Differing Views on Iraq

The theme of today's post is "Make Your Own Hegelian Triad."

I will give you the thesis, and then the antithesis. Then I will supply the synthesis.

But first, the thesis. This is from Ann Coulter's latest column:

"This year's Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.

To wit, they're claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they're all for the war against terror — absolutely in favor of that war — they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as "Iraqi civilians," even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.

As Howard Dean put it this week, "The occupation in Iraq is costing American lives and hampering our ability to fight the real global war on terror."

This would be like complaining that Roosevelt's war in Germany was hampering our ability to fight the real global war on fascism. Or anti-discrimination laws were hampering our ability to fight the real war on racism. Or dusting is hampering our ability to fight the real war on dust."

Okay. Got the thesis?

Now here's the antithesis. It comes from a study written by Jeffrey Record and published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute. It's quoted in Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks (pps. 308-309 if you'd care to look it up):

"Of particular concern has been the conflation of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored crucial differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary pretentive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the [Global War on Terror] but rather a detour from it."

Rather an effective antithesis, wouldn't you say? Especially since it comes from an official Army publication, and not from some aging bottle blonde spinster with her head up her ass.

Now for the synthesis. I've quoted it before, but it's worth quoting again. It's from one of my favorite authors, Edward Gibbon. He's writing in Great Britain about that insurgency across the pond known as the American Revolution (Gibbon was, at the time, a Member of Parliament):

"I shall scarcely give my consent to exhaust still further the finest country in the world in the prosecution of a war from whence no reasonable man entertains any hope of success. It is better to be humbled than ruined."

I think that pretty well sums it up – don’t you?

Tom Moran