Mark Steyn On Iraq

From the December 31, 2005, National Review (On Dead Tree), subscription-only, for now:

I’ve never been one for “winning the hearts and minds” of Iraqis. Heart-wise, an awful lot of them dislike infidels and Jews and American soldiers, and, while one may deplore that, it’s just a fact of life. But, in their minds, as those poll numbers indicate, the Iraqis are rational enough to work out where their best interest lies. And, quite reasonably, they figure it doesn’t lie with a psychotic death cult that nowadays mainly blows up Muslims on buses, in shopping markets, schools, and even mosques. That’s the worst corporate diversification since Seagram’s bought Universal Pictures. And at least Seagram’s still made whisky; Zarqawi isn’t killing a lot of infidels these days.

So Iraq’s hearts and minds are operating far more rationally than the Democrats, who these days are both heartless, in their indifference to the aspirations of ordinary Arabs, and mindless, in their calculation of their own best interests. I find Chirac-Schroeder obstructionism easier to understand than the Dean-Boxer variety. For EU politicians, as those French and German poll numbers indicate, there’s not a lot of good options when half the babies in your maternity wards are Muslim. But what’s the thinking behind what the Democrats are doing?

Easy, you say: It’s naked partisan politics. And, to be sure, the broader culture has kind of internalized it as such, to the point where, for example, Dan Balz can publish a huge piece in the Washington Post that from its headline down — “Hillary Clinton Crafts Centrist Stance on War” — assumes that it’s perfectly natural to talk about the foreign policy and national security of one’s own country entirely in political terms. For Balz and for everyone he quotes in the piece, the point of a “policy on Iraq” is not to have a policy that affects Iraq in any real sense but to have a policy that advances domestic political fortunes. “Iraq” might as well be a board game you’re in the national playoffs of.

Example: “Her refusal to advocate a speedy exit from Iraq may reflect a more accurate reading of public anxiety about the choices now facing the country.” Note that Balz takes it for granted that Senator Rodham Clinton should have no principled position on Iraq, no strategic view of the Muslim world, no philosophical preference as to America’s mission abroad, no genuine concerns about security, etc. Indeed, he’s implicitly arguing that the greatest strength of Hillary as a viable Democratic presidential candidate — poor Joe Lieberman’s “Joementum” won’t even place him in the Top Ten in the Iowa caucus — is that she’s the least encumbered with anything that will prevent her from agreeing with whatever the 10 p.m. internal polling numbers are showing.

Take that headline: What would a “centrist stance” be on, say, the Second World War? Every few days, some media outlet or other runs a piece about how Bush is “in a bubble” — and no doubt he is, to one degree or another, as busy world leaders tend to be, by definition. But the American media raging that Bush is in a bubble are the equivalent of that famous British newspaper headline: “Fog in Channel. Continent Cut Off.” Whatever bubble Bush is in, it’s a vast jostling metropolis of diverse peoples stretching to the horizon compared with the shrunken little bubble the Democrats and the media inhabit, reinforcing each other’s illusions, like two madmen playing Chinese whispers. No serious person — by which I mean a fellow who’s aware there’s a real country called “Iraq” and it’s in a part of the world called “the Middle East” — could read that Balz analysis without weeping with laughter. Pseudo-policies are soberly considered as if they had any meaning in reality: Should we withdraw from Europe six months after D-Day? Or commit ourselves to a phased drawing down over three to nine months? Clearly, if we announce we’ll be leaving the Continent by October 27, that might embolden Herr Hitler. But, if we say 10 percent of our forces might remain until February 1947, that will give us a more flexible exit strategy with strong centrist appeal.