their post-colonial sovereigntism-for-the-Third-World.  At the same time, it made al-Qaeda the bull to America's matador, forcing them to charge into a battleground where they had to face us head-on, and where the asymmetric warfare that could have been devastatingly effective if it had consisted of a series of 9/11-type attacks, instead merely served to ruin the organization's reputation.

Like Truman, Bush committed America to a generational struggle.  As before, there will be Red Scares and imaginary "missile gaps" as Americans get impatient with not seeing their country in its traditional winner role.  But the most important struggles take a long time to win.

Take That, Big Brother!

From the LA Times (Senate faces showdown on immigration, 6/28/07):

But the most ambitious attempt to overhaul immigration laws in two decades suffered a major setback late Wednesday when lawmakers approved an amendment that the bill's backers and the administration said would undermine its effectiveness. The measure targeted the bill's work-site enforcement section, removing all provisions that required so-called "Real ID" driver's licenses — tamper-proof, secure identification that does not yet exist, but that the bill's backers consider essential to cracking down on illegal hiring.

Repeated objections from the bill's Republican opponents meant that the Senate could not consider other amendments to toughen enforcement against illegal immigrants. The bill's backers had hoped those amendments would bolster Republican support.

The tamper-proof ID card was the scariest aspect of the bill. Any crackdown on illegal hiring will just drive them underground, and maybe empower organized crime in the process, like Prohibition in the 1920s. I was ready to swallow this sinister provision to avert the still worse threat of ethnic cleansing (a.k.a., mass deportation). But thank heaven it's out of there. Now let's hope the bill passes.

UPDATE: It doesn't:

WASHINGTON - The Senate drove a stake Thursday through President Bush's plan to legalize millions of unlawful immigrants, likely postponing major action on immigration until after the 2008 elections.

The bill's supporters fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to limit debate and clear the way for final passage of the legislation, which critics assailed as offering amnesty to illegal immigrants. The vote was 46 to 53 in favor of limiting the debate.

A Pyrrhic victory for GOP conservatives: "silent amnesty" continues. Best-case scenario for 2008: McCain becomes president, Dems take both houses of Congress, aided by 90% of the Hispanic vote.

UPDATE II: The defeat of immigration reform makes the parallel between Bush and Truman even stronger. Like Truman, Bush voiced the case for-- a bit ineloquently-- and initiated-- a bit clumsily-- a cold war against a worldwide menace for which it took time for the nation to muster the resolve; and in particular, he got us into a hot war in which a crucial geostrategic advance at a global level was masked by a bloody stalemate (though much less bloody, for us at least, in Bush's case). Like Truman, Bush started putting the pressure on on the great civil rights issue of his times, but political conditions were not yet ripe-- the nation's conscience was not sufficiently awakened-- to carry out the transformative changes that justice demanded.

Like Truman, Bush faces the main opposition to civil rights from his own party, just as the Democrats had their reactionary southern wing. Interestingly, if the parallel holds, it is ultimately Republicans, and not Democrats, who will deliver immigrants' rights. Why not? It's one of the few things that free-marketeers, the business lobby, neocons, evangelicals and Catholics can all agree on!

And ex-President Bush will still be a force. In fact, I look forward to him. Having committed himself to global democracy and immigrants' rights, he has plenty of work left to do on the other side of the White House.