THE AMERICAN WAY

Barbara Lerner chastises the legion of Iraq War critics in this article on the National Review website. But she reserves her harshest criticism for the man ultimately responsible for all the post-major combat operations failures in Iraq...George W. Bush. Lerner believes that because the President tried to have it both ways, letting Rumsfeld have his way on some things, and the State Department/CIA on other things, the situation was completely bungled. I believe she is right. We crushed Saddam's government in a lightning strike, then we stopped. We should have gone on rooting out potential enemies and slaying them, like Moqtada al Sadr. We should have crushed Falluja the first time around. We should have made it clear that we were as deadly and uncompromising a force as Saddam could ever hope to be, but with far greater power. This would have created the Hobbesian awe necessary to get everyone in that very Hobbesian land (where it is truly a war of every man against every other man) to respect the will of the new sovereign (our hand-picked Iraqis backed by the power of the U.S. military).

But, of course, Lerner's solution would not have ever been implemented by an American administration, and will never be implemented by future administrations. As Richard Widmark (playing the lead American prosecutor) says in that classic film "Judgment at Nuremburg", "We're not cut out to be occupiers. We're new at it and we're not very good at it. We always want to cut the other guy a break. It's the American way". I just recently watched that film again, and that line rang like a bell. Even in 1961, at least one Hollywood script writer understood the real weakness of Americans if they ever tried to build an empire, we don't have the stomach for the brutal work necessary, even if we really don't want an empire, but to help other nations build a democracy. Fortunately, we were brutal enough during the active combat operations part of World War II to convince the Germans and the Japanese to abandon their imperialist dreams (most of their populations spent the first winter after the war just struggling to find food and fuel amidst the rubble of their bombed-out cities). Unfortunately, we were not brutal enough in Iraq to convince the various factions that they shouldn't resort to violence to find redress for their grievances.

My conclusion, then, is simple. No more wars of choice. No more pre-emption. Let the Iranians have the bomb. If they attack us, annihilate them. It's the American way.