I read this Jackson Diehl column late last night, and my first instinct was to believe he’d been sitting around, deliberately trying to figure out what would maximally infuriate me. Then I decided I must have been asleep already and it was all a bad dream. Then I got to the office this morning and it was still there, real as the pile of books on my desk. There on the stack in With All Our Might which, like Diehl, I would recommend. But Diehl doesn’t actually seem interested in recommending it, instead he’s using the recommendation as a pretext to engage in a lot of unsupported slurs about “Internet noise” and people who want to withdraw from Iraq. He quotes the following from Will Marshall and Jeremy Rosner as his big, substantive rebuttal to us silly Internet noise makers:
The fact that President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction does not justify an immediate or precipitous withdrawal. Instead we should rally the American people for an extended and robust security and reconstruction presence.
Let me be blunt: This is not an argument. This is cant. It’s silly and it’s insulting. If you’re going to spend your time, as Diehl does, sneering at the Internet for not being substantive then you might want to put an actual substantive argument down on your precious newsprint. Where is the evidence, for example, that this plan is feasible? For that matter, what’s the plan? And if President Bush and his team have mismanaged virtually every aspect of postwar reconstruction then why on God’s earth would we expect them to suddenly implement a brilliant plan?
Nobody doubts that the best thing to happen for Iraq would be for the United States to put together a crackerjack “stability and democracy and ponies” plan and then put it into place. Iraq would end up stable, democratic, and everyone would have ponies. It’d be great. The trouble is that it’s become very clear that nobody actually has such a plan on hand. And not, fundamentally, because they aren’t thinking hard enough. The issue is that there are actual limits to what our troops can accomplish. They’re soldiers, not magicians. They can’t conjure up a sense of national identity or widespread social support for liberalism.
What Iraq needs is a political settlement among the important factions such that everyone would prefer living under the terms of the agreements to fighting with each other. Absent such an agreement, the American military can’t “fix” Iraq. Given such an agreement, the American military would be superfluous.
