THE MOTHER OF BATTLES.

Have the Islamists decided to make their last stand in Iraq?

As Orrin has posted below, al Quada and Palestinian suicide bombers are converging on Iraq while Iran and Syria are most likely providing surreptitious support to the Iraqi regime. (And there goes the argument that the "secularists" and the fundamentalists can't make common cause.) The Saudi people are cheering on Saddam and the government is trying to broker a deal to end the war. It is an article of faith on the US right that Iraq is only the first step in a campaign to remake the entire middle east. Does the middle east agree?

The war in Afghanistan was a wake up call for many militaries around the world, from the Russians to, one has to imagine, the Iraqis, the Syrians and the Iranians. Although almost any other government in the region will have more of an air defense than the Afghans and the Iraqis, none can be under any misapprehension about their chances against the US. It is now clear that their functional allies in the UN cannot be depended upon to deter the US. Deciding to all hang together now against the chance that they will hang seperately later would not be their worst tactic.

This war would be horrible. There would be, I'm afraid, many dead Americans from terror tactics. There would be thousands upon thousands of dead Arabs and Persians, to which I am not at all indifferent. If the clash is inevitable, however, it would be better to have it now than postpone it. That is the biggest lesson we should take from Gulf War I.

Such a war would also put to rest some of the world's misunderstanding of the United States. We are a difficult people to understand, so I symphathize with the incorrect lessons learned by Osama, et al. Our toleration for dissenting speech, for example, is taken as a sign that we value talking over action; in fact, to borrow an observation from Solzhenitsyn, we barely value speech at all as we have so much of it. "Actions speak louder than words" might as well be our national motto. Similarly, our inexplicable reluctance to respond to the terror attacks of the last ten years -- which was, of course, disasterous -- is also misunderstood. It may be that the lines we draw at the America's borders are not obvious to those whose concern is the umma. One lesson of American history is that, when prodded, we are not overly concerned with who gets hurt. I've long suspected that the Israeli response to Palentinian terror tactics is the model of restraint compared to our response if similar tactics were tried against us. We might be about to find out. (Speaking of the Israelis: Do we really expect them not to take a hand if Palestinian terrorists are gathered in Iraq?)

Finally, we might also be able to put to rest, both in the US and abroad, one of the misreadings of Vietnam. It is true that a sufficiently bloody war, fought for a long time, without any direct threat to the US, will ultimately be unpopular. Too much is read into this. In the Iraqi war, let alone our war with the Islamists, American's are convinced that we are directly threatened. More importantly, this war is not likely to continue for years and, of course, like all wars we've fought since Hiroshima, it will only go on at all because we choose to let it. Also, once the war is perceived as over, we really don't pay too much attention to the lives lost or money spent (see, e.g., Afghanistan, Korea, Germany, Japan.)

If all of our enemies in the middle east do decide to ban together, this would be an unanticipated (?) expansion of the war. The President may not have been able to justify such an expansion to the country at his choosing. If it is forced upon us by the tactics of our enemies, we will take action and that action will be popular.

What sort of middle east will be left after this war is over? I would like to see a chain of democracies, more or less on the Japanese/Korean model, throughout the region. But so long as they're quiet, I'm not overly concerned.

More: Militants call Israel suicide bomb 'gift to Iraq', At least 49 injured in Netanya attack (CNN).

A suicide bomb that injured dozens in northern Israel Sunday was "a gift to the Iraqi people," according to a Palestinian militant group that claimed responsibility for the attack.

The bombing, which took place at a busy cafe in the coastal town of Netanya, injured at least 49, five of them seriously, Israeli police and ambulance services said. Ten Israeli soldiers were among the injured.

If our enemies see this as one seamless war, can we really afford to disagree with them?

Posted by David Cohen at March 30, 2003 4:57 PM