Iraq.

Obama keeps trotting out that going to war with Iraq was a mistake, standard received wisdom on the left. Which just goes to show the shallowness of their ‘thinking’. Not mentioned is what might have happened had we not. We would still have Saddam running a dysfunctional totalitarian state in the midst of like states, with the only likelihood for the future being that it would get worse and more dangerous. Instead we have a nascent democracy in an Arab Muslin country which is also an ally. We have a presence there that we would not otherwise have. We have the example to other Arab states that yes, they can ‘do’ democracy and that it is beneficial to them and to the world. This was the real ‘Bush Doctrine’ as laid out by Paul Wolfowitz and others and it is still the best hope for changing what could not be left to fester like a metastasizing cancer, it had to be tackled just as in the end Nazism and Communism were. But you try to explain that to a lefty, they merely think you are insane or retarded.

What I really wanted to comment on is the also oft repeated canard that ‘mistakes were made’, that it was Rumsfeld and Bush’s obstinacy that created the insurgency and Al Qaeda and the ‘quagmire’. But what if Petraeus had been parachuted in after the initial invasion with his surge, would it have worked? I think not. Just as Germany and Japan had to experience the horror of military defeat and devastation, so the Sunnis had to experience the same, though not by the US. Al Qaeda did us a huge favour by making Iraq their central battle ground. Though the Sunnis allied themselves to AQ, thinking the US was the enemy, [which it was I guess since they'd ousted them from their position of the 'natural' rulers of Iraq], they gave them a taste of real defeat and occupation by a hostile entity, which also provoked the Shia to retaliate with the spectre of all out civil war erupting. Without those years of war and horror I think neither the Sunnis or the Shia would have given up their conviction that Iraq belonged to them to rule and do with as they saw fit. In the meantime, because of their intelligent and heroic role, the US Military came to be seen as the ‘good guys’, which the surge emphasized by showing the Iraqis, and the Sunnis especially, that we meant business, that we weren’t going to quit and leave them to the mercies of AQ and/or the remnants of Saddam’s regime. This is what Obama, Murtha, and all the other critics of the surge didn’t understand and that Bush, Petraeus and others did, and why Obama ‘couldn’t in his wildest dreams’ see that it could succeed. But Iraq had to be ‘ready’ for that.

It took the British some fifteen years to defeat the Communist insurgency in Malaya, how many years is it now that Sri Lanka has been fighting the Tamil Tigers, it isn’t something that can be achieved in a short time by waltzing in and ‘doing everything right’ and be out again in a year or two. It’s a hard slog, but something the civilized world has to engage in from time to time since there will always be areas of the globe that become totalitarian and dangerous.

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