Brilliant.

Dreher has finally moved from bashing Bush to enunciating an actual policy position for Iraq.


(He does this in a post where he reveals, "I didn't write about the war in my book because my own views on the war were evolving at the time." That suggests that the book was really more about his own political views than about describing the political views of an heretofore uncategorized group of conservatives -- no surprise, really -- and it begs the question, why did religion play such a prominent role in the book since his religious views were probably evolving at the time?)

(They're still evolving. "Nobody can deny -- nobody with any sense does deny -- that the world is moving to Pentecostal Christianity," he writes yesterday, but just ten days prior, he asked whether we are entering "the Orthodox century." Shortest hundred years I've ever experienced.)


Rod's thoughts about war are as coherent as everything else he's written.

He wants us to withdraw from Iraq.

The thing is, I strongly believe that the president is right: we are fighting a war that's going to take generations to see through. I have been very outspoken about the threat to America and the West from Islamic fundamentalism. But this Iraq debacle -- which was unwise and unnecessary -- is going to set back the war against Islamism incalculably. I think the US should realize that in this battle, we've been licked, and we should retreat to defensible borders, so to speak, and rebuild for the next round. Because there will be a next round.

While I appreciate his saying this much, this position raises as many questions as it answers.

1. What "defensible borders"? Even taking that metaphorically ("so to speak"), it ought to be clear that the war with jihad is being waged over there and over here. There is no "high ground" to which we can pull back and defend our interests more easily, as the jihadists' range is not limited by the lack of tanks, ships, or long-range missles. It may be convenient for Dreher to use 9/11 in his ridiculous commentary on NPR, but it's not as if Manhatten is now utterly out of the reach of terrorism. Does Rod idiotically believe that our enemies will leave us alone to "rebuild"?

2. What is this business about rebuilding anyway? It wasn't like the thugs pulled a Pearl Harbor and destroyed a sizable portion of our fleet. Does Rod think that our enemies won't be hard at work while we're rebuilding? That they won't be using the remnants of Iraq to build another terror state? That Iran will halt its work for nuclear weapons until we're ready to stop them?

3. Momentum counting for an awful lot in war of this nature, what does pulling back do for our momentum and theirs? Will our enemies find it harder to recruit as we turn tail, or easier? Will we find it harder to fight the next war, or harder?

4. And to what end are we readying ourselves if nation-building is off the table? Dreher's unambiguous in his belief that the paleocons were right that nation-building is a fool's errand:

"It was our Jacobin hubris, our prideful belief in our own power, that got us into this mess."

Well, if we're to have a muscular foreign policy -- AND ROD LAUGHABLY WRITES THAT HE ACTUALLY WANTS A MUSCULAR FOREIGN POLICY -- what will be its goal? If we can't change our enemies in the Middle East, ought we plan to obliterate them? Or try to contain and quarantine them? Or is our so-called "muscular" foreign policy really one of defensive reaction, called muscular because Rod wishes it were so?


This isn't the breadth and width of the idiocy even in this one post:

I think the most important contribution conservatism will make to the debate going forward is a deep understanding of how decisive culture is to the making (or un-making) of societies. That, and an appreciation of the tragic sense of life. I don't think that's been much a part of American conservatism for a long time. Perhaps the Iraq catastrophe will change that. Perhaps.

Someone should tell Rod that WAR ISN'T A FUCKING POETRY READING. "An appreciation of the tragic sense of life" might be fine in a coffee shop, but this is a battle of wills between barbaric jihadists and what's left of the Judeo-Christian West. Pathos ain't going to help us kill or defeat anybody; I'd say we have plenty of pathos as it is, as opponents of Iraq were invoking Vietnam two weeks in.

Understanding that culture matters is a good thing, too, but only if that steels us for the costly and long-term commitment it will likely take to drive our enemies to their knees: "liberal democracy is a hard thing to create, so we should invest the blood, treasure, and years to ensure that the required values spread and triumph over totalitarianism." That I could buy, but not "nation-building is hard, so let's quit after four years and only 3,000 casualties."


That's perhaps the most galling thing from Rod's NPR commentary: "I didn't expect Vietnam." Well, by any historical measure, we haven't had another Vietnam. Even if we did, a nation that suffered 360,000 dead in the Civil War (Union side only) and 400,000 in World War II ought not to be driven from the battlefield because of Vietnam's 58,000 deaths, to say nothing of the 3,000 deaths in Iraq.

How many soldiers will be killed in the next round, Rod -- "Because there will be a next round" -- before you start making McNamara comparisons and calling the theater a "meat grinder"? A hundred? A dozen? One?


Again, this is a battle of wills, and if we withdraw as Rod wants us to, we will show that we simply do not have the will to suffer any appreciable casualties to win a war. Our enemies will see precisely how to drive us from any endeavor -- kill us a few at a time with weapons as simple as roadside bombs, and get the media to cover it (but we shouldn't blame the media; Rod assures us they're not to blame) -- and they will turn every battlefield into another Iraq.

And our oh-so-muscular military and Rod's academic understanding that the war will be long will be as useful as our very own Maginot Line.