Positive Liberty

Charles Krauthammer — among the most readable of the remaining hawks — argues today that

Of all the arguments for pulling out of Iraq, the greater importance of Afghanistan is the least serious.

Let’s look at his reasons.

this argument assumes that the world’s one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined, does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. But because it assumes that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.

It sounds horrible when you put it that way, but let’s turn things around a bit: We’ve known where al Qaeda is based for many years — in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Are we to believe that we have reached the optimal number of American troops searching for al Qaeda operatives in that area? Are we to believe that fifty or a hundred thousand more will make no difference? Sure we outspent Iraq and Afghanistan. But results are results, and the mere fact that we spend a lot doesn’t mean that we can achieve whatever we feel like.

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer — a Martian — and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources and no industrial or technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure that, though suffering decay in the later years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, could easily be revived if it falls into the right (i.e., wrong) hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question.

I’d like to think that the Martian would at some point ask the question, “So, which country actually attacked us?”

Krauthammer’s argument here is just silly; if we chose our military targets based on their wealth, education, and advanced military and technological infrastructure, then there are far better targets than Iraq: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to name just two. Or France, while we’re at it. It’s like the old story of the drunk who lost his watch in the darkness, but who looks for it under the lamppost: “Why don’t you look near where you lost it?” he is asked. “The light’s better over here,” he answers.

Osama bin Laden, the one whose presence in Afghanistan (or some cave on the border) presumably makes it the central front in the war on terror, has been explicit that “the most . . . serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq.” Al-Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman Zawahiri, has declared that Iraq “is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era.”

Are we to suppose that bin Laden has no selfish motives whatsoever for encouraging us to attack Iraq? That he always means what he says, and that he offers us sound strategic advice? Please.

For one thing, bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein about as much as we did. He was no doubt delighted that he could maneuver two of his enemies into fighting one another, regardless of whether it was just or wise for us to depose him. (IMHO: We have the right to depose dictators in the course of a war already begun or imminent. We don’t have a right to start a war whenever we feel like it, which is what many have argued.)

Further, not only does bin Laden enjoy watching his enemies fight one another, he also gets a colossal distraction and diversion of American resources — resources we might otherwise use to find him. This can only work to bin Laden’s benefit, which is part of why he insists on the importance of Iraq.

And it’s not just what al-Qaeda says, it’s what al-Qaeda does. Where are they funneling the worldwide recruits for jihad? Where do all the deranged suicidists who want to die for Allah gravitate?

Anywhere but near Osama bin Laden and his inner circle. It’s called a smokescreen.

The Democratic insistence on the primacy of Afghanistan makes no strategic sense. Instead, it reflects a sensibility. They would rather support the Afghan war because its origins are cleaner, the casus belli clearer, the moral texture of the enterprise more comfortable. Afghanistan is a war of righteous revenge and restitution, law enforcement on the grandest of scales. As senator and presidential candidate Joe Biden put it, “If there was a totally just war since World War II, it is the war in Afghanistan.”

Exactly so! And this is why Afghanistan is the war most worthy of support. The eyes are upon us of all those who waver in the world, so we must be scrupulously just. This is how to win the war of ideas, in which Afghanistan is only a battle.

If our resources are so stretched that we have to choose one front, the Martian would choose Iraq.

And not the country that actually attacked us. What, then, would the Martian choose to let al Qaeda and its sponsors go unpunished? Either this is some very sloppy writing, or Krauthammer himself is from Mars.

[He would choose Iraq] because, unlike a majority of Democratic senators, [the Martian] did not vote four years earlier to authorize the war in Iraq, a vote for which many have a guilty conscience to be soothed retroactively by pulling out and fighting the “totally just war.”

So… The Martian — whose logic diverges ever more rapidly from that of lowly earthlings — would support the Iraq war because he didn’t support it four years ago. Democrats may have been for the war before they were against it, but all decent folk, Martian or otherwise, should have been against the war before they were for it.

But by the same logic, shouldn’t Krauthammer, who supported the Iraq war, now be feeling some guilt for his stance, just as the Democrats now do? And is it just me, or is the room kinda spinning here?

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