Outside the Beltway

Bush’s Vietnam?

James Joyner · Sunday, April 11, 2004 · 2 comments

Mark Steyn:

Fallujah is not the new Mogadishu, Muqtaba al-Sadr is not the new Ayatollah Khomeini and, despite what Ted Kennedy says, Iraq is not ”George Bush’s Vietnam.” Or even George Bush’s Chappaquiddick.

Bill Bennett agrees:

We need to be reminded that we are in a war. Many of us said right after 9/11 that this will be a long and hard war. And it will be. Because of many early victories, we cannot forget that wars are not easy and that they are not clean and, when truly meaningful, they are not short.

Many have been questioning our mission because of the violence in Iraq – but it is worth remembering what former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens once said: “The Middle East is not the Middle West.” Violence in the Middle East is more of a norm than an exception. Nonetheless, well over 80 percent of Iraq is supportive of our mission to attempt to build democracy there.

The violence in Iraq is contained, now, to within Iraq – and no longer exportable, as it was under Saddam Hussein, to neighbors like Israel and Kuwait and, for that matter, Iran. Hussein slaughtered more Muslims than anyone in modern history, invaded two countries and fired missiles into Israel. Today he’s in prison. Thank God.

Tony Blair warns against letting our fear get the best of us:

People in the West ask: why don’t they speak up, these standard-bearers of the new Iraq? Why don’t the Shia clerics denounce al-Sadr more strongly? I understand why the question is asked. But the answer is simple: they are worried. They remember 1991, when the West left them to their fate. They know their own street, unused to democratic debate, rife with every rumour, and know its volatility. They read the Western papers and hear its media. And they ask, as the terrorists do: have we the stomach to see it through?

I believe we do. <***> But our greatest threat, apart from the immediate one of terrorism, is our complacency. When some ascribe, as they do, the upsurge in Islamic extremism to Iraq, do they really forget who killed whom on 11 September 2001? When they call on us to bring the troops home, do they seriously think that this would slake the thirst of these extremists, to say nothing of what it would do to the Iraqis?

Or if we scorned our American allies and told them to go and fight on their own, that somehow we would be spared? If we withdraw from Iraq, they will tell us to withdraw from Afghanistan and, after that, to withdraw from the Middle East completely and, after that, who knows? But one thing is for sure: they have faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism. And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.