Alternative Realities

It's a tough slog through the Defeaticrats' quagmires of doom and swamps of loathing. But if you put your back into it, you can get all the way to the end of Steve Chapman's Desperate Arguments for Staying the Course at Real Clear Politics. And when you do, you break blessedly into the fields of reason and peaks of clarity, since Mark Steyn's Dems Determined to Ignore Progress in Iraq is the next RCP click.

One author (Chapman) writes for the ChiTribune; the other for the Chi SunTimes. But they are writing from worlds apart.

Chapman can't find a reason to be reasonable. His perception of the war is formed by defeatism. In his mind, he can't see America winning; he can't see America right; he can, therefore, only see a limited, blinders-on landscape of Bergmanian bleakness and sorrow.

He takes the GOP argument that Iraq is tying up terrrorist resources and protecting us at home and says:

But if this is true, why would we ever want to leave? If the enemy's main goal is to kill Americans, turning the war over to Iraqi forces won't solve the problem. On the contrary, it will leave the insurgents no choice but to come after us right here at home.

By this logic, the only sensible thing to do is stay in Iraq until we kill them all. No serious person thinks that is going to happen anytime soon.

Is he telling us he's not a serious person? Chapman is a body-counter, and he thinks that body count is the only thing that counts, that the definition of victory is "kill them all." But the Islamic world is seeing a few other things: Democracy and freedom abudding. Muslims killing more Muslims than Americans are. A despot on trial, a Taliban destroyed.

He has the destructive Dem vision of a war without pain:

At this point, the administration's arguments have the ring of desperation. They're the equivalent of telling a man who picks up a beehive and gets stung by dozens of bees that whatever he does, he must not let go of the hive.

But is the sting so bad that it's keeping you from destroying the hive that's been bothering us for years; that is intent on bothering us for years to come? How many stings are too many for Chapman? On the other hand, how many stings are too many for something strong, like America?

Steyn sees the stinging bees and their hive differently:

And, without rehashing the last millennium and a half, the Muslim conquest of Europe and then the Crusades and the fall of Andalusia, if you take out a map of the world and look at the rise of the European empires you notice a curious thing: in conquering the world the imperial powers for the most part simply bypassed the Islamic world. They made Africa and South Asia and Latin America and everywhere else seats of European power, but they left the Middle East alone. And, even when they eventually got their hands on the region, after the First World War, they made no serious attempt to reform the neighborhood. We live with the consequences of that today.

So Bush has chosen to embark on a project every other great power of the last half-millennium has shrunk from: the transformation of the Middle East.

It's clear that there's been a mistake in history. It has not been good for the planet to leave the Middle East and Islam unreformed. Bush is brave enough -- the Dems would say stupid enough -- to start this process, and now that it's started, the Middle East will not be the same.

The Egyptians get it, so do the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Jordanians and the Syrians. The choice is never between a risky action and the status quo -- i.e., leaving Saddam in power, U.N. sanctions, U.S. forces sitting on his borders. The stability fetishists in the State Department and the European Union fail to understand that there is no status quo: things are always moving in some direction and, if you leave a dictator and his psychotic sons in business, and his Oil-for-Food scam up and running, and his nuclear R&D teams in places, chances are they're moving in his direction.

Toppling Saddam was worth doing in and of itself. Toppling Saddam and trying to "midwife" (in [Egyptian democracy advocate Saad Eddin] Ibrahim's word) a free society would be worth doing even if it failed. But, as it happens, I don't believe it will fail, not just because of Bush but because enough Iraqis -- Shia, Kurds and even significant numbers of Sunnis -- are determined not to let it fail.

Chapman sees us as Imperial Storm Troopers, the world's bad guys. He has it wrong. There are some who see us as if we were wearing hard white plastic, but throughout the Middle East, we're seen not as imperialists, but as liberators. And there are a hundred million whispered prayers that we will succeed, and then go home.

In other words, the Bush plan.