Let's hope that preparations by Iraqi soldiers for that country's important referendum on the constitution will bring a degree of success, that Iraqi citizens will have the high courage required to vote Saturday--and that they will be safe.
As disappointed (indeed, angry) as I am about the appointment of Harriet Miers, who should withdraw her name, I really care most of all about the war in Iraq. Winning it is essential to the safety of the people of both Iraq and the United States. That is why National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's "American Debacle" article in the Los Angeles Times was so appalling:
"Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental 'Study of History,' that the ultimate cause of imperial collapse was 'suicidal statecraft.' Sadly for George W. Bush's place in history and - much more important - ominously for America's future, that adroit phrase increasingly seems applicable to the policies pursued by the United States since the cataclysm of 9/11.
"In a very real sense, during the last four years the Bush team has dangerously undercut America's seemingly secure perch on top of the global totem pole by transforming a manageable, though serious, challenge largely of regional origin into an international debacle."
The historian Victor Davis Hanson (whose "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" is receiving enthusiastic reviews) answers Brzezinski:
"Aside from the unintended irony that the classical historian Arnold Toynbee himself was not always 'adroit,' but wrong in most of his determinist conclusions, and that such criticism comes from a high official of an administration that witnessed on its watch the Iranian-hostage debacle, the disastrous rescue mission, the tragicomic odyssey of the terminally ill shah, the first and last Western Olympic boycott, oil hikes even higher in real dollars than the present spikes, Communist infiltration into Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cambodian holocaust, a gloomy acceptance that perpetual parity with the Soviet Union was the hope of the day, the realism that cemented our ties with corrupt autocracies in the Middle East (Orwellian sales of F-15 warplanes to the Saudis minus their extras), and the hard-to-achieve simultaneous high unemployment, high inflation, and high interest rates, Mr. Brzezinski is at least a valuable barometer of the current pessimism over events such as September 11.
"Such gloom seems to be the fashion of the day.
"The story of the war since September 11 is that the United States military has not lost a single battle, has removed two dictatorships, and has birthed democracy in the Middle East. During Katrina, critics suggested troops in Iraq should have been in New Orleans, but that was a political, not a realistic complaint: few charged that there were too many thousands abroad in Germany, Italy, the U.K., Korea, or Japan when they should have been in Louisiana."
Should liberal opinion prevail--and it could--we will face an American debacle.
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