Watching Fox News Sunday today I was more than a little appalled to hear Internationalist Governor Bill Richardson (D, NM) grandstanding along with Governor Ed Rendell (D, PA) about the amount of money we're spending to rebuild Iraq. He actually went so far as to say something to the effect that (paraphrased) Why should we spend $200B to build bridges and schools in Iraq instead of spending $200B to build bridges and schools in Pennsylvania and New Mexico?
You heard it right, he asked us to subordinate a major spending element of the war on terror to provide pork barrel projects to two, ah, randomly chosen states. I was reminded of the common bumper sticker slogan I saw on many a burned out VW bus during the late Reagan years: It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.
This was never a very effective bumper sticker slogan, not least because it's rather too wordy to be effectively read on the back of a moving vehicle without causing an accident. But it ignores certain elemental truths about the way the world works, and why remaining defenseless but having really great roads is not a solution.
Implicit in that bumper sticker slogan from the '80s, and Gov Richardson's fatuousness today, is the misconception that isolationist America-first social projects can soak up all the money they want to, even at the expense of defense projects, without making us inherently less safe. This runs into the Butter Knife Problem we are warned of by the good folks over at Anticipatory Retaliation: namely, that if all the world's governments disarm completely and spend all their resources on building bridges and schools, then some lone aggressor outlier can conquer the entire world with no more competent weapon than a butter knife. And all those bridges we built will actually make it easier for our butter knife-wielding conquerers to spread their reign of terror throughout the country.
Disarming--and this refers to defunding any militarily necessary projects, not just buying fewer missiles--was hardly the answer in the Cold War, and it's even less the answer now.
The spending in Iraq is, in many ways, even more creative and damaging to our enemy than Reagan's massive military buildup was. Liberals really should love the Iraq rebuilding project, and an honest analyst could hardly reject it, given that we already actually conquered the country, regardless of what they thought about that initial conquering. The failure to rebuild Germany after Versailles should provide an adequate contrast to the Marshall Plan after World War II; Germany's failure since 1945 to overrun any of its neighbors is no coincidence and was largely because of the generosity with which our vanquished foes were treated.
Rebuilding Iraq into a democracy, to surround Iran with US-friendly nations along with Israel and Afghanistan, is part of the larger master plan of winning the war against Islamic fascist terrorism. Either Richardson, and his ilk, somehow fail to see that as desireable, or--rather more likely--they simply find it more important to thwart the evil George Bush at every turn, and complain of his every priority and plan.
Richardson was also asked how Kerry expected to "magically" gain military support from our "traditional allies" in Iraq, and to expand a bit on just who those providers of troops might be. Richardson bluffed nonsensically around the first question, saying that Kerry would "call a summit of NATO members" to request their support, and ask the UN Security Council for some non-specified help as well. His inquisitor, Chris Wallace, pointed out that President Bush has already done both of those things--witness, eg, the Istanbul NATO summit last month where Chirac declared himself "entirely hostile" to the notion of a NATO presence in Iraq, and the unanimous UNSC resolution calling on member states to assist in Iraq, which also has not eventuated into additional military assistance. Wallace went on to ask which specific nations Richardson thought might actually provide a major contribution of troops, which already weren't doing so? Richardson's answer: NATO.
Leave aside for a moment that any possible NATO-flagged mission would have to survive an inevitable French veto in the planning stages. Just consider that NATO, per se, has no actual troops of its own; a NATO mission under a NATO flag actually is comprised of member states' troops contributed for that particular mission. As most of the democrats have been appallingly quick to forget while dismissing our "fraudulent coalition," as John Kerry calls it, the majority of NATO member states actually do have troops in Iraq right now (or had them there until recently, in the case of pusillanimous Spain). The five most robust militaries in NATO (as measured by annual military spending), in declining order, are the US, France, Britain, Germany, and Italy. These nations #2-5 are clustered fairly closely in military spending ($25M-$40M per year), then there is a big drop to #6 Turkey at about $9M per year.
So, of 18 member nations with armed forces (NATO member Iceland has zero troops of any kind), right now the following nations (with rank in military spending among NATO in parenthases) have troops in Iraq:
1. US (#1)
2. UK (#3)
3. Italy (#5)
4. Netherlands (#9)
5. Poland (#11)
6. Portugal (#14)
7. Denmark (#15)
8. Czech Republic (#16)
9. Hungary (#17)
Who, from NATO, is not participating now but might be persuaded by the silver-tongued senator from Massachussetts to send significant numbers of troops? The rest of the top ten in NATO with no troops there now is France, Germany, Turkey, Spain, Canada, and Greece. There is another significant drop in military spending between #10 Greece ($6.5 million/year) and #11 Poland ($3.6 million/year) so there seems little hope of getting, say, 10,000 troops from any country which spends itself out of the top ten. So let's consider the six potential sorces for significant additional NATO assistance:
France. See above comment from Chirac that he is "entirely hostile" to this idea of participation in Iraq. It would be quite a reversal, and difficult for him to save face, over a French entry to Iraq. Such a reversal of policy might actually be difficult politically for him to survive, and would expose his shallow duplicitousness with regard to the Bush administration.
Germany. Who can forget Schroeder's petulant insistance that Germany would not participate in the American "adventure" in Iraq, even with explicit UN approval? Unless Schroeder considers John Kerry a higher authority than the UNSC as arbiter of German foreign policy, it's hard to envision German troops under a NATO flag in Iraq, even with Kerry as Commander in Chief.
Turkey. Having the participation of a Muslim nation would be undoubtedly welcome. But if the US incentive of billions of dollars just for permission to pass the 4th ID through Turkey was rejected, it's hard to imagine John Kerry really persuading the Turks to contribute actual troops, just because he asked them nicely.
Spain. Spain has taken itself out of the game. Going back just because John Kerry, rather than George Bush, is in power, isn't really likely.
Canada. The Canadians have quit their peacekeeping duties in Afghanistan and Haiti, among other places, and are sizing down their internationally deployed peacekeeping forces to just 1200 outside of North America. Canada does not seem the likeliest source of a significant contribution to Iraq either, no matter a President Kerry's persuasiveness and multilateralism.
Greece. At a recent press conference, Greek Foreign Ministry spokesman Mr. George Koumoutsakos had the following to say regarding Iraq:
Regarding the Greek position, it is clear that, within the framework established by the UN Resolution, as well as the above-mentioned request, the Greek government will contribute to the reconstruction of Iraq, without direct involvement or a mission - we will not have a military presence in Iraq. I want to be clear on this.Greece has already provided humanitarian aid in the amount of €4.5 million, and at the Madrid Donors' Conference we committed ourselves to a further €3 million.
In short, our position is this: We are contributing to the efforts toward a democratic Iraq, contributing to the reconstruction of the country. There is no question of Greek military presence in Iraq.
So, in short, getting additional real contributions of troops from NATO is getting blood from a stone, and John Kerry--absentee member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--can't possibly be ignorant of this. Any claim by Kerry, or on Kerry's behalf, that Americans are needlessly dying in Iraq because Kerry would be able to get NATO troops to participate where George Bush has not is purely, and knowingly, fictitious.
Things are looking up since last I had a moment to surface and jot a few cogitations, before scurrying back into my underground lair. Marine Corporal Hassoun has been, ah, released, or found, or turned up safe at any rate, and is on his way back to the US. And, *yawn* the most damning news we've heard from Iraq lately was that we were wrong about Saddam having WMD.
Ho-hum. That whole argument has become so old as to be barely worth rebutting, especially since I rather doubt most of its proponents really believe it or care about it with much conviction. Most who gleefully celebrate the absence heretofore of really big caches of WMD are likely less concerned with the specifics of the matter and more so with sticking a rhetorical finger into our President's eye.
Saddam is a bad man and we're better off with him out of power. Enough said. Those who petulantly and sophomorically claim that we are no safer with him in prison than we were with him in power can't seriously give a fig about the war on terror, as they have been clearly blinded by their spittle-flying hatred of George Bush. Those who want to parse legalistic niceties about whether WMD was our primary reason for going, or just our alleged primary reason for going, while disregarding any grownup principles of national security, are probably glad that an experienced ambulance chasing trial lawyer is standing for vice president on the democratic ticket.
With the exception of the recent pussilanimy of the Phillipinos, whose early withdrawl of its 51 peacekeepers has no practical affect other than to encourage al Queda and cause John Kerry to run his mouth still further, matters in Iraq are actually proceeding rather well. They might start to proceed even better if France and NATO at least became uninvolved onlookers instead of active obstructionists. Which reminds me of a grand thought experiment which occurred to me:
George Bush should appoint John Kerry as the head of a bipartisan Senatorial delegation to NATO to request the alliance provide all the troops they clearly would be providing, were it not for George Bush having forgotten Chirac's Mickey Mouse Club secret handshake. Kerry still presses this issue, lately saying that we need from our allies "not resolutions, not words, but real support of sufficient personnel, troops and money to assist in the training of security forces." Since Kerry clearly has the inside track with Chirac and can speak la francais to boot, he should be assigned the task of getting "sufficient troops" from NATO: say, perhaps, 10000 men from the members of NATO who aren't already members of our "fraudulent coalition?" If that's too easy, 20000 would be nice too. What do you say, mon cher senateur? Non?
So what does Edwards bring to the table anyway? He's pretty and he touches Big John quite a lot, which gets kind of unnerving to watch after a while, though these are the only specifically identifyable benefits which Big John gets from having Little John around. But my guess is that there's a reason, possibly even a good one, that even hardcore democrats didn't vote for him in the primaries. If they didn't like him then, I fail to see how he really brings much to the ticket, touching notwithstanding; the comparisons bounding of Kerry/Edwards to Mondale/Ferarro seem amusingly apt, now that the Veep portion of the ticket is occupied by a young and comically inexperienced liberal.
But I keep having this haunting notion that if, on the eve of the election, Bush holds more than (say) a five-point lead, Kerry will pull a Bob Toricelli on the nation and sorrowfully announce that he feels he must withdraw because of the Republican's shameful dirty politics and character attack machine, etc, and he will make such a sacrifice because he considers it his duty to America to stand aside so that someone can beat Bush, whose losing is far more important to the nation than any man's winning, etc, and much much more along those lines. I believe the democrats since 2000 have become kind of eerily desparate, using quasi-legal and extralegal tactics such as the Florida Supreme Court debacle and the New Jersey Supreme Court atrocity--all in the name of some vague notion of fairness, with no regard whatever for the law. Recall that the state of being a nation under the rule of law, not of men, is supposed to indicate a reasonably advanced civilization.
All this is by way of apology for having written so little lately; I recently picked up a copy of Ron Chernow's outstanding biography of Alexander Hamilton, and also a five-CD set of collected Ronald Reagan speeches, so I've been kind of absorbed of late. I'm trying to fit all these little pieces together into some grand treatise which makes sense of both the whole states-vs-federal government debate, and modern corollaries to the Cold War in the war on terror. And how I can consider both Alexander Hamilton and Ronald Reagan to be two of the most essential Americans ever, and whose influences were so uniformly salutary. At least that's how it stands at this point in my reading; check back tomorrow and see if I've learned anything which changes my mind!