I'm philosophical by nature — which is just as well, as I find those who pore over details risk dwelling on them at the expense of larger proceedings. When critics of the Bush administration's war room descend to the operational level I stop listening — it's too great an insult to assume that the fine minds in uniform and out aren't daily observing, collecting, analyzing, adjusting, thrusting or retracting. The leftist media's mischaracterization of our forces as passive and ineffective has been, in the absence of such a clear victory as Election Sunday's, as irriguous as it is ubiquitous, leaving even the most well-intentioned commentators with popular premises ranging from distorted to fictional. All have the right to speak, of course, if not to be believed.
Before the Iraqi campaign began I was more critical of events because I feared that diplomatic and bureaucratic inertia would halt President Bush's effort to resume progress after a decade of "sabbatical," as Bush himself put it. I champed while President Bush and Tony Blair wandered through the circular halls of Secretariat and I strained at their simplification of the Allies' case for war against Saddam Hussein.
Two thoughts. First: it is apparent that some of that disappointment was well-founded. Wretchard of Belmont Club, skillfully balancing fact with principle and wielding history not as a harangue but as a guide to the future, drew a straight line from fourteen months of inaction to the greatest challenges facing our troops' victory over Iraq's former and would-be oppressors. He reiterates today:
Faced with an invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam carried out his own sideslip maneuver into a redoubt. The Duelfer report notes that Saddam may have begun moving his WMD materials into Syria as the US vainly attempted to get UN authorization to topple his regime. ...At least some of that was the key munition of modern terrorist warfare — money....About 600,000 tons of munitions were dispersed throughout the country of which 100,000 tons — five Hiroshima bombs worth of explosive — were taken to Anbar province in the Sunni Triangle alone.
Second: if the President's State of the Union is to be as unapologetic a rejection of old geopolitics as his inaugural address, his administration will have — like the military — learned from experience.