A Response to Jeff Goldstein and His Chorus Blog

This time, however, the media cannot control the entirety of the narrative. And we feckless keyboard warriors and chickenhawks will never let Americans forget,

You really are a talented writer. The problem is that America will forget, because no one hangs around to read keyboard warriors whose overriding ethos or tone is different from what they already believe. And that seems to be the problem with the blogosphere. Everyone seems content to hang out with people who agree with them, and slander anyone who disagrees, and in this way there is no persuasion, which means the numbers stay the same.

The only entre out of obscurity is a fact-based analysis (e.g., the expose of the fraudulent docs concerning Dubya’s service) and even then it bubbles up via MSM. Expressions of opinion, no matter how finely wrought, or magnanimous (an adjective tha applies almost no blog posts), just aren’t going to bubble up and propagate.

The problem is that the war has not turned out as it was advertised in late ‘02 and early ‘03. That’s just a fact. As a consequence of that fact, the American people are tired of the war, and just want it over. The polls on this have been solid for some time.

I watched the TV commentators (and their guests) today. They seemed to cover the spectrum fairly well. Most everyone is calling for “one last push”—ok, fine. Do it. But everyone agrees that this “one last push” is a final roll of the dice. And that if it doesn’t work, we gotta get out. That’s the broad carapace of common sense / conventional wisdom / received opinion which keyboard warriors would have to pierce.

Of course, failure in Iraq—we appear to be failing so far—is terrible for the United States and brutally cruel to our men and women in the armed forces of the United States, the dead, and the maimed. We could—in the opinion of those who think the whole project was a mistake—“throw good money after bad”, or “stay the course” for those who think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. But that approach has to contend with the “you told us sumpin different!” attitude that is now widespread across the land.

_I_ think that at this point it’s a failure of political leadership. If we really want to go balls to the wall in Iraq, we have to go balls to the wall in the whole region, we have to have political leadership that points to the militarization of our culture, the notion of necessary shared sacrifice, but all of this with ABSOLUTE GUARANTEES of individual rights (inc. privacy, freedom of speech), and the notion that we cannot afford to allow a billion Muslims to go batshit, not only because of the oil that fuels the global economy on whose stability our country depends, but also because we cannot afford 1/6th of the population of the world to be unstable, to acquire nuclear weapons and destroy cities in accordance with a nihilist ideology.

However, there’s no way we can do these things with the relatively puny number of people we have in our armed forces. In World War Two, at one point or another, 25% of Germans were in uniform. Our armed forces, including recent veterans, probably is at about 1%. We cannot provide security to the world—our world—under those circumstances.

Nature abhors a vacuum and politics abhors a vacuum of power. There are vacuums of power throughout the Arab/Muslim world, and either we, Americans, fill those vacuums or someone else will. We need to orient our society towards armed service, mobilize the country, re-establish the draft, drastically increase our armed forces (especially ground forces), increase taxes to fund our defense establishment, and then pacify Iraq. Then, we act further on the basis of what the neighbors do. We do not act on the basis of our limited forces, we do not act on the basis of “what we think we can get away with.”

SHORT TERM, I think we are losing and will lose. Too many people have an almost superstitious faith in the efficacy of remote weapons systems. Short term, we cannot possibly put enough people on the ground. But LONG TERM (five years) we can do this. We simply need the political leadership to do it, and we aren’t getting it, and it is unlikely we are going to get it via blog posts here or there. If we don’t get the political leadership to do the things I have outlined, then we will in fact lose, regardless of the imprecations and gnashing of teeth.

NOTE: Although I have been calling for radical increases in the size of the armed forces for a long time, people always accuse me of being a defeatist, because, they say, I am only suggesting these alternatives because I “know” they are unattainable. Rubbish. We can do anything we want to do, we simply need the political leadership to spell out to the American people what’s going on and what needs to be done.

On the other hand, if people continue to insist that these problems can be solved by dropping more bigger bombs, or by killing more people and letting God sort them out, or by insisting we can turn the Iraq fiasco into a triumph by “controlling the narrative”, we will continue to fail. This is not something that can be solved by sending 20 K troops into Baghdad and letting them act like the Wehrmacht in Occupied Russia. We need a lot more people involved, and unless we get that, we will lose, lose, lose, and we are not getting the political leadership to get there.