Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, February 27, 2006 at about 11pm CST - Segment 4

Master CraftsMon - Aired Monday, February 27, 2006 at about 11pm CST
Segment 4

Something weird happened on this last Friday. William F. Buckley of the National Review threw in the towel on Iraq. You have to understand why that is a big event for people on the Right. William F. Buckley started the modern Conservative movement in 1955. For him to say that we have lost in Iraq is equivalent to Walter Cronkite saying in 1968 that the Tet Offensive was a massive defeat, when in actuality the Tet Offensive was one of the American military's major victories.

The article in the National Review is kind of long, but the meat of the article is this:

A problem for American policymakers - for President Bush, ultimately - is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.

The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymakers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail - in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

I had to look up that word 'postulate' in the dictionary. Sometimes ol' Bill forgets that us mere mortals are not as widely read as he is. Postulate means, 'To assume or assert the truth, reality, or necessity of, especially as a basis of an argument.' In other words, the Bush administration has told everybody that these two things will be true at some point in time. Buckley is saying that even though only a short time has passed since Iraq has become a country by our standards, the time is up and we must admit that Iraq will never be one country, nor will the Iraqi military EVER be able to handle security.

I had to read that article three times to understand what he was talking about, because the assertion that the Iraqi army is NOT taking up the slack flies in the face of everything I am getting from our military with boots on the ground. Most of you do not follow the MilBlog, that is the on-line journals of our soldiers in Iraq. These men and women in our military are saying that the Iraqi military is slowly but surely shaping up. The best information I have is that the Iraqi military will be able to provide for their own security at some point in time. Our military does NOT view the situation as hopeless. If the grunts were hopeless, the MilBlogs would show that. They do not.

What is REALLY strange about this article is that Victor Davis Hanson on the same page as Buckley's article refutes the claim that the situation is hopeless over there. Victor Davis Hanson has just returned from visiting Iraq where he saw first hand what is going on there.

Buckley's first assertion, that the Iraqi people will never pull together seems on its face to be incorrect as well. When the great golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra was blown up this last week, there were Shi'ite riots almost immediate. Many Sunni mosques were attacked. Sunni and Shi'ite leaders jumped in and just as immediately tried to calm things down. Instead of the leaders screaming for civil war, the leaders on both sides are calling for unity. The Iraqi bloggers on the ground in Iraq are saying that most people believe that Al Quaeda destroyed the mosque. Subsequent attacks in the southern Iraq just confirmed the impression in most Iraqi's minds.

On the same page of the National Review web site, a guy made the point that in India at one time Muslims were killing Hindus quite a bit. Now, the tribal aspect of their lives are behind them. It has taken about fifty years for that to happen. There still is violence between the groups, but we have riots in this country as well for reasons that are even stupider than religion. To expect Iraqis to suddenly shed their tribal outlook is expecting too much. On the other hand, that is what is happening albeit slowly.

I must admit that the press in this country is doing a bang-up job of painting Iraq as a hopeless case. Our military really and truly hates the United States press because of that. It seems to our troops that the media hates them back. Except Fox, of course. Ollie North has made it impossible for the military to hate Fox.

Maybe you didn't notice this, but a huge number of the signs you are seeing at the Muslim protests are in English. The Irreconcilables really know how to manipulate the press. They are thoroughly convinced that they can get our press to make the case that Iraq and the entire War on Terror is a bad idea. They are counting on the press to force the American people to retreat.

Oh, by the way, William F. Buckley did not say in his article that we should retreat, he only said that we have failed. He advocates that we find a new approach for the War of Terror, because the present one has failed. Walter Cronkite advocated that we cut and run both in Vietnam and in Iraq. I am not sure if Buckley is right, but I refuse to rule out the possibility that he might be correct.

For instance, the U.S. needs to do something to counter the media war that the Irreconcilables have launched against us. So far we have not done a good job of countering their attacks on us in the media both here and abroad.

I just kind of thought it was a weird concept that William F. Buckley had come out against the policies of President George Bush. The thinking on the Left seems to be that all people on the Right worship the ground Bush walks on. The actuality is that most people on the Right like Bush, but think he makes some boneheaded mistakes occasionally. Big government conservatism is a REALLY stupid idea.

What really gets me about reporting of the destruction of the Askariya shrine is that the news media seems almost to demand that there be a civil war in Iraq. Every hour the news people seemed to hold their breaths hoping that new and more horrible things would happen. The Iraqis are not good with the behavior of our news media. Most of the people know that the Wahabists from Saudi Arabia are behind the bombing. The destruction of the Sunni mosques was an over reaction to a fatwa put out by one if the Shi’ite mullahs who on the surface was trying to calm the waters, but in reality was making a call to destroy the Sunni mosques.

Reports are now coming in that like a huge violent storm, the destruction came and went. Baghdad is getting back to normal. The Iraqi military is being praised for doing a good job. The police are getting a lot of criticism for not doing their job. This is not a civil war. It looks like to be that the Iraqis have come out a small amount stronger than before.

Anyway. I am not willing to accept that we have failed in Iraq... yet. I am going to have to get reports from the native Iraqis and our military who are there that the situation is hopeless, before I accept that as fact.