1 Boring Old Man

Stay the course? It was a naive idea hatched a long time ago based of fallacious interpretations of the world and the place of America in it. When the Cold War came to an end, we had logged 50 years of insanity – not all of our own making. We had been forced into a position of believing that the only thing that kept us safe, kept the world safe, was to be the most dangerous country on the planet. That might even have been true during those years, though it was only true because of the equally absurd position of our adversaries. Somehow, democracy became something more than the best way to run our particular country. It became an evangelical cause, a right way to govern. It became a religion.

And so as the dictatorships masquerading as Communism failed, our policies of extreme military might were credited with the fall. That was, again, partially correct. But it wasn’t because of our military prowess, it was because it was a way of staying safe until the Communist dream turned into a nightmare and roasted in its own juices. So what was an extremely effective Defense policy was reframed as having been an Offense – a tragically flawed understanding of what the Cold War had been about. Our policy was a way of waiting until a not so developed part of the world grew up and recovered from the Czars and Emperors that had run things since the dark ages.

We knew what was coming next. It was going to be the Middle East. No question about it. The oil-rich, theocratic Middle East is as primitive as Russia was at the time of Lenin, as China was when Chairman Mao marched into Beijing. Instead of systematically working out a set of policies to gave that part of the world time to discover the advantages of civil-ization, our pundits decided they were going to jumpstart the course of history. And so our "Defense Policy" became an "Offense Policy." And when the loonies in the Moslem world found a way through our "Defense Policy," Terrorism, we went on the offense. Going to war with Iraq at the time we went to war with Iraq was the stupidest move in our history. I doubt that even Nicolo Machiavelli would’ve done something that stupid. Maybe Iraq needed to have a Civil War between the Sunni and the Shia, but they could’ve gotten there on their own. They certainly didn’t need our assistance. Maybe, if we pull out now, the country will descend into the kind of chaos that dominated Yugoslovia when Tito died. But it sure isn’t our business to be in the middle of it.

We destabilized an already unstable country in an unstable part of the world. It’s been a disaster of the first magnitude. So much for evangelical democracy. Democracy is a form of government that emerges when everything else has failed. If there’s an example of a successfully "imposed" democracy, I don’t know where it is. What’s worse, our policy has strengthened our real enemy – the Moslem fanatics. We’ll never get over making this big of a mistake. The only way to deal with it is to minimize our losses and get out of Dodge, refocus our efforts on our real enemy, and stop making things worse. If there’s anything to be said at this point, it’s certainly not "stay the course." Maybe, "get back on track," but not "stay the course."

We won the war we went there to fight – the ill-conceived war we went there to fight. Now, we’re trying to make our very, very bad idea into a good idea, and are making things worse daily. The only thing sillier than "stay the course" is "if we pull out, there will be a Civil War." There already is a Civil War. And the only way to show the world the advantages of democracy is to vote our current lunatics out of power in 2006 and 2008. Democracy is not a religious concept, it just happens to be the best way we’ve devised to diffuse the human tendency of weak people to amass power…