At least Bush wants to win

Bush sticks to his goal of winning in Iraq. The Democrats are just stuck.

Jonah Goldberg

January 11, 2007

AMERICANS ARE torn between two irreconcilable positions on the Iraq war. Some want the war to be a success — variously defined — and some want the war to be over. Conservatives are basically, but not exclusively, in the "success" camp. Liberals (and those further to the left) are basically, but not exclusively, the "over" party. And many people are suffering profound cognitive dissonance by trying to believe these two positions can be held simultaneously. The motives driving these various positions range from the purely patriotic to the coldly realistic to the cravenly political or psychological perfervid. Parsing motives is exhausting and pointless, but one fact remains: "End it now" and "win it eventually" cannot be reconciled.

With last night's speech, President Bush made it clear that he will settle for nothing less than winning it. He may be deluding himself, and his plan may not work, but he at least has done the nation the courtesy of saying what his position is, despite an antagonistic political establishment and a hostile public. What is maddening is that the Democratic leadership cannot, or will not, clearly tell the American people whether they are the party of "end it" or "win it."

Give Sen. Ted Kennedy his due. He not only wants the thing over, consequences be damned, but he's got the courage to admit it, as he did on Tuesday at the National Press Club. But when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid come to a fork in the road, they follow Yogi Berra's advice and take it. On the one hand, they tell the president that they want this war "brought to a close." On the other, they refuse to use their power of the purse to do exactly that, opting instead for a symbolic resolution. It may be the wisest political course for them, but it does a disservice to the nation by making the Iraq debate the equivalent of boxing with fog.

Here we have a president forthrightly trying to win a war, and the opposition — which not long ago was in favor of increasing troops, when Bush was against that — won't say what it wants. This is flatly immoral. If you believe the war can't be won and there's nothing to be gained by staying, then, to paraphrase Sen. John Kerry, you're asking more men to die for a mistake. You should demand withdrawal. But that might cost votes, so the Dems don't. And, of course, Kerry, Pelosi and other Democrats were in favor of more troops before they were against it.

Another Democratic dodge is the incessant demand for a "political solution" in Iraq. "What is absolutely clear to me is there is no military solution to the problems in Iraq, that only political solutions are going to bring about some semblance of peace," Sen. Barack Obama declared. This is either childishly naive or reprehensibly dishonest. No serious person thinks that peace can be secured without a political solution. The question is how to get one. And nobody — and I mean nobody — has made a credible case that the Iraqis can get from A to B without more bloodshed, with or without American support.

Saying we need a political solution is as helpful as saying "give peace a chance." Peace requires more than such pie-eyed verbiage. In the real world, peace has no chance until the people who want to give death squads another shot have been dispatched from the scene. It reminds me of the liberal obsession in the 1980s with getting inner-city gangs to settle their differences with break-dance competitions. If only Muqtada Sadr would moonwalk to peace!

Last night, Bush finally acknowledged what Americans already knew: The war has not gone well. But he also acknowledged what few Democrats are willing to admit: If we leave — i.e. lose — it will be a disaster, a geostrategic calamity for the United States and quite possibly a genocidal one for the Iraqis. It's long since forgotten, but perhaps the chief moral argument against the Iraq war in 2003 was that it would create an enormous humanitarian crisis in the form of refugees spilling over the borders, which in turn would destabilize the region. That didn't happen. But it would be the most likely result of a U.S. withdrawal now. Yet that's a risk the antiwar crowd is suddenly willing to take.

Bush declared last night that "victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship…. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect." This sober, stubborn emphasis on victory puts Bush at odds with much of official Washington. He wisely refused to abdicate his war responsibilities to lead to the Iraq Study Group, and instead launched a broader effort to find a way to win in Iraq — a goal former Secretary of State James A. Baker III explicitly dismissed.

Bush came up with the "surge" plan. Will it work? Nobody knows. But the one thing the American people know about George W. Bush is that he wants to win the war. What the Democrats believe is anybody's guess.