Mark Helprin, a writer for whom I have great deal of admiration, has a thought-provoking piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. He believes George W. Bush has made the U.S. vulnerable by “breaking the nation’s sword in an inconclusive seven-year struggle against a ragtag enemy in two small bankrupt states.”
I respectfully disagree. The war against that ragtag enemy is inconclusive because it has literally not yet concluded. Who, exactly, thought (or claimed) it would have done so by now? Certainly not President Bush, whose administration adopted the term “the Long War” to describe the ongoing conflict, and who has spared no opportunity to remind the American people that the war on terror will take many years or decades to prosecute. Moreover, in one of those two states Mr. Helprin mentions (Iraq), the Long War is going rather well.
Mr. Helprin feels that by going to war in the way we did, “we capriciously forfeited the domestic and international political equilibrium without which alliances break apart and wars are seldom won.” He is certainly correct that fighting with alliances is preferable to going it alone, but to what international political equilibrium does Mr. Helprin refer? And which alliances have broken up? It’s true that both France and Germany, when under vociferously anti-American leadership, declined to fight in Iraq, but to suggest that the absence of those two countries’ fighting forces ensured American defeat is a stretch. France’s is not an historically revered fighting force and if the commitment of German troops in Afghanistan is any indication, Germany’s reputation for military might is no longer warranted. Moreover, the U.S. is winning in Iraq.
“Their one great accomplishment — no subsequent attacks on American soil thus far — has been offset by the stunningly incompetent prosecution of the war,” Mr. Helprin correctly notes of the Bush administration. It is true that President Bush failed to plan for the Iraqi insurgency that followed the coalition’s quick toppling of Saddam. And for that there is no other term but “stunningly incompetent.”
Mr. Helprin’s assessment of the failings of both the Right and Left in the war on terror gets it exactly right:
The Right should have labored to exhaustion to forge a coalition, and the Left should have been willing to proceed without one. The Right should have been more respectful of constitutional protections, and the Left should have joined in making temporary and clearly defined exceptions. In short, the Right should have had the wit to fight, and the Left should have had the will to fight.
It’s important to add that the listed mistakes of the Right have been corrected, while those of the Left have been amplified. And vulnerability is a hard thing to quantify in real time. Most Americans went to bed September 10, 2001 feeling safe. Once you’ve been proven vulnerable, discussion turns to things like how to identify the bodies or whether or not the attack is over. Americans haven’t pondered those questions in the past seven years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and that can’t be completely negated by a few (large) mistakes.
