{"id":687,"date":"2005-01-14T18:39:08","date_gmt":"2005-01-14T18:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:58","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:58","slug":"how_do_we_know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=687","title":{"rendered":"Iraq: How Do We Know When We’re Done?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Crooked Timber<\/a>, Daniel Davies writes (somewhat incoherently) about ‘The Iraqi Resistance and the Noble Cause.’ I think he means to suggest, on one hand that <\/p>\n

bq. “Whatever Christopher Hitchens thinks, they are the direct moral equivalent of the Viet Cong; they represent much of what is worst about the human condition, and any future in which they gained power would most likely be outright disastrous, but for all that, to take up arms against an occupying foreign army is not an ignoble thing to do, and I can quite understand why lots of people on the left have been sympathetic to them.<\/i>” <\/p>\n

…and on the other that:<\/p>\n

bq. “Iraq is not Vietnam (or more specifically, Iran is not China) and they have no hope of victory. All they can really do is prolong the occupation and therefore the misery.<\/i>”<\/p>\n

But then he moves directly to this:bq. “The time has well past by which anyone with brains in their head could reasonably hope for anything other than swift and reasonably democratic elections, a declaration of victory and for the coalition troops to jump in the tanks, start the engines and stop driving when they see the first McDonalds.<\/i>”<\/p>\n

So what the heck?<\/p>\n

I don’t for a moment doubt that on February 1, there will be a long queue of Democrats queued up in front of the television cameras explaining that “we can bring the troops home now,” and that they will even be joined by some Republicans.<\/p>\n

In January 2003<\/a>, I said that I would support the Iraq war if several conditions were met – one of which was:<\/p>\n

We\u2019re in this for the long haul. We don\u2019t get to \u2018declare victory and go home\u2019 when the going gets tough, elections are near, or TV shows pictures of the inevitable suffering that war causes. The Marshall Plan is a bad example, because the Europe that had been devastated by war had the commercial and entrepreneurial culture that simply needed stuff and money to get restarted. And we\u2019re good with stuff and money. This is going to take more, and we\u2019re going to have to be willing to figure it out as we go.<\/p>\n

\nThere are no good examples of this that I can think of in history. The postwar reconstruction of Japan comes the closest, and it\u2019s not necessarily a good example, because the Japanese by WWII were a coherent, unified, hierarchical society that could be changed by fiat from the top. The Robert Kaplan-esque world we\u2019re moving toward isn\u2019t.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I supported Bush because I believed that he wouldn’t be inclined to ‘declare victory and go home,’ and so far haven’t seen anything to suggest that he’s changing his mind. The appointment of Rice as SoS, and her effort to bring like-minded staff into the core of the foreign policy apparatus is a key piece of evidence in this regard.<\/p>\n

But I’m still watching, and to David and the others who think the troops should head for a Mickey D’s as soon as the Iraqi votes are counted, my response is simple … hell no<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Not only would such an act be deeply immoral in any world in which one doesn’t see murderous thugs as a ‘legitimate voice of national resistance,’ it would abandon the Arab world to more decades of brutal, kleptocratic dictatorship – wrapped in either the nationalist or pan-Islamist flag – and would expose Europe and the United States to a rising wave of violent, militant Islamist action.<\/p>\n

We’ll be done when we’re finished, and we’ll be finished when we’ve won. It’s that simple. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Armed Liberal: To David and the others who think the troops should head for a Mickey D’s as soon as the Iraqi votes are counted, my response is simple … hell no.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}