Friday, August 11, 2006

We’re in a war. Let’s try to win it.

When did Newt Gingrich morph into such an erudite statesman? He has an excellent article in today’s WashPost today titled “The only option is to win”:

[Richard] Holbrooke represents the diplomacy first-diplomacy always school. We saw its workings throughout the 1990s, as Syria was visited again and again by secretaries of state who achieved absolutely nothing. Even a secretary of state dancing with Kim Jong Il (arguably a low point in American diplomatic efforts) produced no results; such niceties never do in dealing with vicious dictators.

The democracies have been talking while the dictators and the terrorists gain strength and move closer to having the weapons necessary for a terrifying assault on America and its allies.
Hope springs eternal among the talkers, as Charles Krauthammer noted in “Short term gain, long term pain”:

Lamont said in his victory speech that the time had come to "fix George Bush's failed foreign policy." Yet, as Martin Peretz pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on Iran, the looming long-term Islamist threat, Lamont's views are risible. Lamont's alternative to the Bush Iran policy is to "bring in allies" and "use carrots as well as sticks."

Where has this man been? Negotiators with Iran have had carrots coming out of their ears in three years of fruitless negotiations. Allies? We let the British, French and Germans negotiate with Iran for those three years, only to have Iran brazenly begin accelerated uranium enrichment that continues to this day.

Lamont seems to think that we should just sit down with the Iranians and show them why going nuclear is not a good idea. This recalls Sen. William Borah's immortal reaction in September 1939 upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland to start World War II: "Lord, if I could only have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."
To quote JFK: “Let us never fear to negotiate.” But what happens when negotiations break down and no consensus can be found? Robert Tracinksi writes that the clash between the liberal West and the Mideast mullahs is inevitable:

It is, indeed, "five minutes to midnight"—not just for Israel, but for the West. The time is very short now before we will have to confront Iran. The only question is how long we let events spin out of our control, and how badly we let the enemy hit us before we begin fighting back.
Unfortunately, I think it will take a nuclear bomb to awaken Americans to the idea that we’re fighting a global war on terror. Five years after 9/11, the slide back to the collective shrug of “acceptable losses” such as the occasional Khobar Towers or USS Cole is unmistakable. Yes, let’s talk, but let’s not be afraid to act.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Harry Truman was invoked in another thread. When the Korean War unexpectedly started, it was Truman's stated opinion that World War 3 had begun. He was, we now see, wrong.

It wasn't such an unusual error. People tend to overimbue the current events of their political lives with epochal significance. Professionals tend to use those same events to their advantage (a pithy if biased quote of the last 48 hours describes this week's bombing plot as a potential "political defibrillator by Republicans on electoral life support").

Just as the 1960s and 1970s were shaped more by civil rights and the women's movement and the growth of suburbia than by Vietnam, this period is far more likely to be shaped more by the computer or everyday surveillance or in vitro research than it ever will by Dick Cheney's threatened mushroom cloud.

Some people prefer the idea of a "war" because wars tend to have startpoints and endpoints and finite boundaries. It comforts them to think they're fighting a "war"; it makes upsetting and vague and open-ended circumstances less scary to contemplate. But they shouldn't feel too insulted if the other participants don't conform to a neat, compartmentalized battlefield mindset.

The first useful step in a "war" against terrorism is not to be so terrorized. If this step is taken, many things are possible. If it is not taken, the "war" is already over. Of course, there is little electoral or commercial gain in this attitude, which is why you hear so little of it from our leaders or our media.

Eric said...

Well put. Thanks for your comment.