Cleveland's leading AM news-and-talk radio station recently changed its affiliate from ABC News to Fox News, and while the oeuvre of the latter is more attractive, headlines must be headlines. I overheard one such just this morning. Someone — a White House reporter, a Congressman, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in dainty cursive on the inside of a Hallmark Forget-Me-Not — asked for the United States to surrender Iraq to Near East fascists and retreat from the country. This question appears to now be a fortnightly regular, though its relevance to events on the front is conversely related to its frequency. The United States military has been forthcoming about its months-long campaign to defeat the enemy in Iraq, part Islamist invader and part Ba'athist fugitive. Bloggers, chiefly Bill Roggio and Richard Fernandez, compile, corroborate and present in objective narrative the slow constriction of the enemy presence.
As has been predicted and described here, the enemy is continually reduced in his ability to prevent Iraqis from building, with Allied assistance, a democratic state. Terrorist acts fail, or cannot be carried out and are scuttled, or ranks must be composed of the stupid and the tricked; and the enemy is beset by his own as much as our defenders. The only strength shared between thugs is ruthlessness; deprived that, their esurience can be tilted inward and they can be made to destroy themselves.
This perspective is almost totally absent in mainstream journalism. When the terrorists in Iraq are diminished to the irrelevance of the terrorists in Afghanistan — whose threats against Afghan democracy, specifically the highly attended parliamentary election, are something of a national laughingstock — the gentry media might as well blame its wildly disparate reports on military obfuscation, and then the next day begin eulogizing the lost nephews of Mao, Ho and Che. But we do have this repeated bid to give up, and we do have polls which indicate an American public that is — considering its fair majority re-election of a president who ran on his administration of the war — frustrated with the clarity of victory in the mind's eye.
One of these polls, when divided, generally comes in three parts: loyal supporters, loyal opponents and the middle that has swung from the supportive two-thirds of polled Americans in early 2003 to the undisposed three-fifths of polled Americans today.
The moral relativists are responsible for solid opposition. Many leftists, mostly the anti-nationalist solipsists, are entombed in an ether that has guarded them from history — nothing good has come of conflict, they say. What of the democratic state's inherent right and obligation to self-defense? They are unmoved. Soldiers who are too old to be patronized as "boys" or "children" are men whose respective wives, children and professions are commitment in supersession of any sworn oath to serve. Over the last thirty years the left has advanced the military not as a voluntary martial order in which men and women fight and kill, and perhaps die, in the defense of a republic and her people but rather as a showpiece, vestigial and exorbitant, for parades and allegorical maneuvers to commemorate what should have been the 1945 end to all human conflict had it not been for oh, say, America.
Now, that is make-believe. If not for the American force of arms, a great many states and populations would be either enslaved or conspicuously absent. Lumbering carriers flying the stars and stripes keep Seoul and Taipei free; and GIs do the same for Baghdad and Kabul; a proposition that is, for the sake of the lives of millions, better left untested.
Americans who have become worried or disappointed by the war, despite marked and continuing progress, appear to be those who may have taken too seriously the meaning and application of the Powell Doctrine of modern warfare. The Powell Doctrine, eponymous geo-political ethos of Retired Army General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is one born amid an experience of singular American failure. Its single substantive application was the Gulf War of 1991. In short, the doctrine is low-risk, limited-commitment warfare: engage only threats that consensus will deem are clear and present, and engage them only with irresistable force that obviates American ideational epilogues of the Tokyo General HQ and Marshall Plan variety.
General Powell himself wrote on the subject for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1992. "Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do." He wrote that some months after tens of thousands of rebelling Iraqis were murdered by a recrudescent Saddamite army in the spring of 1991, the would-be revolutionaries absent the help of Americans who stood by on the advice of reasonable people. To abandon the Iraqis then was to "Abandon any claim to the triumphant act of statesmanship we have all applauded," said another man during the holocaust, and that man was right.
A decade-and-a-half later, what the free world gained in science and skill and vision came with the desolation and Islamist infiltration of Iraq and the Near East. To demand stability but refuse means by which that must be accomplished — nation-building, democratizing — is on the order of instructing a man never to marry a woman unless he is certain that the couple will never disagree, fall into misunderstanding, quarrel, shout, slam doors, stomp about, question the relationship or otherwise dabble with any of that "for richer or poorer" nonsense. The Powell Doctrine is for the nation that does not intend to fight any wars, or fight them and not complete them, or ignominiously lose all of them; in the same manner that the aforementioned romantic advice is perfectly tailored for the eternal bachelor or serial divorcé.
The Powell concept is yet respected by a good number of intellectuals and citizens. Will Americans break? No, very probably not. With the defeat of John Kerry went Vietnam defeatist politics, and those who try again will pay dearly. President Bush still has Congress, and how. Still, impatience is wearisome. In lieu of editorial — common sense. We must find a good capstan shanty to encourage these fifty states to do with quiet hearts the work given them these years.