Another neocon finds what’s been beneath his nose for 3 1/2 years

In his column today in the New York Post, John “The Charmer” Podhoretz discovers a fundamental fact that I’ve been repeating for three and a half years, a fact that establishment conservative have studiously ignored all through that time: We don’t have a strategy for victory in Iraq.

Podhoretz writes:

Whenever a plain-spoken person like George W. Bush resorts to a technobabble word like “metric”—by which he means a mathematical way of measuring progress—you know there’s deep trouble.

This is surely the first war in history with a combatant that cannot quite define what victory is except to say victory hinges on the political maturation of the country where the war is being waged….

Unfortunately, coming up with a “metric” to define our progress will not be sufficient unto the day. Making progress will not be sufficient.

We’re fighting a war and we need to win the war. That means declaring our specific war aims—among them the destruction both of the Sunni insurgency and the Mahdi Army. And it means designing a war plan to meet them and meet them decisively.

Rather than imposing timetables on the Iraqi government it probably can’t meet, the president should be imposing timetables on his own generals and Pentagon. As in, “We need to win this thing. We need to break the backs of the bad guys in a big and decisive way. I want to know how we’re going to do this in six months.”

Great. Whatever my own views about what we should now do in Iraq, I’m glad that Podhoretz is at least speaking in more realistic terms about the problems we face there. But why is he only noticing now, after 3 1/2 years, that we do not have specific war aims to defeat our enemies in Iraq and a war plan to achieve those aims? He tells us: he agreed with the Bush idea that “the political progress in Iraq leading to the formation of the government there would ultimately break the spirit of the resisters.” In other words, democracy alone (i.e., the holding of elections and the formation of a government) would somehow make the jihadist fanatics just disappear. How could anyone with a two-digit IQ believe such a thing? Through the neoconservative ideology which holds that only ideas—namely the idea of democracy—are real.

The U.S. under President Johnson committed massive folly in Vietnam. But even Johnson and McNamara and Westmoreland never said anything so transparently absurd as that we could win and were winning in Vietnam because “the love of freedom resides in every human heart.” They never said that fixing sewage lines meant we were defeating the Vietcong. No, they said that killing lots of Vietcong (Westmoreland) and permanently securing territory from the Vietcong (Creighton Abrams) meant we were defeating the Vietcong. In its total departure from rationality, the Bush/neocon folly in Iraq is an order of magnitude beyond the folly of Vietnam.

By the way, the time that elapsed from Nazi Germany’s declaration of war on the United States on December 9, 1941 to Germany’s surrender to the Allies on May 8, 1945 was 1,246 days. The time that has elapsed from the beginning of the U.S. occupation of Iraq on April 9, 2003 (the fall of Saddam’s statue) until October 27, 2006 is 1,297 days. America’s unserious, dishonest, lying, fantastical incompetent, neocon “war” against the terror insurgents in Iraq has already lasted 51 days longer than America’s war against the most fearsome tyranny in history.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2006 05:45 PM | Send