An Islam realist talks with … a U.S. senator

Finding herself sitting across the aisle from Sen. Spector on an Amtrak train, Diana West showed to him a column of hers about the futility of both the “surge” and the “withdrawal” plans in Iraq (she doesn’t say, but I assume she means her July 13 column in the Washington Times). She told him the U.S. needed to crush our enemies in Iraq, and that we need to be more concerned about avoiding American casualties than about avoiding Iraqi casualties.

[I]t sure sounds better than asking American troops to knock on doors, card terrorists and drive over IEDs for the next 20 years. But not to the powers that be. In our new age, in our post-modern culture, American war goals—American self-preservation—are secondary to war casualties, and I don’t mean our own.

That’s who we are—socially humane, expendable and increasingly impotent. It’s not who our fathers and grandfathers were. The men who decimated German and Japanese cities as part of the effort to win World War II as quickly as possible would have been perplexed by descendants who now send American troops house to booby-trapped house and expect to achieve anything but more war, “limited” though it may be.

Talk about waste.

You rose to go. I asked whether anything I said had made sense. Your conclusion: “I don’t think we’re prepared to take the kind of civilian casualties that you describe.”

And you were gone.

Here’s what I wanted to say next: If that’s the case, senator—and I’m afraid it is—we’d better get out of the business of trying to project power. We have forgotten how.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 20, 2007 07:39 PM | Send