Abandoning Iraq

The picture really is quite bleak according to David Warren.  I see his point of view and follow his train of thought all too clearly. This war will inevitably come back to bite us in the rear end.  It won't be pretty.

...in trying to build a secular democracy over the ruin of Saddam’s regime, the Americans tried something they had not the stomach for. From the outset, they imposed upon themselves restrictions that would make that fight unwinnable. As in Vietnam, they adopted a purely defensive posture.

So far as President Bush can be blamed, it should be for showing insufficient ruthlessness in a task that could not be accomplished by half-measures. Alternatively, for failing to grasp that America was psychologically unprepared for real war, not only by the memory of Vietnam, but by the grim advance of "liberal" decadence in domestic life over the generation since.

The great American jurisprude, Robert Bork, expressed his foreboding to me four years ago, before Iraq had even been invaded. "It took the New York Times five years of war in Vietnam to turn on President Johnson; but this time they are at the President's throat from day one." As he further noted, the whole approach to the impending and inevitable Iraq war was being skewed by the need to assuage political and diplomatic adversaries.

...If Iraq is abandoned, the credibility of America and the West is lost. Iran's hopes of regional hegemony are assured. The Americans will have cut and run after enduring less than one-twentieth of the casualties they suffered in Vietnam; and from a battle more consequential, for it is against an Islamist enemy that is rising, instead of a Communist enemy in decline.

Read the whole thing.  Link above.

Also don't miss Neo-neocon's analysis.

Comments

[Jack]

Interesting.

[alisa]

...If Iraq is abandoned, the credibility of America and the West is lost.---hmmmmmm sounds like Viet Nam....which is what the media and 'some politicians' have been angling for.