STRANGE TIME TO PANIC:

An Iraqi's progress report: Baghdad's national security chief lists the advances and argues for more time. (Mowaffak Rubaie, July 21, 2007, LA Times)

The military force increase by the United States called "the surge" is only one element in the Iraqi and coalition strategy. The other elements are the political/diplomatic initiatives and economic progress — and the reality is that the strategy is working in spite of the monumental obstacles presented by international terrorists and difficult conditions inside Iraq.

Iraqi and coalition security forces are having major success against Al Qaeda and some of the other groups that are the principal sources of the violence that aims to overthrow our young democracy. From Al Anbar to Diyala, from Nineveh to Basra, the atrocities of the terrorists against our people are backfiring, and our citizens are coming forward to offer themselves to counter them.

Increasingly, Iraqis are showing confidence in our steadily improving security forces by leading them to hidden weapons and terrorist locations.

Iraq is continuing to increase the size and capabilities of its forces in the expectation that soon it will be able to decrease its reliance on coalition forces for direct combat functions. In no other modern country has the creation of new forces been as rapid and effective as in Iraq.

We also recognize that we have a long way to go.

Of course, Democrats and moderate Republicans also turned against the Cold War just as President Reagan was winning it.

MORE:
The American leap of faith -- and ignorance (George H. Rosen, July 21, 2007, Boston Globe)

It is a truism that Americans have always been interested -- seriously, deeply interested -- in building heaven on earth. From John Winthrop's "city on a hill" to Brigham Young's Utah, and through the clusters of Fruitlands, Amanas, Zions, and towns called Hope, we have always followed millenarian dreams.

Though, to call them millenarian is perhaps misleading. The millenarian paradise comes at the end of time, and Americans have always believed -- in fact, insisted -- on their right to build heaven immediately, right now and right here. It is why political figures have always spoken so easily and often about the American Dream as an inalienable birthright. One doubts if the Uruguayan or Albanian dream comes as readily to the political tongue, and it would be understandable if the Iraqi dream right now is not heaven on earth, but merely the prospect of going to the market without being blown up.

There can be an instability to millenarian certainty, our American expectation of paradise now: a dangerous impatience. It is one thing to cherish a vision of earthly paradise and work for it, best exemplified in our modern history by the civil rights movement, where the heavenly visions of gospel anthems gave sustenance for the real world of struggle. It is quite another to have a rigid vision of the perfect, which when the world doesn't live up to one's expectations, deteriorates into scorn for one's fellows and a desire to run off, to escape the fallen world into a dimly understood somewhere else.

Living between ecstatic hope and black despair, we sometimes have a short fuse before our frustrations lead to flights that can harm, not only ourselves -- like the suicidal sea cook's -- but the real people who inhabit what is, for the escapees, a dim and imaginary refuge.

The foremost cautionary tale of such a disaster in our history is the story of William Walker, the Tennesseean who led a band of American fanatics and mercenaries south of the border in 1853 to take over a country -- any country -- as a haven for English-speaking rulers and the institution of slavery. Walker first tried seizing a chunk of northern Mexico, failed, and then moved further toward the equator.

In bloody encounters, he momentarily became the master of Nicaragua, where he repealed the country's 30-year-old emancipation proclamation, only to be driven yet further from home and sanity in repeated attempts to retake the country. Walker died before a Honduran firing squad in 1860 with a trail of pointless carnage behind him, quickly forgotten in his own land, but long remembered in the Central American countries that suffered at his hands.

Sadly, this peculiar strain in our national character may shed some light on our Iraq disaster.

It's a function of the immaturity of the Left that it can never get past the fact that the City on the Hill still has sewers. The Religious, unlike the Rationalist, understand that Man can not create perfection.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2007 9:11 AM