I’ve been busy, so I haven’t commented on the death of Osama bin Ladin, and it’s not like there was a dearth of comment anyway.

And frankly, it’s been much more interesting to wait and see what the reaction has been. Osama himself really wasn’t a very interesting person.

Think about it, if he hadn’t done what he’d done, do you think he’d have attracted any attention as a fiery Islamist preacher? Other than as a figure of fun for late-night comics that is.

There’s been the usual soft-headed logic of those who think Osama should have been given “due process.”

Yes of course, just like when the Greatest Generation hit the beaches of Normandy armed with writs, summons, and legal injunctions telling the Nazis to suspend all concentration camp operations and executions of hostages pending further investigation.

Boy that showed them!

Then there was Heinz Uthmann, the judge in at the Labor Court in Hamburg, who filed criminal charges against German Chancellor Angela Merkel for “rewarding and approving an intentional homicide,” after she expressed pleasure at the death of bin Ladin.

You know, I believe some day it’s going to be impossible for even the most cowardly and muddle-headed to deny that our civilization is at war. Against that day, shouldn’t somebody be keeping a list? I suggest the categories on that list might include: useful idiots, appeasers, and collaborators.

Then there are those who approve of bin Ladin’s killing on principle, but think the boisterous American rejoicing was somehow vulgar and unseemly.

Lately I have meditated a lot on one of those one-line gems of wisdom Thomas Sowell tosses off with such apparent ease.

“If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.”

Mark Steyn pointed out when General Gorden’s death at Khartoum was avenged by Lord Kitchener at Omdurman, he had the corpse of the Mahdi dug up and took his skull for a paperweight.

At first, I thought the disposal of bin Ladin’s body was seemly and civilized. After hearing the outpouring of wimpishness from American and Europe – I say he should have been treated more like Danny Pearl’s body was.

Cut it in pieces, take his skull for the Smithsonian, and for good measure bury the rest of him in a pig yard.

Oh, and I see Omar bin Ladin is actually making noises about suing over his father’s death.

Let him show up in court. Then shoot him.

No wait, that’s an honorable death. Lynch him.

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If you go here, you’ll find a column on Col. Ryszard Kuklinski by an author who attended a seminar on him and his role in preventing WWIII at Langley (CIA HQ.)

http://townhall.com/columnists/DavidRStokes/2008/12/21/the_spy_who_really_came_in_from_the_cold

I have the book on the stack of “must reads” that only seems to get taller. I think I’ll move it up in the queue.

As some of you know, my father-in-law was an officer in the Polish military at the time of the events described, which lends the affair a certain interest for me. The impression I get from him is that a fair number of Polish officers thought Kuklinski was a patriot and hero, who did what a lot of them would have liked to have done.

It says something disturbing about our political and academic culture that this story is so little-known. This man, more than any other single individual, may have literally saved the world.

All evidence from the unimpeachable source, the former Soviets themselves, now shows that the invasion of Western Europe and the initiation of World War III by the Soviet Union was a “when,” not an “if.”

What saved the world, or at least Europe, was American military readiness, espionage, and the crucial information supplied by this man.

Gestures of good will, the philosophy of peaceful coexistence, all the enlightened attitudes of western intellectuals counted for precisely nothing.

Is this why this story is being, can we say, “militantly ignored”?

Have they forgotten the lesson of Archimedes?

“But nothing afflicted Marcellus so much as the death of Archimedes, who was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through.”

Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Marcellus. Translated by John Dryden

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Note: This appeared as an op-ed in the VC Times-Record.

“The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Thucydides

We were watching the news the other night, when they reported that the Russians appeared to be ignoring the cease fire with Georgia brokered by France.

My wife laughed heartily, “Gee, ya think?”

As in, do you think the Russians are acting like… well, Russians?

I thought I heard a bitter edge in her laughter though. My wife grew up in Poland, during the last years of the Soviet occupation.

Western Europe is wringing its hands and doing nothing. The NATO Alliance, minus the United States is a military pygmy, and too much of Europe’s natural gas and oil comes from Russia.

The U.S. is blustering, but in the end will probably do nothing that matters. American power is overextended, and who among us is willing to go to war with a really formidable power over a county that is, “far away, of which we know little,” as Neville Chamberlain said about Czechoslovakia?

The blame the victim game is starting already. The Rose Revolution that brought a hopeful degree of democracy to Georgia is only five years old.

The argument will run like this: Georgia has an imperfect democracy. Imperfect means not worthy to survive. Therefor they should not survive. Now go back to sleep.

The strongest protests are coming from Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They are of course, motivated by the thought, “We’re next.”

But in this fat, happy, lucky country, we forgot the lessons of history.

We forgot the world is a dangerous place.

We forgot new dangers always arise, even as old ones subside.

We forgot that, “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”

And so, as young Americans prepare to go back to school, I wonder how many realize that the most important history lesson is taking place outside their classrooms.

The lesson is, history is not over. We should hold off on beating our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks, and the lion is not ready to lie down with the lamb just yet.

What we should do about Russia and Georgia, I really don’t know.

Another thing we’ve forgotten is that sometimes there are no good choices, only a choice between terrible alternatives with no guarantees of a happy outcome.

I would offer this piece of advice though: when your kids go back to school, tell them to pay attention in history class.

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Two things happened regarding Iraq recently, one the media ignored, the other they zeroed in on like a laser.

I won’t insult your intelligence by pointing out which is which.

Last night we saw on the news that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki endorsed Barack Obama, and thinks his plan (if that’s still his plan) to withdraw American forces over 16 months from the date of his taking office is a great one.

When we saw that, my wife remarked, “That does it. Obama wins.”

The gentelmen of the press must have been out for a coffee though, because they missed the last story, that provinces nine and 10 of Iraq’s 18 had just been handed over to Iraqi forces.

The conclusion seems inescapable, Al Maliki would like the U.S. to leave because he doesn’t need us anymore. Or at least, he doesn’t figure he’ll need us by 16 months after the election.

This confirms what independent correspondent Michael Yon has cautiously said, that all indications show the war is about won – and the mopping up can be handled by the Iraqis themselves.

Being an optimist by nature, I always try to temper it with the Pessimistic Postulate: It’s easier for things to get worse than to get better. (A specific application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.)

So what’s the case for optimism?

Because I don’t believe Al Maliki wants to die for one.

If he didn’t think his side would handle the rest of the job, he’d be signing his own death warrant by kicking the U.S. out.

For another, he has to make the kill on Al Queda in Iraq himself, to settle Arab conceptions of honor.

Arab hell, it’s the same reason Charles Du Gaulle demanded the Allies let the miniscule Free French forces be first into Paris.

Al Maliki can dismiss American forces with a “Thanks for the help, we’ll take it from here,” and be the only Arab leader who can address the mighty American state as an equal, rather than a resentful supplicant or petroleum blackmailer.

And, when the only legitimately elected government in the Arab world (I know Egypt and Lebanon have elections, but come on…) says, “Please leave now” – and we do, what does that say to the Arab street?

Don’t misunderstand me, I still think it could go horribly wrong. But if we hand it over to them, and it does, then it’ll be their screwup not ours.

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In re post below, see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMxPUzEBWDU

This is an Israeli news re-broadcast taken from a Palestinian news broadcast. It shows the celebration and handing out of sweets after a gunman opened up in a Yeshiva, killing eight kids.

Do you think this will get shown on west European TV news?

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Issues of courage and cowardice have been on my mind a lot lately. In my reviews of ’300′ I mentioned that the disturbing thing about the bad reviews I’ve read isn’t that they didn’t like it, it’s definitely not to everyone’s taste, but that much of them seemed to be part of a reflexive dislike of any portrayal of physical courage.

In my post ‘Virginia’, I mentioned that the three responses to deadly danger in rough order of desirability are, 1) avoid it, 2) successfully run away from it, and 3) successfully fight back against it.

Any competent and ethical martial arts instructor knows that one of the difficult tasks of instructing boys and young men, is teaching when and how to escape and evade aggressors. Testosterone overload often makes men want to fight when they should run, or keep pounding on a downed foe longer than the law considers justified. (You could call that “losing by winning”, when you consider the potential criminal charges and/or lawsuits.)

One thing I like to do is to pose the question, “What is the highest military command skill?” I didn’t know the answer myself until it was pointed out to me.

Experts consider the highest command skill to be the ability to lead a retreat in good order.

Think about that for a minute. When in an untenable position, you may have to fall back to a one you are better able to defend. If it has to be done in the face of the enemy, it can all to easily turn into a rout – and then you’re screwed.

Circumstances alter cases of course. For a Greek hoplite, when the day was clearly lost he could possibly save his life by abandoning his heavy armor and running. (“He who fights and runs away… etc.) But if just one man did it too soon he could cause the collapse of the line. (Hence the Spartan expression, “Come back with your shield or on it.”) For a medieval pikeman facing cavalry, dropping his pike and running meant that the cavalry would likely run him down and take him from behind.

The point of all this is that running is not necessarily evidence of cowardice – it all depends on circumstances.

Americans proud of our preeminent position of power in the world, might do well to remember from time to time that our nation was populated largely by people who successfully used the strategy of running away.

Now if you’ll bear with me a moment (I promise, it’s actually heading for a point), I’d like to tell you about a science fiction story I read when I was in high school, lo these many years ago.

“At the Core” by Larry Niven, was part of his Known Space universe, set in the far future and involving his character Beowulf Schaeffer.

Beowulf Schaeffer is hired for a deep space exploration mission by the Puppeteers, an alien race described as looking like “a three-legged centaur with two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets for heads.”

Puppeteers have a certain outstanding characteristic – they are cowards. All of them.

Puppeteers have an inborn mortal fear of, basically everything even remotely dangerous. So for dangerous tasks such as exploration they hire humans, whom they regard as crazy – but lucky. (A brave Puppeteer is by definition psychotic.)

They hire Beowulf Schaeffer to pilot a new kind of spaceship to the galactic core and report back what he finds.

What he finds when he gets there is that the galactic core has exploded in a chain of supernovas. In 50,000 years the blast wave and radiation is going to reach our galactic neighborhood, rendering it uninhabitable. He reports this and returns.

When he gets back to Known Space, he finds that all of the Puppeteers have fled the Galaxy.

Let’s break here and ask yourself what you’d do if your knew for certain that an unavoidable danger was going to wipe out all life on Earth and all of the nearer solar systems – in 50,000 years? Would you even lose any sleep over it?

Didn’t think so, neither would I.

Beowulf Schaeffer muses on this and comes to the same conclusion. We’d do nothing until the sky started to glow.

He thinks further on it. No Puppeteer ever pretended danger didn’t exist. He may have been looking for the best place to run, but he would never deny the necessity for running.

He concludes, “Maybe it’s humans who are cowards, at the Core.”

(Nice play on words there.)

To belabor the point just a little, it’s not necessarily cowardly to run from danger. As I said, it depends on the circumstances. Sometimes running can save your life, sometimes it gets you killed – or leaves those you love unprotected.

But to deny that danger exists?

I’ll deal more with this later.

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Well now the crisis is over – except now it’ll never be over. But the Brits got their 15 servicemen (and one woman) back. They had a nice little love-in with Mr. President who gave them new suits and gift bags. This was followed by the obligatory media encounter group therapy session.

Everyone seems agreed that the Iranian whacko won this one hands down. Debate tepidly rages on about the conduct of the servicemen and how little time it took for them to crack. The Iranians seem to have had side-splitting fun intimidating them, without actually doing them any physical harm.

A former Iranian hostage from the Carter Crisis, guesting on Hannity and Colmes was obviously trying real hard to be kind, but invidious comparisons with the behaviour of the (mostly civilian) men and women who endured far worse for 444 days were impossible to ignore.

Colmes said, we got them back and isn’t that all that matters? The media basically had to line up real war heroes to say their conduct was reprehensible – those of us who aren’t, aren’t supposed to criticize until we’ve been in their shoes.

Oh horse pucky! I don’t know how I’d react in the same situation – but when it comes to the defense of me and mine, I want men who are tougher than I am mounting guard on this fat, happy, clueless country of ours.

And these were Royal Marines! In the UK, the Marines are far more of an elite outfit than even the USMC. They are mostly commandos trained to a standard comparable with any of the elite forces in the world.

And what few people have had the guts to ask is, what the hell was a mother with a child at home doing in a combat position? And what effect does this have in that ulta-patriarchal culture to parade her in front of the media, pat her on the head and say (in effect) “There there now little girl. You go home and play with your baby.” Convince them that the forces of the West are composed of women and real sensitive guys?

But in all this, I think everybody has missed the point. Yes you could say that they betrayed their country. But don’t forget – their country betrayed them first.

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Everyone who writes, or aspires to write, has had the experience of having a really great, really original idea – and then open a newspaper, magazine, website etc to find his/her great idea worked out in print under someone else’s name.

This has happened to me more times than I can count. Most recently I found this article by Jonah Goldberg http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTVjNGRmZmM0M2FmODgwZmFlYTEyODBlODcxMzAyNTY=

which expresses something I thought I was ahead of the curve on. Well, evidently not.

What Goldberg says is that he’s the first to voice (though not to endorse – yet) what a lot of people who are more-or-less on the Right are thinking; the threat of jihadism makes differences between Republicans and Democrats seem so trivial, and since the Democrats show no signs of putting the welfare of the country ahead of making political points against the Republicans, maybe we should just elect them. “It’s your problem now, what are you going to do about it?”

When an idea is in the air, points go to the first writer to pluck it out and put it down.

That’s OK though, I’ve still got some ideas I can claim to be ahead of the curve on. One question I’ve been asking about for the past several years is finally being taken seriously. How many surplus Chinese men are there?

A perennial problem in Chinese history is that in famine times in China, families killed girl babies when they couldn’t feed them. Boy babies were preserved because sons support their parents in their old age, while girls are married out and separated from their families and obligations thereto, forever. (Even widows’ remarriage rights were controlled by their in-laws.)

What this means, is that a generation after a really widespread famine, there was a surplus of young men who couldn’t get married because there weren’t enough women. This to say the least, makes for social instablility. The last time this happened on a really massive scale, was before the T’ai Ping Rebellion, which set records for casualties that lasted well into the 20th century.

So… some years back when reading about the “one-child policy” of the Chinese regime, and how it had led to sex-selection of boy children through abortion, it occurred to me that this was having the same effect on Chinese demographics that famines used to. (Not to mention that they’ve had widespread famines under the communists as well.) That generation of boys should be coming to maturity in large numbers right about now.

So how many extra boys are there? For years I couldn’t find a durn thing about it, until recently when I’ve begun to find some estimates in articles about China. I have no idea how accurate they are, but they run at around 20 million (!!!). That’s 20 million frustrated, horney young men who have to turn gay, patronize whorehouses or sublimate their sex drives in ways young men usually do – in stupid risk-taking behaviour and violence, i.e. they kill each other off until the sex ratio is more even. They are also fertile breeding ground for any Cause that offers a chance for rapine and pillage.

Furthermore, I’ve read of a similar phenomenon in rural India; families selecting boys by abortion of female fetuses. What kind of sexual imbalance are they working on?

In other words, the most populated area of the Earth is going to be hideously unstable for at least another generation.

There is another idea I’ve never been able to get anyone to take a look at, and now it seems the question is moot anyway.

I think they found an important part of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program the first week of the war – and looked right past it.

Within days of the coalition entry into Iraq, CNN showed an underground bunker with an entrance that looked like an Old West mine, full of 55 gallon oil drums. There was a brief stir of excitement, then jubilation in the Middle Eastern press when it turned out they were full of – insecticides.

What occurred to me was that insecticides are a handy chemical precursor to a servicable nerve gas. Commercial insecticides are what the Aum Shin Rikyo cult in Japan used to brew their home-made gas. Of course, they could have been meant for agricultural use – but then why store them in a bunker quite obviously meant to be concealed from aerial observation?

(For the record, I thought “Weasons of Mass Distruction” was a stupid term. Artillery and aerial bombardment are “weapons of mass destruction”. War gases have been effective in only a very limited set of circumstances, usually when used against helpless civilians.)

I nosed this idea around and generated zero interest in any quarter, pro- or anti- Iraq war.

Ah-well, sic transit gloria blogger.

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Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of invading Iraq in the first place, if the United States withdraws before achieving a state of affairs that both our people and our enemies regard as victory, the consequences will be disastrous. Our enemies will be emboldened to continue supporting terrorist attacks on Americans at home and abroad. Jihadists now engaged in Iraq will be able to turn to attacking American interests abroad and renew plans for attacking the homeland. The Europeans, whatever they say about us now, will have good reason to doubt our commitment to our mutual safety. (Though this might not be an entirely bad thing if it motivated them to start taking responsibility for their own defense.) At home, the Hard Left will have won a significant victory in their drive to discredit and demoralize American self-confidence.

However, even winning may have undesirable long-term consequences. The Afghanistan War against the Soviets raised, motivated and trained a legion of Jihadist volunteers for the Mujahaddin who afterwards went looking for a fight with the West full of confidence and experienced in underground warfare. The insurgent survivors of an allied victory in Iraq may well come looking for vengeance, but more wary of American power.

Since Vietnam the technology of insurgent warfare has advanced tremendously. The Vietcong used an ingenious array of homemade booby traps constructed from bamboo stakes, earthen pits, and sometimes from ordinance stolen or donated by their patrons, but often not far removed from traps that hunters had used since the Stone Age. Today the Islamist terrorists get explosives by the ton from their supporters and a thriving illegal market, and make detonators out of TV and car key remotes. Though they cannot produce the technology themselves, they can exploit it to produce weapons of terrible power. Advancing technology will only make the situation worse, to a degree we can only imagine.

Among those who believe that the West is engaged in a “clash of civilizations” with enemies bent on our destruction, there is honest disagreement about whether Iraq was the appropriate battlefield and whether it was wise to commit huge amounts of our resources in what may ultimately be a futile attempt at nation-building. That argument will be settled quite soon. Either way, what will remain is the growing realization among our people of what our enemies have always known and openly proclaimed; that Iraq is only one campaign in a long war. Nobody on either side of the argument over Iraq is going to like this, which does not make it any the less true.

As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the question is not about whether one is “for” or “against” war, but whether there is a choice. It takes two sides to make peace, but only one to wage war. The question is whether to fight back or to yield, and if the choice is to fight, whether to choose the time and place of battle oneself or to let the enemy do so. For good or ill, the choice was made to fight the enemy in Iraq. Arguing about fighting in Iraq strikes me as similar to arguing whether Calais might have been a better choice to invade occupied Europe than Normandy. Either way, the di has been cast. For now we can only hope it will ultimately prove a strategically good decision, but we will know for sure soon enough.

However, recently a suggestion has been made that could offer a graceful exit – or a mandate to stay for at least a while longer. Since there have now been several successful elections held in Iraq, surely it’s time for a referendum on the war for the Iraqi people themselves? Let them vote whether they want the US to stay or go.

I have a further suggestion. Rather than have the Iraqis vote on stay versus go – have them vote on go immediately versus stay for one year, renewable next year. And let it be clearly understood that there will be a limit to the times they can renew our presence.

If the voters decide “get out now”, fine. Democracy is served and we’ve bowed to the will of the Iraqi people. It would certainly take the wind out of the sails of those claiming that the stated goal of spreading democracy is a farce, even if the result is more chaos. It’s called “the people’s right to be wrong”.

If the vote is “stay for another year”, the US could take the attitude of “OK, but you really have to get your act together and handle your own problems, we really need to get out of here.”

Jihadists would be hard pressed to object to this – though they will of course. How are they going to justify their campaign, with all the attendant misery to ordinary Iraqis, if the people are free to tell the US to leave? Are they going to boycott the election? Attack the polls again? Good! They reveal their own despotic nature to the world and make it hard for the lumpen intelligentsia of the West to stay on board with them and maintain their own credibility.

And folks, whether you support the war or not, it’s really important that we not stay for too much longer. Even if, perhaps especially if we win.

After the Second World War, America occupied a devastated Europe, spent huge amounts to rebuild it, and subsidized the defense of Western Europe against the Soviet threat for the next two generations.

Now we have an ally that constantly second-guesses the use of the military power of the US-lead alliance while contributing a miniscule amount to that power. Whose chattering classes complain incessantly about American hegemony while refusing to build a European counterbalance to it. Whose belated attempts to build a strong Union of their own flounder about in seas of red tape, creating immense unworkable federal structures that meet with narrow approval, if that, only because they are – not American.

And why? My guess is, by undertaking their defense on a permanent basis, we took their manhood from them. More accurately, they yielded it to us willingly, and they hate us for it. We don’t want to make that mistake again with Eastern Europe and we certainly don’t want to make it with Iraq.

I’ll have more to say about this later, but in brief, we have to make sure we are making allies – not welfare clients.

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Comparisons between the Iraq war and Vietnam abound, on both sides of the argument. Opponents of the war, and subsequent occupation and reconstruction of Iraq have been shouting “quagmire, just like Vietnam” since the first week of the war. Proponents have been bringing up the specter of “betrayal on the eve of victory, just like Vietnam”.

There are indeed some similarities between the two situations, which may yet bring us to another foreign policy disaster, and these deserve thoughtful consideration. But in almost all important respects Iraq is not Vietnam, and the differences may give cause for cautious optimism.

First we ought to consider how Iraq is like Vietnam. To begin with, the rationales, both for and against, were never well articulated. But in the absence of a strong and compelling argument for going to war, any argument against going to war carries more weight.

“Bush lied, thousands died.” the elusive weapons of mass destruction. Arguments continue about whether Saddam did or did not continue his program to obtain chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It is certain that he did at one time have chemical weapons, which he used on the rebellious Kurds, and had been seeking biological and nuclear weapons, but no clear cut evidence has surfaced that he continued to pursue these programs after the cease fire following the first invasion of Iraq. The Iraqis certainly acted as if they were conducting hidden programs, but that may have been a bluff, in which case they have limited claim to sympathy for their plight. Or it may very well have been a case of the dictator demanding his people produce unbeatable secret weapons and being assured by his fearful subordinates, “Yes Boss, we’re right on it! Any day now.” (Note Hitler’s constant assurances that secret weapons would be fielded any day to reverse the tide of WWII.)

The salient fact remains that legally speaking we did not go to war with Iraq – because we had not been at peace with Iraq since the first Gulf War. There was a ceasefire in place, which Saddam was in violation of every single day. (By the way – this also apples to North Korea.) All arguments about the legality of the second invasion of Iraq must first address the first set of hostilities under George Bush Sr. There was never a lack of a cassus belli under the accepted standards of international law, just not very exciting ones to present to the public. Fine points of law are not very rousing when you are asking your citizens to commit to something as serious as a war.

Contrariwise the rational, well-considered argument that invading a country and dealing with the subsequent insurrection/ civil war was not in our national interest got lost in the hysterical America-hating rhetoric of the American and European Left and the overheated anti-statism of the isolationist libertarian Right. Like Vietnam, the voice of a patriotic and principled opposition to the war (which included a number of top military officers in both cases) was lost in the shouting of a movement whose hatred was of America, not war.

The movement whose basic motivation was America-hatred found the national interest argument unappealing, precisely because they care nothing for America’s national interest, and were therefore reduced to claiming that Iraq was a better place under Saddam and that American forces were responsible for more innocent deaths than Saddam’s evil regime a la Michael Moore.

Where the anti-war movement did succeed was in framing the debate as “pro-war” versus “anti-war”. Nobody but a Nietzschean lunatic is “for” war. The questions rational men must ask themselves are, “Do we have a choice and is war the worst alternative?”

Generations of post-World War II recriminations have lamented that the West failed to deal with Hitler until it was almost too late, and paid a terrible price in lives, treasure and a devil’s bargain with the Soviet Union that delivered another two generations of Eastern Europeans into serfdom.

Which brings us to the most obvious similarity between Iraq and Vietnam, or between any wars – the fact that they are expensive.

Iraq though, has been remarkably cheap in terms of lives lost. (If you can ever count lives lost as “cheap”. For every death, the world has ended for someone and is irretrievably damaged for others.) The insurrection has so far produced fewer American and coalition casualties than a good month or a bad day of any of our previous large-scale wars, while inflicting massive losses on the enemy. Ongoing civilians casualties (“collateral damage” in that detestable military euphemism) are arguably less than Saddam inflicted on his own people while in power – so far, and indeed more casualities are inflicted deliberately by Jihadist terrorists than accidentally by coalition forces. (Even the highly questionable John Hopkins study held that 2/3 of all deaths are Jihadists killing Iraqi civilians.)

However, the technological and training expertise that has produced this one-sided kill ratio must be paid for in other ways. To put it bluntly, the enemy spends lives they hold cheap while we spend money to preserve lives we hold dear – both ours and those of innocent civilians. That may look like a good trade but the legitimate question arises of how long we can keep this up before our economy suffers seriously, and with it our military capability? Particularly when the political realities are such that we cannot cut government services in other areas to compensate for military expenditures.

And there is disturbing evidence that Osama bin Ladin and his cohorts are well aware of this and counting on it.

Iraq is not like Vietnam

The most important difference is, there is no draft. Morally, this matters to those of us who believe passionately that our lives belong to us alone. Personally, it matters to those of us who are deeply insulted by the arrogant assumption by politicians of their right to arbitrarily dispose of our lives as they choose. Practically, it matters in that it deprives the America-hating movement of an army of foot soldiers.

Woven into the fabric of the very concept of consensual government is the principle that not only do we get to help choose it, we get to decide on a very personal level whether it’s worth dying to preserve. Those who made the war in Vietnam, in their arrogance forgot that part of the American national character described by Baron Von Steuben, who trained Washington’s army at the founding of our nation. In a moment of exasperation he exclaimed, “It’s not enough to give an American an order, you have to tell him why!”

Dissent in this war is tolerated to an extraordinary degree. During the Vietnam War, anti-war dissenters were spied on and harassed by all legal and many illegal means. Today their opinions are taken seriously, as dissenting opinions should be in a free society. On university campuses the opposition is not against the Establishment, nowadays they are the establishment and have no fear for their jobs in expressing anti-government opinions, often quite the opposite. Today students and faculty with pro-administration opinions are harassed, ridiculed, rejected for tenure, and increasingly, threatened with physical assault.

In this war, it is consensual government our soldiers are being asked to fight for. Those of us who came of military age during Vietnam remember watching power change hands in a coup and assassinations, followed by almost half a dozen coups before a military strongman emerged, who held power unopposed until the fall of Vietnam. Does anyone seriously wonder why American youths were less than enthusiastic about being told, not asked, to risk death to support that regime?

In Iraq the first order of business was to get an elected government with a written constitution in place. There are many perceived flaws in the process and it could still go horribly wrong, but Vietnam taught us the cost of waiting until “later” to get that job done. The sight of all those dyed fingers lifted defiantly in the air was inspiring to all who sincerely love liberty and wish the people of Iraq well. By now even those Iraqis who quite understandably resent the occupation of their country by a foreign power, must begin to realize that instead of fighting to eject American forces from their country, they can work to establish a stable government of their own choosing, and tell them to leave – if they still want them to.

A plebiscite held to ask them if they want the coalition to stay or leave, may (and I stress may) satisfy Arab conceptions of honor – as well as providng us with a graceful exit that is nor perceived as a rout.

Critics argue that the administration is making the unfounded assumption that everyone actually wants a democratic government, and this is a serious consideration. Our free institutions are based on legal and cultural traditions thousands of years old, which flat do not exist in most of the world. However while many have no strong desire for, or even understanding of free, consensual government it does not follow that they prefer living under one that terrorizes, tortures and murders its citizens at will.

In terms of geopolitics, the situation in Iraq is far different from Vietnam. Vietnam was a minor client state of a rival superpower that the U.S. could not afford to confront directly. Iraq was a major player among hostile Arab nations who resent and fear American world hegemony but cannot confront it directly and can only work covertly against American interests. Vietnam’s patron superpower had less interest in outright victory than they had in keeping the United States engaged in a protracted and expensive war that sapped its strength, created domestic chaos and distracted it from their main interest in Europe.

Iraq is in the geographical center of the struggle against Jihadism. The patrons of fanatical Jihadism are vitally concerned with Iraq and rightfully fearful that a stable, even semi-democratic Iraq would be the beginning of the end of their tyranny and autocracy throughout the Middle East.

Once France was chased out of Vietnam, the European powers could express moral disdain for America’s presence there, but had no financial interest threatened by it. Their realistic concern was that America would be distracted in a theater peripheral to Europe and our will to resist the Soviet’s plans to eventually absorb Western Europe into their empire destroyed.

With Iraq the situation is more complicated. France and Germany’s ox certainly got gored when their cozy financial arrangements with Saddam were trashed. However, in the long-term, a nuclear Iraq or Iran would be a greater threat to them than to America and they are in a far worse position to deal with the threat without the U.S.

Organized opposition to the Vietnam War in America was early on co-opted by a Hard Left cadre who made common cause with Soviet/ Vietnamese communism, which was portrayed as being on the side of workers, women, freethinkers, minorities, homosexuals and whoever else’s cause it was convenient for them to espouse. To this day, the survivors often remain visibly nostalgic about their days in the Movement, which were the most meaningful of their lives. As opposed to the foot soldiers of the Movement who basically just breathed a sigh of relief and got on with their lives once the draft was discontinued.

Today, the Hard Left opposition has made common cause with the Islamists who openly advocate and practice: chattel slavery, the brutal subjection of women, religious persecution, the murder of homosexuals, the extermination of Jews and who despise the multiculturalism of Western intellectuals. To say the least, this casts doubts on the sincerity of their patriotism and concern for human rights and seriously damages their credibility in the eyes of ordinary people with common sense – and even many intellectuals.

The Vietnam War was inarticulately justified, strategically confused and fought by soldiers who, though as valiant as any America ever fielded, could be compelled to serve no more than a one-year tour of duty, which forced the military to fight with a large percentage of inexperienced troops at any given time.

However, the loss of Vietnam forced the military into a radical rethinking of the way free nations conduct warfare. And the evidence indicates that the learning curve is even steeper than before. The modern all-volunteer military is highly competent, flexible, adaptive, forward thinking, and in spite of well-publicized abuses, far less likely to take out rage and frustration on civilians. The My Lai massacre took years of dedicated effort by a few brave individuals to bring to light. The far less serious abuses at Abu Ghraib were brought to light almost immediately by the Army itself and the individuals responsible tried and punished.

All of this justifies cautious optimism, but there are also reasons to be concerned. Precisely because the hysterical anti-American faction of the opposition has drowned out rational voices concerned about Iraq, these serious concerns may not be given the hearing they deserve.

Next: Iraq could be worse than Vietnam.

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