We are called Defeatists and Retreatists. Of late, it's been Bill Kristol of Weakly Standard's turn to attack us. These charges must be answered. I bring into evidence the words of William Pitt the Elder, during our own Revolutionary War. "In order to open the way toward a happy settlement of the dangerous trouble in America, you will be forced to a disgraceful abandonment of present measures and principles which you avow but cannot defend."
Mr. Kristol’s editorial contains some doggerel from Sara Coleridge. Apricots and gillyflowers and cooling showers, oh my! I respond with another bit of doggerel:
If buttercups buzz'd after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
This song was played by a military band some centuries back, as was ejected from our continent, not by outright military defeat but by that war’s domestic unpopularity. The tune, The World Turn’d Upside Down, was played at the English surrender at Yorktown. America’s war for independence was only an entr’acte in a much larger war between Britain and France for the West Indies.
These bits of doggerel always accompany such defeats. The winners write the history, but the losers write the songs.
The Surge is working, so it would seem at first glance. General Petraeus has made considerable headway, but only in places where his troops are present in great abundance. Elsewhere, in Basra, the British success story (the model for Petraeus’ own strategy), is dying as the British prepare to withdraw. As the British influence wanes, three Shiite militias now contend like yelping jackals to gnaw on the bloated and stinking corpse of Basra, once the greatest port city in the Persian Gulf. The same fate awaits our Surge: in Baghdad, the Sunnis withdraw from Maliki’s government and will not be persuaded to return.
Yes, there is good news from Iraq. Vast new deposits of oil and gas have been found in the Sunni areas of Iraq. The Sunnis of Anbar Province no longer need to come, hat in hand to the Shiites and Kurds for oil money. Our new allies, the 1920 Brigades, now styling itself Hamas in Mesopotamia and Islamic Jihad, are composed of former Ba’athists. If summer were spring and the other way round.
There is a far more pragmatic view of recent developments in the Legislative Branch. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have boxed in the supporters of this war. The Republicans, especially those coming up for election in 2008, are desperate to distance themselves from the President’s Iraq policies, but the Democrats have made all such retreats impossible. The beleaguered Republicans straggle like Custer’s troops to the top of the Little Round Top, and everywhere, the outraged nation circles below.
To crooked eyes, truth wears a wry face, so said JRR Tolkien. Bill Kristol, in high dudgeon now indulges in odd speculation about Democratic retreats and suchlike. It may well be one soldier tells lies about alleged atrocities in Iraq, but other soldiers right up the food chain in the US Army Rangers lied about another incident, SP4 Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire. Of these lies and coverups, Kristol is oddly silent.
But let that be as it may, never did any man speak ill of himself in his own paper. Weekly Standard has been publishing every Pollyanna screed from the now-discredited Neoconservatives since this war began. Kristol’s own role in the rah-rah-ing of this war is undeniable, and the country has had a gutful of Bush’s misguided war in Iraq and his baffling inattention to Al Qaeda’s continuing presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Continuing the fisking of Kristol’s mendacious repetition of O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack’s, I do not chew my cabbage twice, I have written of this elsewhere. Kenneth Pollack's book on Iran, The Persian Puzzle is perhaps the worst book on the subject written in modern times. He doesn't speak either Arabic or Farsi, and makes some of the most puzzlingly stupid remarks about the region. Pollack backed this war against Saddam, when those of us who did understand the situation were warning Saddam wasn't the problem: Saddam's enemies were the problem. Pollack was deeply involved in handing information to AIPAC. As for O'Hanlon, that old rogue Glenn Greenwald has done a much better job of demolishing O'Hanlon, calling him a deceitful cheerleader.
Americans, as that old wag Ambrose Bierce once noted, learn their geography from the war reporting. It is largely irrelevant what the Rasmussen poll of Americans might make of the Surge, the only opinion which matters is the Iraqi opinion. Yes, many Iraqis are grateful for the American presence, but they know it cannot last forever. They openly talk of Iran’s aircraft bombing their neighborhoods when the Ameriki leave. Do not count on CENTCOM to widely report on its failures, as I previously noted, no man will speak ill of himself in his own paper. Basra is dying. Of this CENTCOM says nothing. That’s the British sector. The UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to the USA to deliver the bad news in person: the British Army is leaving, as it left Yorktown so long ago. The world turn’d upside-down.
The Republicans have bet everything on General Petraeus’ dog-and-pony show in September. This is, in effect, saying George Bush is not the Commander in Chief. By September, Basra will be a smoldering hell. Will the Surge now extend into Basra? We do not know. One thing is certain, if Basra falls to the Shiite warlords, we will be trapped for all practical purposes: there is no other way out of Iraq except through that part of Iraq, and we will fight our way out.
The British suffered defeat and dishonor at Yorktown, but they would return to burn Washington, by which light our own National Anthem was composed, to the tune of an old British drinking song. The British would go on to become our sincerest allies, and Canada a great friend.
Defeat and dishonor is temporary: only when the British public grew sick of the war against our nation did the madness end. Most of the casualties of our Revolutionary War were atrocities: Tories and Revolutionaries burning each other out, militias roved the countryside. I write this in the heart of southern New Jersey, where brush wars consumed the landscape. War is a temporary madness, and only when it is put aside by men and women of good will and sound reason can we find the needed political solutions. Of course we must wage war on our enemies, but in the landscape of Iraq, we resemble nothing so much as the Hessian soldiers of King George, just another militia. The madness must stop, will stop, and we will leave. It is only a question of when: only Iraq can settle its own problems. We do them no long term favors by staying to baby sit their civil war. Those who urge an end to this war follow in the honorable example of that notable Defeatist and Retreatist, William Pitt, who said:
"In order to open the way toward a happy settlement of the dangerous trouble in America, you will be forced to a disgraceful abandonment of present measures and principles which you avow but cannot defend." He fully justified the resistance of the colonies and reminded the House of Lords that, "It is not repealing this act of Parliament, it is not repealing a piece of parchment that can restore America to our bosom. You must repeal her fears and her resentments."
I close this editorial with a bit of Walt Whitman: a poet who cared for the wounded and dying of the Civil War:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
...
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer'd not,
The living remain'd and suffer'd, the mother suffer'd,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer'd,
And the armies that remain'd suffer'd.