A CASE FOR BUSH
A response to some comments on Tom Reasoner's blog which seem to be responses to my blog.  (Cool!)  About Tom Reasoner-- atheist and materialist, last I checked, libertarian, with one of the more interesting and odd minds I've come across, plus an extremely appropriate name: "Thomas" conjures up Doubting Thomas the disciple (and Tom would also, I suppose, disbelieve in the Resurrection until he touched the wounds in the Risen Lord's hands and side) and "reasoner" conjures all the brilliant if somewhat overly mechanistic thought-patterns of the eighteenth-century intelligentsia.
 
Tom supported the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but thinks Bush shouldn't get much credit for them because
 

I would wager my eternal, gorb-given piggy-bank that nearly anyone in that same position would have taken some sort of military action. Did anyone in America, from either party, or anyone around the free world for that matter, disagree with invading Afghanistan? The Gallup poll from November, 2001 showed that 80% of Americans supported the war. That's not just a majority, that's an overwhelming majority.

 
To answer the question, yes, lots of people in the free world disagreed with invading Afghanistan.  Even protested against it.  And I don't think that "nearly anyone would have taken some sort of military action"-- I'm confident that John Kerry (who wanted to let Saddam take over Kuwait in 1991) would not have.  Clinton probably would have taken military action but not effectively.  It was not obvious then, nor is it obvious now, that attacking Afghanistan was the best way to stop terrorism from Al-Qaeda.
 
More importantly, though, the war in Afghanistan was an unprecedentedly difficult venture, and even in hindsight I am a bit dazzled that the Bush team had the courage to do it.  I sure wouldn't have!  Afghanistan is famously the graveyard of empires, an extremely difficult battlefield in extremely primitive conditions where no one knew the rules of the game.  The Russians thought we were fools to go in.  Tom suggests that
 

The next biggest mistake was supporting certain warlords in our attempts to bring down the Taliban regime. Some of these warlords are just as bad if not worse than the Taliban itself.

 
but if we had abstained from employing proxies and instead (somehow) plunged in a huge occupying army, we probably would have met the same fate as the Soviets.  And whatever their faults, the warlords do not ban music, as the Taliban did.  Yes, they banned music-- no radios, no singing.  Can you imagine a life without music?  I don't even want to try!  Another indicator that the warlords are better than the Taliban: millions of Afghan refugees have returned to the country.  They have "voted for their feet" for the new order, so to speak, even if it's a bit chaotic.  Even Tom's last (and most standard) objection I'm not sure I agree with:
 

The last great and ongoing mistake was not finishing all of the work that needed to be done stabilizing the country. Currently, the government headed by President Karzai is in control of only the capital in Kabul and some of the surrounding areas.

 
I believe that democratizing Iraq is feasible, because that country has a relatively dense, educated population, much higher levels of literacy (and even knowledge of English) and is habituated to living under the authority of a government.  Afghanistan is a primitive tribal society dispersed across a great mountainous desert, with extremely low literacy rates, poorer than anywhere outside sub-Saharan Africa, and landlocked, depriving it of ready access to the outside world.  Possibly more engagement would have produced results, but I certainly won't presume to pass such judgments.
 
What is more surprising, Tom also thinks that
 

Perhaps Bush would have stayed focused in Afghanistan if it weren't for his next biggest mistake: invading Iraq. I should qualify that, because it seems likely that we were eventually going to invade Iraq anyway. In this sense, invading Iraq was less a mistake and more an inevitability, but again, we should not fall prey to crediting a man for doing the obvious if he does it poorly. If we had not invaded Iraq when we did, we would have done so the following year, or the year after that, or within five years or ten.

 
Well, being an Army man, maybe he knows more than I do, but this reasoning seems as amazing to me as it would to Jacques Chirac.  I agree with those who claim that Iraq was a "war of choice"-- in this case, the right choice, but certainly a choice.
 
Let's recall something here: Bill Clinton, in the years after Mogadishu, made quite sure that no US soldiers died fighting abroad.  Not one.  In all the war in Kosovo there was not a single casualty.  Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 after Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors.  From the point of view of upholding international law, that was the perfect time to go in.  But there was not a chance he would do so.  Because US soldiers might get killed.  If Kerry is elected, he may well interpret his mandate, and his cowardly character will certainly predispose him to, as for a return to the days when US soldiers did not die.  Invading Iraq was an act of courage and political risk.
 
What Reasoner calls
 

the impatient and hasty decision to invade Iraq

 
was no such thing.  It was fourteen months between the Axis of Evil speech and the order to march.  With great labor, we got Resolution 1441 out of the UN-- and even then we didn't invade!  Instead, we went along with Blair and tried to get a (legally superflous) second resolution.  It was only when France made it clear that they would veto any war resolution-- when the attempt to build a coalition was finally and decisively defeated-- that we went in.  Reasoner echoes the common fantasy that
 

It might have even been as simple as waiting a lone, solitary year.

 
Baloney.  We would have provoked the same resistance whenever we did it.
 
Tom's angriest complaint against the Bush Administration relates to allies:
 

Waiting might not have even been necessary if it hadn't been for Bush's biggest, most-colossal mistake: insulting most of the combined leaders of the world. Even before 9/11, America was lush with political and diplomatic capital around the world, and after 9/11, we had capital to burn by the truck-load (I was going to say tower-load, but thought better of it). It seems almost inconceivable that one man could turn so much good-will and sentiment towards the US into so much hatred and resentment in such a short amount of time, but Bush, through the sheer force of his ignorance and practically-paranormal will, has made the conception a reality. I could forgive him for turning our record budget surplus into a record budget deficit (the events and aftermath of 9/11 would have been difficult for anyone to budget for), But there aren't words enough to describe my outrage over his foreign policy mistakes. What is a president good for if not foreign policy? Please tell me how any other person on Earth good have fucked-up as bad as Bush?

 
Tom overstates it, but it is true that we have lost a lot of diplomatic and political capital in the past two years, especially in Europe (though attitudes to the US in Russia have actually become more favorable).  And probably this could have been handled better at the beginning, although this critique of Bush is somewhat obsolete: for the past year and a half, and especially in the past few months, the Bush Administration has emphasized diplomacy, and relations are improving a lot.
 
First, however, I would rephrase the "diplomatic capital" that we used to have in Europe as "hanging out with the wrong crowd."  The Europeans' efforts to stop the genocide in Bosnia was a disgrace, due to the Europeans' habit of moral equivalence: they refused to distinguish between the Serb genocidaires and the Croat and Muslim victims, and tens of thousands of the latter died right on Europe's doorstep in the full gaze of international media attention.  In Rwanda again, the "international community" failed to stop genocide.  The Clinton Administration forces the Europeans' hand in Kosovo in 1999, even if the intervention was vitiatied by Clinton's refusal to sacrifice any American soldiers' lives under any circumstances, thereby causing things to get much worse before they got better.  The Europeans live in a dream-world where endless negotiation can magically resist a loaded gun: a dream-world made possible by the umbrella of American military power.
 
Maybe a different administration would have got more token support from Europe, but so what?  For the millionth time, we did have allies, lots of them, including a lot of Europeans, the UK, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy, and so on.  (One of the most offensive ironies of Kerry's "fraudulent coalition" complaint is that, while ostensibly an appeal to get more support from allies, it is extremely and obviously insulting to those leaders who took great risks and showed great courage in standing with us.  Why should any foreign leader support us if we'll turn around and call them "frauds" the next minute for doing so?!)
 
At the end of the day, Tom is letting himself be seduced by the fantasy that a lot of foreign support could have taken the burden off America in the war in Iraq.  But the Europeans have neither the capacity nor the incentive to give us much help in these matters.  Why should they fight when they know we will, and when the post-Cold War free security they enjoy allows them to slip ever deeper into a pacifist dream?  No one else can help us much because no one else has much military power, and for the most part, we like it that way.  It is those who fear or hate us, who have expansionist ambitions or who want to rival us, who have an incentive to build large militaries.  The National Security Strategy of 2002 argued, basically, that we could put an end to arms races by being so strong that it was pointless for anyone else to attempt to acquire military power.  Is this a good strategy or not?  I can see both sides, but we should accept that a corollary of "full-spectrum dominance" is that we'll have to shoulder the burden of major interventions.
 
To sum up, I am not convinced by Monday-morning-quarterback critiques of the Bush administration about the conduct of the wars, diplomatic or military; and I salute Bush's courage in undertaking these noble and generous struggles on behalf of the world's miserable and oppressed.  Indeed, Bush did nothing less than single-handedly re-invent courage after it had atrophied and passed halfway into oblivion under Clinton.  Re-invented courage, that is, in the liberal half of the world.  The jihadists had plenty of it.