Tuesday, July 17, 2007

A Liberal War No More   [Rich Lowry]

It seems to me lately that the Iraq war has become less of a "liberal" war and more of a hard-headed Andy McCarthy-type war. Our chief war aims now are basically defeating al Qaeda and trying to check the ambitions of the Iranians—both of whom are unabashed enemies of the United States—and establishing an Iraq state that is somewhat stable and doesn't drag the region into a conflagration. Those are old-fashioned, national interest-based realist reasons for waging a war. Of course, we are down to these very basic rationales for the war because of the failures of the last four years. The war still has ideological import, but it is less highlighting the virtues of democracy in the Middle East (certainly not anytime soon) than the savagery of al Qaeda and its rejection by ordinary Iraqis. One way to look at it is that Sunnis have been offered three (from their view) radical social visions—a Shia-dominated democracy policed by the United States (offered by us obviously); their annihilation (offered by the Shia militants); and a repressive Taliban-style religious state (offered by al Qaeda). They are definitely not interested in the latter two visions and we'll see over time if they accommodate themselves to some version of the first as the least bad of the options realistically open to them. In the meantime, we are fighting to kill and stymie our enemies and to establish order in a strategically crucial country in the Middle East. You don't have to be a Wilsonian to support those war aims.

07/17 04:16 PMShare