Got a link to this post from Dark Syde at Brent Rasmussen's site in my inbox. Was flattered to receive it; the other folks it was addressed to were Tim Blair and Jim Treacher, which means the author must think pretty highly of me to link me in with those two fellows, whose blogs are rather more famous than mine.
So, thanks, Dark Syde.
I disagree with almost everything you say in your article, though. It begins well enough; the stockbroker story is rather entertaining.
But we then get into the stock setwork, lighting, and casting. Cue the maiden being tied to the tracks! Cue the moustache-twirling villains! Cue the train emerging from the tunnel!
Where to start . . .
The War in Iraq edges closer toward catastrophic disaster daily, by any sane assessment, . . .
Catastrophic? In what sense? It reminds me of the "Iraq spinning out of control" meme. It implies that there is a great big cliff we are marching towards. Really? Well where's the cliff? Where is the tipping point where our position in Iraq becomes militarily untenable? You say we are headed towards catastrophe. Care to tell us when that occurs? February? April? June? Sometime in 2006? Hillary's second term?
Remember -- in Vietnam we faced a much larger problem, and were suffering almost ten soldiers killed a day. In Iraq, that figure is two per day. (This month, so far, we are suffering 1.63 dead per day.) We were never in danger of being militarily forced out of Vietnam. Never. Had we had more political will in the U.S., we could have remained in Saigon until today. Instead, we abandoned the people of Vietnam to their fate. It was shameful to do so. The tragedy of Vietnam was not in us getting involved there. It was noble of us to do so. The tragedy was that we abandoned an ally in the field and did not take the measures necessary to win.
We face a struggle. Our choices are a) continue the struggle, or b) cut and run. Do you really think we'll be better off if we cut and run? Did leaving Vietnam enhance or hurt our image in the world?
And as a side note, it is also somewhat ungenerous to flatly assert that any assessment that disagrees with yours must therefore be insane. Shouldn't we at least wait for the results of my Rohrschach test before we go there?
In the process we have, for all intents and purposes, given up on capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and his deputy Aymen Al Zawahari, even though Jihadist videos continue to flow from their remote wilderness hideaways, in which they quite bluntly explain that they're going to attack us again and again. It doesn't make a lick of sense to allow your enemy a refuge in which to regroup. There is no chapter in Sun Tzu's The Art of War recommending you go after someone who has no bearing on your foe, and allow that enemy to catch his breath.
Evidence of this? You are drawing a conclusion without offering an argument. Who says we've given up on Bin Laden? It appears to me that we are still hunting Al Qaeda. As are our allies.
A few things to keep in mind about the place he's hiding. It is winter. Afghanistan and the remote provinces of Pakistan are extremely difficult places to fight even in the summer. When the mountains become passable again in the spring, we begin the hunt again.
What, militarily, would you have us do differently there? Short of using nuclear weapons to make the entire area uninhabitable, we don't have a lot of good options there. We wait until spring and then we resume the hunt.
The tribal areas are approximately 25,000 square miles in size. About the same size as West Virginia. So take West Virginia. Remove virtually all the roads and infrastructure. Put in some 10,000 foot high mountains. Add a local population that doesn't cotton much to outsiders -- well, ok, we've already got that.
Now, find 10-20 men who are doing their damnedest to hide.
You might remember this cautionary tale. Took five years to capture this guy in rural North Carolina.
So, how many troops do you want to devote to this operation? I don't know about you, but my answer would be something along the lines of "as few as possible." Because it is likely to be impossible to catch them, until the day they decide to come out of the mountains and start rustling through dumpsters.
Will we eventually get them? Perhaps. But think of it this way. He has nowhere to train large numbers of terrorists. He has the Special Forces hunting him. He likely does not have any communications gear more sophisticated than the M1A1 Guy On a Donkey. So, he is, if not eliminated as a threat, then at least pretty well degraded.
Traditional conservatives have long felt that free market capitalism is a cure all for every geopolitical ill.
Not so. Free trade and capitalism are good things. But also add in democracy, the rule of law, and freedom of religion. The market does a good job distributing material goods. It does nothing for the soul. Both things are important. To reduce Conservatism to mere capitalism is missing quite a bit.
There's much more. Give Dark Syde's article a read. I will also, as time permits, and may offer more thoughts.
And thanks, for lumping me in with Treacher and Tim Blair. Good company to be in.
UPDATE: I've corrected a few things; I originally had Brent Rasmussen as the author. It is his co-blogger DarkSyde that wrote the post. My bad. I've corrected it in my post.
