William F. Buckley sez we can’t leave Iraq just yet because:
- 1) The old concern that Shiites and Sunnis would fire up sectarian hostility to dismember the state is taking a back seat to the concern that they are forgetting their differences in order to fight jointly — for the expulsion of the American military.
2) Our program to train an Iraqi peacekeeping constabulary is in disarray. Many Iraqis trained and pressed into duty fled from the onrush of dissenters and terrorists, in some cases joining with them. There were reports of trucks and cars designated as equipment for Iraqi police which, in the pell-mell of midweek, were turned over to, or taken by, the terrorists for use in their anti-American war.
3) Sentiment in neighboring Arab countries that could be said to have been tolerant of the U.S. enterprise seems markedly to have turned. This is in part because our friendship in this quarter is the friendship of summer soldiers. But in part also because some Arab observers have concluded that the U.S. is not going to pull off the grand enterprise we took on. Some phrase their criticisms with no attempt to conceal their contempt. “Thank God that the American administration is too stupid to win the Iraqis over,” one Islamist lawyer in Cairo reported to The New York Times. “On the contrary, they create feelings of frustration and commit more mistakes, leading more Iraqis to rise against them.”
That manila folder labeled Things They Should Have Thought of Before Invading has long since burst from overstuffing. Who would have guessed that Iraqis might reject occupation on both religious and nationalist grounds? That creating and maintaining a collaborationist police/military force might be a tad difficult? That even the neighboring Arabs who weren’t furious about the invasion might turn on an unsuccessful occupation? Who woulda thunk all that?
Contra Jim Henley, I consider it not only acceptable but imperative to point out that the warmongers were wrong and we were right, because, like all good bureaucrats, they’re not going to stop at one failure. Since the American attention span is shorter than the childhood of a fruit fly, we had better take full advantage of this moment to emphasize just how wrong the warmongers have been.