The more people on our side get killed, the more we’re winning

In April and May the average number of Iraqis killed each day in terrorist attacks was 15, up from five per day in February and March. Fifteen people blown up and killed every day by terrorist bombs. In March and April of 2002, when terrorist attacks on Israelis were occurring almost daily, the situation became finally so desperate that the Sharon government, after having dickered and delayed for a year, finally invaded the West Bank to uproot the terrorist infrastructure. The ongoing mass slaughter of innocents in Iraq dwarfs what was happening in Israel at the peak of the terror intifida, yet somehow it’s all seen as normal. Thus that deluded fool Amir Taheri, the Iranian exile whom the neocon New York Post allows to write a column twice weekly, mentions the 15 per day figure and adds:

Does this mean that the insurgency has fresh wind in its sails? Are the terrorists winning, as some Western commentators suggest? The answers: No, and no. To be sure, the insurgency still holds the tactical initiative in the sense that, within the area where it has an effective presence, it can still decide where and when to strike. Strategically, however, the insurgency is weaker today than it was a year ago. This is because the struggle for Iraq is ultimately a political one, the outcome of which will not be decided by how many people each side kills but by how those killings and other acts of violence are translated into political realities.

Taheri, as I said, is a fool. But the substance of what he’s saying is no different from what our most respected political and intellectual leaders are saying. Indeed, the paragraph I quoted above was approvingly highlighted in the daily e-mail I receive from the Center for Security Policy, which is headed by neocon Frank Gaffney. Neoconservatism elevates abstract universalist formulae, namely “democracy” and the notion that all people are the same and want “democracy,” over the actual content of reality, including tribal and religious groupings and the conflicts between them. Under the neoconservative dispensation, an ideology of universal sameness replaces reality, and democratic politics is seen as the carrying out of war by other means. Accordingly, as Taheri puts it, an election and the construction of a parliamentary government become “strategic” facts, as compared to the mere “tactics” of the enemy’s being able to operate freely inside Iraq and mass murder the Iraqi people at will. Therefore you don’t have to defeat the enemy militarily in order to be successful. If you put in place something which you can plausibly call “democracy,” and which you can claim shows the victory of your democratic ideology, that itself is the victory. If the mass carnage of innocents in marketplaces and mosques still continues, it doesn’t matter, because that’s only tactics. The strategic reality, the reality that counts, is “democracy.” For neocons, only slogans are real, and everything else, including living human beings, must be sacrificed to them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 01, 2005 08:36 PM | Send