William F. Buckley Jr. on the current state of the War in Iraq:
[B]eyond affirming executive supremacy in matters of war, what is George Bush going to do? It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an organized enemy. There is clearly organization in the strikes by the terrorists against our forces and against the civil government in Iraq, but whereas in Vietnam we had Hanoi as the operative headquarters of the enemy, we have no equivalent of that in Iraq, and that is a matter of paralyzing importance. All those bombings, explosions, assassinations: we are driven to believe that they are, so to speak, spontaneous.
When the Romans were challenged by Christianity, Rome fell. The generation of Christians moved by their faith overwhelmed the regimented reserves of the Roman state. It was four years ago that Mr. Cheney first observed that there was a real fear that each fallen terrorist leads to the materialization of another terrorist. What can a ?surge,? of the kind we are now relying upon, do to cope with endemic disease? The parallel even comes to mind of the eventual collapse of Prohibition, because there wasn?t any way the government could neutralize the appetite for alcohol, or the resourcefulness of the freeman in acquiring it.
In case you aren’t quite grasping the implications of what Buckley is saying here, he’s basically saying that by continuing to engage in a conflict that has no foreseeable end and no foreseeable victory, we may be sewing the seeds of a conflict that will be even worse that the idea of planes flying into skyscrapers.
Is he right ? Well, let’s just say that, given how things have gone over the past four years, I wouldn’t bet against him.
