American Competence

Alan Caruba and I agree most of the time. He is an erudite and thoughtful columnist. Yet on the occasion of his essay on a failure of American Competency I find that we are not in lock-step. Caruba proposes that the NeoCons asked too much of our military and have basically mishandled the Iraq peace (no doubt we won the war). I look upon myself as somewhat of a NeoCon, believing in the power of American exceptionalism and our obligation to spread democracy and peace to the world.

If we have failed in Iraq, and I am not yet ready to admit that we have, it has been more a failure of will than any issue of ability.

The United States has always been a bit too worried about world opinion, when most of the time the opinionated foreigners are the very totalitarian despots or decadent liberals who are in desperate need of reform. Instead of dancing around with a petty so-called insurgency in Iraq for all these gruelling months, we should have been taking the war to where the terrorists live, and thrive.

I have said before, in this space, that the enemy has had no respect for borders up till now, and we should not either. We should have carried the war into Syria and Iran. Had we had done so, we would eventually leave the terrorists without a base of operations and insurgency would be an impossibility. Where do people think the bombs and weapons used in the factional strife in Iraq or by the Taliban in Afghanistan come from. Shut off the base of supply of both men and arms and you shut off the war.

It is not too late for this policy to be implemented in a physical sense, but politically it may now be impossible until our erstwhile enemies conjure up another spectacular victory over the great Satan (read us). May I say that such an act is almost guaranteed. These people are not to be appeased. They will strike us again and strike with malice in their hearts and strike us in a way meant to humiliate us. What they do not understand is that the United States is not yet decadent Europe, (though we are headed that direction). We are a leviathan only partly awake to the danger that the terrorists represent. When properly stung we will be roused to do what is necessary to crush the terrorists in their hives.