Actually, somewhere there behind his usual fog of mega-hackery, our man Vic seems to realize, like the generals did months ago, that it's time to start seriously laying out an alibi for the loss of the Iraq War: The Quiet Consensus on Iraq: The more they argue, the more they sound the same by Victor Davis Hanson 10/07/05.
Vic says:
The shortcoming [in the Iraq War] was never the number of U.S troops per se, but our self-imposed straightjacket on rules of engagement that apparently discouraged the vital sorts of offensive operations that we have at last seen the last two months.
Yeah, all those rules about minimizing civilian casualties and restrictions on torture were holding us back from Final Victory. But now, Vic says things are going fine. We're probably approaching the "tipping point." I mean, if you believe Vic.
Vic is trying to do the stiff upper lip pose and all that. But the weirdness of his ostensible argument in this column is likely to be a symptom of panic. You know those religious cults where the leader predicts the end of the world on a certain day? You might think when the day comes and goes with no apocalypse, that the followers would melt away.
But you would be wrong. The short-run reaction in groups like that is to believe even more strongly in the leader and in whatever excuse he comes up with for it failing.
Iraq War fans have already gone through a moment like that with the WMDs. Once they weren't found, the Republicans were suddenly passionately, desperately concerned for the human rights of Iraqis. But now the hardcore supporters of the war have shrunk to less that the portion of the country that loyally votes Republican. So even some hardcore Reps are no longer drinking the neocon kool-aid on Iraq.
But the neocons themselves, like our man Vic, are now facing the collapse of their even more grandiose dreams. And, if Vic's column is a measure - and it usually is - they are going into another phase of desperately believing that the prophecy is really, really true, it's just that some little thing went wrong this time. Vic is desperately asking us in this column to believe that darn near everybody agrees with Bush's "stay the course" policy, except for a few demented lunatics like Cindy Sheehan and Howard Dean. Bush just has a slightly different emphasis that the 70% or so of the public that thinks the Iraq War is a godawful mess.
Vic is confident of the exit strategy:
Yet most supporters of the war do not want an open-ended commitment to Iraq either, with large permanent basing and perpetual subsidies to such an oil-rich state. So here too there is general agreement emerging about our goals as outlined by most of the military's top brass: in a year or two begin to downsize our presence in Iraq, ideally leaving behind special forces and elite units embedded within Iraqi units, backed up by instantaneous air support.
In the larger sense, with Saddam gone — he was the reason for America's 1991 build up in the region in the first place — our total regional troop strength could decline, contingent on the degree to which Al Qaeda poses less of a conventional threat than Saddam Hussein once did in this critical area.
This is the approach that I am hereby officially dubbing the Oasis Exit Strategy. It looks beautiful. But as you get closer and closer to that point where we start withdrawing troops, it just keeps receding into the distance. Also, I don't believe I've heard a clear commitment from the Bush administration not to seek those permanent bases.
But Vic also, in what could generously be construed as unintentional candor, describes how the Bush administration has now made the Iraq War its own justification, a self-perpetuating horror for which no end can be realistically conceived. And he even offers empirical evidence for it, kinda sorta, with his own version of a body count:
In one of the strangest developments of this entire war, the Western world hears almost nothing about the aggregate number of jihadists killed by coalition forces in Iraq, even though we suspect it may have been several thousand — 10,000, 20,000, 50,000? Surely this has had both a concrete and a spiritual effect on hundreds of thousands of angry young Islamists, who are beginning to realize that a trip to Iraq may be lethal - and unwelcomed by most Iraqis who just wish to be left alone to form their own new government. Whatever one thought about the nexus of Iraq and terror before, no one now denies that our jihadist enemies are in Iraq and are being fought and defeated there each day.
How many "jihadists" have we killed? Oh, ten thousand, fifty thousand, a lot anyway, and who cares about the number because they're all just a bunch of dead terrorists, right?
Vic goes back to the "flypaper" theory, which says we fight The Terrorist over there so we don't have to fight them over here. But he argues that we know the flypaper theory works because there are all these terrorists making strikes in other countries outside the Middle East. Yet, somehow the Iraq War is supposed to be drawing the apparently finite supply of The Terrorists from all the world to Iraq. "Better then to draw them out and hit them abroad than just play defense at home," he writes.
Well, yeah, Vic, if it actually worked that way, it would. And when it comes to the neocon grand fantasy of a war of liberation here or there inspiring the Arab masses to rise up and establish pro-American regimes, Vic is still drinking the kool-aid:
If Iraq is a more lethal theater than Afghanistan, and appears the more unstable, then we should remember that Saddam Hussein was sui generis, and his warped country the linchpin of the Arab Middle East. Who knows what Iraq will look like in, say, 15 months, given that its liberation had about that much lag time after the fall of the Taliban? [Presumably we're supposed to believe that Afghanistan is now a model democracy. Or something. - Bruce]
On the horizon there are a number of events whose public repercussions are impossible to predict, although they may well enhance the efforts of democratic reformers. The elections of October will be followed by even more voting in December. For all the predictions of Sunni boycotts and subversion, at some point the wiser ones will participate — understanding that the insurgents are losing, destroying not the Americans, but their own country in the process, and that a constitution moves onward, with or without them.
Soon there will be a globally televised trial of Saddam Hussein that may well shock the Arab autocracies — especially when their unfree populations gaze on the most well-known and thuggish of the Arab illegitimate leaders, chained in the docket and demurring to a constitutionally-appointed judge.
And he concludes with an insistance that everyone but lunatics like Michael Moore agrees with him and his hero Bush, Liberator of Peoples and Hooder of the Unrighteous:
Yes, America is divided about Left/Right politics and over occasional antiwar street theater. But on the major issue of the war on terror and Iraq, most critics have very few ideas of doing anything other than what we are doing right now. The result is a strange consensus that few speak about — but fewer still wish to undo.
If Vic keeps going down this path, don't be surprised if he's found one day standing in front of his mirror with glazed eyes, repeating over and over again, "Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. ..."
Or maybe it will be more like Kyle McLaughlin in the final scene of the final episode of the Twin Peaks series as Agent Dale Cooper, standing in front of his mirror, seeing the reflection of the demon Killer Bob looking back and him, and repeating over and over, "Where's Annie? Where's Annie?" and cackling madly.
The death of a beautiful dream can do that to you. Especially when the beautiful dream requires years of blood and carnage to bring it into being.
