The Blame Game (repost)

Buckley, prophet and icon of the conservative prerogative, looks to Iraq and uses the “d” word:

Defeat.

But it’s a qualified kind of defeat. It’s not the fault of America or of George Bush or of the policies and practices that led to the war.

It’s the Iraqis, who, because of the shadowy evil among them, foiled the ideals of a great nation and were not yet ready for American greatness.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven’t proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren’t on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

And they’re ungrateful to boot. It wasn’t the philosophy that was wrong, it was that we were too generous. Buckley even implies that maybe Saddam had a handle on the situation after all.

Along with the more populist version of this same meme coming from O’Reilly (“It was the crazy-people underestimation.”) the next phase of the war cycle is taking shape.

… the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail.

It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail – in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn’t work.

The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

Our noble ideals simply couldn’t overcome the inherent evil in Iraq. The primitives were unable to evolve, even when we showed them the light.

How this squares with the fact that professional military and government planners told the adminstration from the beginning that the plan wouldn’t work remains a mystery. That certain traditional American ideals were deftly sidestepped is an invalid point for debate. Look for the storyline to be redirected at “I-told-you-so Democrats” who wanted us to fail from the beginning.

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