WSJ: The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve: Response to Buckley, Will, Fukuyama

[Barrett808]

The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve
A response to Messrs. Buckley, Will and Fukuyama.
BY PETER WEHNER
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed from the outset. Or so the argument goes.

Let me address each of these charges in turn.

The war is lost. "Our mission has failed," Mr. Buckley wrote earlier this year. "It seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly," saith the man (Mr. Fukuyama) who once declared "the end of history" and in 1998 signed a letter to congressional leaders stating, "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place."

These critics of the war are demonstrating a peculiar eagerness to declare certain matters settled. We certainly face difficulties in Iraq--but we have seen significant progress as well. In 2005, Iraq's economy continued to recover and grow. Access to clean water and sewage-treatment facilities has increased. The Sunnis are now invested in the political process, which was not previously the case. The Iraqi security forces are far stronger than they were. Our counterinsurgency strategy is more effective than in the past. Cities like Tal Afar, which insurgents once controlled, are now back in the hands of free Iraqis. Al Qaeda's grip has been broken in Mosul and disrupted in Baghdad. We now see fissures between Iraqis and foreign terrorists. And in the aftermath of the mosque bombing in Samarra, we saw the political and religious leadership in Iraq call for an end to violence instead of stoking civil war--and on the whole, the Iraqi security forces performed well. These achievements are authentic grounds for encouragement. And to ignore or dismiss all signs of progress in Iraq, to portray things in what Norman Podhoretz has called "the blackest possible light," disfigures reality.

(more)

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008182

Mr. Wehner is deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.

[acmavm]

1. That guy is taking some REALLY heavy duty drugs.

.

[soothsayer]

2. hey, they almost have clean water and functioning sewers over

there. Give us another three years and we'll be even closer.

[Cocoa]

3. when does Peter Wehner ship out?

[John Q. Citizen]

4. Oh. So now we are debating the wisdom of spreading

democracy through invasion and occupation?

I thought it was about emminent threat and WMDs.

Silly me.

[formercia]

5. Charge blindly forward

Just like British officers in World War I sent waves of men into the killing fields of the maxim machine gun because it wasn't part of their past wartime experience. Since these chickenhawks have no collective wartime experience of their own, it stands to reason they would follow a similar irrational policy.

[BlueEyedSon]

6. "dead for a perfectly predictable reason:l Iraq lacks the democratic

culture..."

No, because Bush ignored 10,000 pages of planning, deployed too few troops, allowed the whole thing to become a corrupt-crony mess, and launched the invasion for personal gain (political capital and OIL).

Aside from the fact you cannot impose democracy from outside on ANY culture.....

[tanyev]

7. Nobody cares about your opinion, Peter Whiner.

[wtmusic]

8. Peter Wehner "faces no difficulties in Iraq"

"We". Heh. Good one, Peter. Now get your ass out of your comfortable office on Liberty St. and go help fight, you worthless POS.

[tonekat]

9. This is why I regard the WSJ editorial page as the comics...

...it's the funniest part of that paper...pitiful to realize those fools are serious when they write this malarkey.

[cliss]

12. Same here. After about 1 week of reading them,

I decided to make the best possible use of that paper.

I opened up the Editorial page, and laid it in the bottom of my Kitty Litter box. The story about "winning in Iraq" was face-up. My kitten used it.

[TrogL]

15. I can't use my local paper for that

It's so full of shit it won't absorb any more.

[rodeodance]

10. te he, he is trying to call back the flock!

[Demeter]

11. Yes, the PNACers Have a Lot of Nerve

and if they had any consciences, they would have lost that nerve a long time ago.

[Jack Rabbit]

13. Mr. Wehner is deputy assistant to the president

Mr. Wehner is deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives.

There are two ways to tell if a neoconservative is lying:

• His lips are moving; or
• There is verbage beneath his byline.

[bemildred]

14. What nerve?

Another long-range mouth-fighter bloviating about courage.
:puke:

[teryang]

16. neo-con myopia- losing war equals losing nerve.

This transfers responsibility for a diastrous strategic blunder from its mentally and ethically impaired ideologic and proto-totalitarian authors to those who are opposed to a war which was doomed to be a dismal failure from its defective conceptualization.

The morally and intellectually bankrupt corporatists are still making huge profits and have virtually destroyed the institutions of a free people, so they see no reason to lose their nerve. Hey, if this is a loser, the next gambit is to spread the war to preserve their control of the wretched country they have created in their corporate image.

[NorthernSun]

17. Neocon nerve

The pro-war Neocons lost their nerve years ago. I think it was during the Vietnam war.