Mark Danner: "Taking Stock of the Forever War"

I highly recommend Danner's piece in today's NYT magazine. I hope he's wrong, but if forced to bet, I'd bet that he's largely right. I do disagree with him about one significant point: he seems to deny that part of what motivates bin Laden is a fundamental disagreement with Western liberal principles. I'm not sure how anyone can deny that such disagreement constitutes a significant part of his motivation, but Danner clearly knows more about this than I do.

His line is that we stuck the conflict with al Qaeda into the moral/political/ideological boxes that we already had on hand. Us: good. Them: evil. Hulk: smash. We seem to have always had those conceptual boxes laying around, and we had plenty of surplus ones left over from the Cold War, and, hey, why waste 'em? Instead of asking the questions we needed to ask about bin Laden's motivations, instead of facing the fact that he was in large part reacting our our policies--and that those policies were in large part themselves unjust--we simply went with the he's just evil story.

Well, he is evil, he's just not just evil. He's a bad man--sort of a Pat Robertson with ideological 'roid rage--but he's reacting in part to our policies. Ignore either element, and you can't understand the situation. Or so it seems to me, relatively casual observer that I am.

Problem is, our current leaders aren't men given to deep thought or careful study, and they have little respect for those who are. Try to really understand our enemies--even if that understanding is in the service of defeating them--and the terrorists have already won. Go out swinging blindly or you hate America. Try to separate fact from fiction, eschew wishful thinking, and you are a pasty-faced denizen of the reality-based community. Real men act; girly men think. Support our troops. God bless America. Mission accomplished.

There's an opposite element on the left, of course, which thinks that everything is our fault and bin Laden is just misunderstood. That element of the left, however, is tiny and marginalized. The aforementioned element on the right is large and in charge.

As you know, I've frequently asserted that, though it may not be clear who's winning the (in Danner's (and Joe Haldeman's) phrase) "forever war," nobody could have imagined four years ago that we'd have done so badly. No rational person could have thought that it would be such a near thing in 2005. It's as if E. J. Dionne had just gone four rounds with Mike Tyson and it still wasn't clear who was winning; you'd better keep your money on Tyson, but you'd better be really, really concerned, because something has gone very, very weird. Danner agrees, insightful chap that he is.

If we had rational leadership, I wouldn't be that worried even now. This struggle is winnable, though I'm beginning to doubt that we'll actually win it. Bush has made almost the worst possible decision at almost every juncture, and now he seems determined to stay what may be the worst possible course--staying in Iraq without putting in enough troops to win. Even if the Democrats evolve into vertebrates and win in 2008, I expect that Republicans will return to Clinton mode and thwart every effort, as they twarted Clinton's efforts to attack al Qaeda.

If I'd have been in charge of this thing--and, mind you, I'm an incompetent pointy-headed philosophy professor with no experience ever accomplishing anything--we'd have won in Afghanistan rather than doing our best to lose in Iraq. There'd be a national park at Tora Bora where people could come to see the dark smudge on the floor where Osama bin What's-His-Name used to be. We'd have taken that 200-odd billion dollars we've wasted in Iraq and made Afghanistan into something like a Western liberal paradise. Democracy, free market, good roads, good schools, a community college system, rural electrification, Five Guys Burgers and Fries. The message would have been: we are terrible in battle and benevolent in victory. Attack us and die immediately. Be good to us and we'll be good to you, sharing the blessings of liberty and prosperity.

If we'd done that--if we'd made the moral and prudential difference between ourselves and bin Laden rather more clear--al Qaeda might be just a bad memory today, September 11, 2005.