Delusions of Adequacy

Via World Magazine Blog, an interesting column by Mark Helprin. Helprin gives articulate voice to many of the concerns I've had about the war in Iraq in recent weeks. He takes the Bush administration to task with brutal yet clinical precision, stating in his opening paragraph:

Though America has condemned the cruelties of Abu Ghraib, they remain nonetheless a symbol of the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership.

And that's the gentle paragraph. Helprin spends the next seven succinctly cataloguing the missteps and mistakes made by the civilian leadership in Washington -- ie., Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. These seven paragraphs are, by Helprin's estimate, "the briefest summary of mismanagement" on the part of the administration and the military leadership.

But Democrats are, in Helprin's view, worse, because they lack even the resolve to fight against America's enemies:

John Kerry may say one thing and another, but no matter how the topgallants break in the Democratic Party, its ideological keel is a leaden and unthinking pacifism, a pretentious and illogical deference to all things European, and the unhinged belief that America by its very nature transforms every aspect of its self-defense into an aggression that justifies the offense against which it is defending itself... Their allergy to military expenditure assures that, unlike Republicans, who provided just enough to accomplish an arrogant plan if nothing went wrong, they would not provide enough to accomplish a humble plan if everything went right.

Helprin proposes that once the situation has stabilized -- after we've allowed the Kurds, Shia, and Sunni factions to obtain control over their territories, we should emplace strongmen, set up a federation, and withdraw, "with or without permission," to bases in Saudi Arabia -- which seems to represent nothing better than a return to the status quo ante... though the absence of Saddam is a definite boon. And this modified status quo ante may be the best we can hope for.

Agree or disagree with him, Mark Helprin's is a voice that should not be casually ignored. The bio at the bottom of the piece states that he's a novelist, a WSJ contributing editor, and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. What it doesn't say, and should, is that he is also a speechwriter for Republican presidents and has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli Air Force, and the IDF. He, in other words, knows what he's talking about when it comes to military matters, and his words should carry weight with Republicans and conservatives in general.