Jeff Medcalf of Caerdroia comments on yesterday's response to Andrew Sullivan:

I've not really understood a lot of the criticism of the war and its aftermath, in that much of the criticism seems to assume that it's possible to have perfect knowledge (even in advance of events), perfect predictive ability, and perfect execution of plans - that, in other words, perfection is not only possible, but required.

Indeed. At a few points during the last year, I've been criticized for making numerous comparisons between Iraq and Japan. Of course while some parallels can be drawn, some cannot; my point has always been that many critics or avid second-guessers treat every problem or shortcoming as failure that could have been avoided or, worse, a portent of doom. Their standard for victory is based on a flawless model that, for whatever reason, stipulates that if an administration were to make every correct decision at the right time, democratization would run smoothly, peacefully and quickly.

In fact, this undertaking is inherently difficult and problematic, the failures of bureaucracy an occupational hazard (forgive the pun) because at present only bureaucracy can oversee such an incredible scope of social, military and cultural transition. There's a historical record for it and very few seem to care to read even a whit of it. I've been tempted over the past several days — especially in light of criticisms of the Coalition Provisional Authority yesterday — to quote from a few texts recalling the difficulties within Douglas MacArthur's SCAP. Not as a shield against constructive criticism, which has never been my intention, but simply for perspective. True enough, some critics have made valid points against CPA; and MacArthur had the prerogative, administrative support and personal will to run an extremely tight ship within and without, some things CPA perhaps lacks. Yet as Jeff declares, "At some point, we all either learn to live with this or we learn to live under the tyranny of those who do understand." This war on terror is only a chapter in the greater struggle between free men and authoritarians. It will neither be easy nor won soon, and can only be won by improving a world that is today only half-free. Better we learn now when we're not physical fighting for every one of our lives.

Childbirth is neither pretty nor altogether safe for mother or child. But no one ought to blame the Creator, who gave it to us as a gift for this world. Without it, we perish. So is freedom a welcome toil for its foremen and stewards.

DIFFICULT, NOT IMPOSSIBLE: Today's events in Basra are tailored to kill liberalizing Iraqis while discouraging the American public largely in control of the occupation's future. The animal cruelty of the shared enemy of Americans and Iraqis should give us an even deeper conviction to destroy their sickened, regionwide culture — unfortunately, doubt competes with righteous indignation. The better half of National Review, one of them in Iraq no less, report that our military is more than up to the job, and most Iraqis are more than ready to make the best of democratic capitalism.

Andrew Sullivan is taking National Review's editors to task for balking at Iraq in the wake of April's troubling two weeks, and well he should. I disagree with a few of his points, particularly his lingering consternation over early postwar looting (in fact, a "realist" would recognize that the first weeks of every modern, postwar democratization has begun that unfortunate way), but elsewhere he's on point. His most striking statement is this:

the perceived difficulty of that transition — and the immense dangers of trying to achieve it — were outweighed by the gathering national security threat that surging Islamo-fascism, Al Qaeda-style terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction could pose to the West as a whole. None of our options, in other words, were pretty. But we had learned on September 11 that mere observation and pin-prick attempts to stymie discrete terrorist operations could not shield us from devastating attack. In that context, the Iraq gamble — and it was a gamble — was regarded as one worth taking.

...There are times when ideological movements have to be confronted ideologically — and Islamo-fascism was and is just such a movement. This recognition doesn't junk realist conservative thought; but it provides an essential complement. Blind realism is no realism at all.

Blind realism is a fashionable sort of pessimism. Now, how does what Sullivan has written — a double-thick outline of Bush's stated, progressive objective for winning the war on terror — square with the underpinning philosophy that John Kerry offers for his hypothetical role as Commander-in-Chief? Tim Russert's Meet the Press this past Sunday gave us all we need to decide:

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry said yesterday that he will treat the war on terror "primarily" as law-enforcement action even as he pledged to remain committed to Iraq and to personally plead for international help in policing and rebuilding that nation.

"In order to know who they are, where they are, what they're planning and be able to go get them before they get us, you need the best intelligence, best law-enforcement cooperation in the world," the Massachusetts senator said in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Beautiful as buzzwords, but the shorthand of that statement is this: Organized terrorism has nothing to do with repressed societies, the repressive regimes themselves, or the number of these governments supporting terrorism as a matter of public policy; and it can be excised from a country without a fundamental cultural change. Under Kerry's theory, the Near East's dictators were minding their own business when terrorism spontaneously blinked into existence, are all eager to remove what they have previously enjoyed as politically expedient shunts, and — once active terror cells are destroyed — will settle into a kindler, gentler tyranny that never, ever creates or supports a domestic, fanatic cult of hatred and slaughter.

Kerry's dismissal of the ideological element of the war on terror is denial of the conflict itself. His advice is the sort of perfectly gentlemanly, asethetically pleasing gossamer that led the free world astray for most of the last decade. Beware.

NO ALTERNATIVE: Belmont Club provides a blend of reports, op-eds and analysis on the Near East's culture of death. This is an enemy that can, if its dictatorial roots are left in place, indefinitely strike at us, only aided by time as technology improves. Remember, law enforcement had been the modus operandi for the decades before the World Trade Center attacks. I direct this to readers who know who they are: note how John Kerry and his supporters place their rhetorical weight on two pivotal events, September 11th and the decision to remove Saddam Hussein. The prevailing Democratic Party line is a mish-mash of accusations, innuendo and hindsight used not to develop a revolutionary world view but to damage political opponents. Listen to their obsession with conspiratorial speculation, a continual massaging of this bit or that bit in an attempt to implicate Bush — by now, most of it contradictory and unsupported by facts. (Notice how the White House almost always refrains from taking what would be an enormous opportunity in blaming the Clinton administration.) The beginning and second military campaign of this war are not guides for John Kerry and his party; they're a haven, a perch, along with the failure of American direction and will that is known as Vietnam. John Kerry may talk about the future, and what has been hailed for years as "progressive" may revel in scrabbling about history for a silver bullet; don't be fooled. This is reactionary ideology of the purest kind. They haven't learned from the past. They dwell in it. If you've begun to consider Bush's opponent because those around you talk a good game about our having been "misled," ask yourself (and them): what are Bush's opposition saying for themselves? And out of that paucity, how much of it is at odds with what we should all understand about our enemies?

Belmont Club's Wretchard has been examining Iraqi culture and its progress towards liberalization. He offers some advice:

The US military dominance of the battlefield and its ability to suppress the activities of criminal gangs has meaning only if it creates the necessary space to peaceably alter the dysfunctional aspects of Middle Eastern society which are the wellsprings of terrorism. What is the use of American military superiority if it simply provides an opportunity for Al Jazeera to spread its propaganda via the newly licit satellite dishes? The normal metrics of military success should also have their cultural analogues. The GWOT cannot be considered won until 90% of the viewership in the Middle East watches something other than Al Jazeera. The campaign in Iraq cannot be considered a success until Baghdad becomes the cultural capital of the Arab world, producing not less than 200 Arabic films a year: comedies, family dramas, stories of Arab boys who have triumphed over adversity to become doctors, scientists and explorers in outer space. Until the day when an Iraqi boy looks at an aircraft and dreams of flying to the moon instead of turning it into a 150 ton bomb the war will not be won. It must be our goal to create a system of education which would make attendance at a madrassa a stultifying experience by comparison: dreaded as a dark place of bad food, harsh punishments and ignorant men. One of our objects must be to create a situation where a degree at the Al-Azhar Islamic university has as much relative value as a correspondence certificate from the Maharishi University. We must work for the day when the Jihadi ninja suit becomes the working attire of a carnival clown.

He's right, and the power of modern culture against old-age tyranny is a topic I've addressed before. The more I look at the current situation in Iraq, however, the more I believe that the cultural battle and the military battle, while separate, are still so intertwined that cultural gains are tenuous at best. Intransigent elements preventing cultural gains will not compromise; they must be destroyed. Only then can permanent maturation of Iraqi society occur. To echo what I wrote yesterday: the Allies believed they could rebuild Iraq and use the strength of free Iraqis against the Near East terror culture without including actively hostile states like Syria and Iran. It's my growing suspicion that we were wrong, and that the beachhead in Baghdad must be expanded before it is overrun. Iraqis can build a civil society with our help but those on the ground need breathing room.

FEAST FOR THOUGHT: Michael Ledeen weighs in.

GREAT MINDS...: Joel Mowbray is concerned but not worried. And he uses the term "beachhead" as well.

As I made clear yesterday, I was not impressed with National Review's editorial on lowering expectations of Iraqi governance in the near term. I was further, let's say, distressed reading contributor Peter Robinson's comments at the Corner, particularly the following:

As my Hoover colleague Tom Sowell said over lunch a couple of weeks ago (I made notes afterwards rather than during lunch itself, but this is a close paraphrase): “Don’t they [the members of the Bush administration] realize how many centuries it took to establish democracy in Europe? And now we’re supposed to establish democracy in Iraq? On a timetable?”

A democracy in Iraq would be splendid, of course. But since in all history the Arab world has seen exactly one democracy, that of Lebanon, which lasted only from the 1940s to the 1970s, it would represent a high achievement if we could merely ensure that Iraq proved, on the whole, peaceable and prosperous, becoming, as Mark Steyn has put it, “the least badly–governed Arab country.”

To which I responded via e-mail: "I don't know what volume of e-mail you've received in negative reviews of the NR editorial but I'm one who found it to be poorly reasoned, diffident and as naturally full of holes as mesh. Really a shock from NR - or perhaps not. To be frank, I'd try to avoid the patrician eye-roll on establishing democracy, pardon the meme, 'where there is no tradition.' Japan's military cabal wasn't exactly pluralist, and the Meiji period was little more than oligarchical modernization. The island didn't know individual liberties from Ragtime, and yet MacArthur's most sweeping reforms were done before the seven-year occupation was half over. Different from Iraq, yes, but then different from Germany. And Italy.

"I never thought I'd say this about NR but its distancing itself from Iraq with piquant one-liners is rather disgraceful."

Peter responded, graciously, with this:

Well put, and thanks for writing. I'll post a reply on the Corner.

[N]either the NR editorial nor my own posting, below, represents an attempt to back away from the project of rebuilding Iraq. What they represent is an effort to sort out our priorities. A stable currency, property rights, a functioning economy, basic public order (note that in Japan, Germany, and Italy alike, once the fighting stopped, it stopped)—each of these is at least as important to the future of Iraq as any set of electoral arrangements. Undemocratic nations are capable of making enormous progress (Taiwan under the Kuomintang, Hong Kong under the British, or, for that matter, Kuwait during these past few years under its own royal family) while democracies that lack the necessary legal and economic undergirding can dissolve into chaos (the Weimar Republic). A working democracy in Iraq would certainly represent a stunning achievement. But we need to be realistic about what we can and cannot accomplish in the space of a few years—and to put first things first.

I've responded:

I very much appreciate the response - thank you. If you have the time, something much less, er, emotive:

If the Bush administration and its supporters think that simply signing a constitution and holding elections will flip Iraq like a coin to democracy, then we are terribly misguided and due for disappointment. But given the White House's firm delineation of political handover, security withdrawal and direct elections - taking care to stagger the implementation of each - I would argue that the president does not believe this. His idealism paints a picture of a better Iraq through unfettered democracy, not an instant simulacrum of America.

I've reread the NR editorial and it's less objectionable to me as much as the first and second time. Yet here's where the point of contention seems to be: the editorial, with its deadly triumvirate of unsophistication, trauma and l'homme providential, builds a strawman claim that because paramilitary and political violence have not ceased, Iraq's society is in part responsible and therefore unprepared to assume the same self-governance as Wilsonians hoped. You sharply noted that other efforts in democratization began when the American military shifted from its war footing - something that has not happened in Iraq. But who is causing instability? There are two distinct groups in Iraq, it seems. And the reason for this seems to be external to the question of the Iraqi public character. To badly lift a Fukuyama concept, there are those who have eagerly left history and those who are still stubbornly and fanatically ensconced in it. The first group, Iraqis who are ready for life and liberty and all the rest, dwarfs the second. As it should be. The second group, identified though numerous reports over the year and especially in the past ten days, seem not to overlap with the first - but are instead the men America meant to fight in March, 2003 and intend to fight to further the war on terror. With a few exceptions, this group was never a potential segment of the first group; their hearts and minds are not to be won but, sadly, saturated with high-speed particulates of heavy metals. What we seem to be looking at is a two-week-old infant with a case of the whooping cough. Nothing wrong with baby - and that must be stressed - she's simply undeveloped and weak, and happened to be in a room highly contaminated with Bordetella.

Bring it back to Iraq: the problem isn't Iraqi society so much as it is the persistence of Ba'athists and foreign fighters. That insurgent elements are very obviously aided by Iran and Syria, and manned by nationals from nearly every Near East country only underscores the alien and irreconciliable nature of those responsible for this Bloody April. Iraq is proving challenging in the first year because it's the first Near East country in this age to have its polity forcibly changed to the delicacy of democracy; and as a consequence, it's literally surrounded by parties and states with whom America is - in the ideological figuration of the Bush Doctrine - at war.

Now we're almost saying the same thing. Here's the difference: I believe that Iraqis are no different than any other population whose vulnerable first years are marred by subtle invasions, and that if the sources of unrest were truly dealt with militarily, Iraqis would prosper relatively quickly. I assume one of the reasons Cold War administrations never hotly pursued assertive democratization is that they assumed the Soviets would poison every well. So I don't think it's an indigenous problem, if one consigns the Ba'athists and the criminal followers of al-Sadr to beyond Iraqi polity. At the same time, I do insist that the NR editorial is lukewarm on Iraqi democratic prospects. They didn't say "progress must be delayed until obstructive forces have been neutralized." Noting "the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is fundamentally still a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny" is a direct indictment of Iraqis themselves. The editors can't be talking about anything else.

My answer is to lower expectatons - not of the Iraqi people, but of the intentions of hostile interests to stand by and watch the natural assimilation of Iraqis into civil society. This seems to be a military problem, not a Wilsonian failure; thus the solution substantive, even plenary action against the elephants in the Near East room. True enough, the Iraqis owe us nothing, unlike the Axis, and we are therefore limited in our range of options within Iraq. But if anything, the current difficulties are a sign that Iraq was never meant to be separated from the war on terror.

A CLARIFICATION: Under no circumstances am I suggesting that Iraqi society is either traditionally democratic or without a multitude of scars and poor habits. It has many blemishes, lessons to unlearn. But all societies who have been forcibly or externally democratized bear these marks. My point is that Iraqis, separated from their organized tormentors, are really no worse off than any other erstwhile nondemocratic society.

They deceive, they ambush, they hide behind children. If Iraq is lost, these animals will eventually come for all of us. But the enemies of humanity, the agents of doubt, are no match for the United States military. Belmont Club has commentary.

The magazine Engineering News Record has done an outstanding job documenting the progress of Iraq's reconstruction over the past year. News is mixed, good and bad; exactly what one ought to expect from an enterprise borne on compromise and threatened by conflict. Some stories are mildly amusing, such as the confusion faced by Iraqis — who, under Saddam, once were happy simply to work on a construction site they wouldn't get killed on — as they learn American Contracting 101. A few reflect the dangers still present in the country, especially from organized forces under al-Sadr and concentrated in Fallujah. Left unchecked, terrorism works: contractors are mortal men and fear for their lives, business stops. But as the latter article suggests, replacement workers, eager for any kind of work, are never in too short supply; and according to at least one security company principal, medium- to long-term outlooks are bright.

One story stands out as proof that, in spite of attempts by terrorists to cause disarray and paralyze a nascent civil society, work continues wherever it can:

Ongoing security problems in Iraq are having little impact on the oil sector, Iraqi oil ministry officials said April 13, although kidnappings and ongoing violence are slowing reconstruction and have forced the postponement of an oil conference in Basra. At the Ministry of Oil (MOO) and the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), senior officials say it is business as usual — expanding production, increasing exports and attracting foreign investment. “Everything is fine,” says Assem Jihad, MOO spokesman. “There are problems with security but it does not influence our operations.”

Despite pervasive security problems, the U.S. Project Management Office in Baghdad expresses an optimistic view about the progress of reconstruction. “The violence has not stopped or slowed down the process,” says PMO spokesman Steve Susens. “In fact, most of our prime contractors are already here and we are actually moving pretty rapidly. From what we are hearing, many of the projects that are ongoing have not been slowed or stopped, at all,” he says. “In fact, there are some cases where the locals are helping to make sure the contractors and the workers are safe.”

Authoritarians are quite serious in their bid to bring about the collapse of a free Iraq. But Iraqis appear just as serious to preserve their new lives. And just as a defeated militarist Japan's industry — decades old and largely unchanged, by postwar standards hopelessly obsolete — was reborn through American generosity, technology and investment, Iraqis are enriched by their Western counterparts.

Iraqi blogger Omar has been quietly observing Arabs online (emphasis my own):

I've been visiting the BBC Arabic site in the last few days and I found a forum where people from many Arab countries –including Iraq- post their opinions about some hot topics, the main of those is Iraq and terrorism of course. I wasn't surprised to see that most Arabs (especially from Egypt, Palestine, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Syria) are forming one side of the debates while Iraqis and people from the rest of the gulf countries are taking the other side.

But I was surprised when I found that the almost all the Iraqis who took part in the debates are on our side, maybe 95% of Iraqis expressed their rejection to the violent behavior of some Iraqis and condemned the terrorists attacks on both Iraqis and the coalition saying that the Arab world must stop supporting the terrorists and the thugs from inside Iraq. It's also surprising that many of those Iraqis live in areas that are recognized to have a public anti American attitude in general like A'adhamiya, Diyala and Najaf. I feel that those people are still afraid to voice their points of view in public in such hostile atmospheres but the internet is providing them freedom and safety to say whatever they believe in.

This month's terrorist violence erupted with the partial intention of clouding the world's perception of Iraqis - we were meant to recoil in horror at telephoto lens video footage of atrocities and mischief committed by people identified as "Iraqis." Over the last ten days many on the left and a few on the right have fallen for this impression, declaring the country hostile or barbaric or otherwise hopeless. Omar's anecdote reminds us that this is not so, that optimists were and still are correct: nearly all Iraqis are not only peaceful but eager to live freely, silenced only by strongmen. The rising of Fallujan gangs and al-Sadr's louts, as well as reported collaboration between all manner of thugs, should be noted as a perfect example of authoritarianism: all appurtenant beliefs thrown away for the common objective of compelling good people into submission or complicity through brutality. The men fighting against the Allies aren't the ones we meant to be free; they're the very men from whom the Allies must liberate the Near East.

John Derbyshire, contrasting his Third Way of nation-building to the First Way of punishment and the Second Way of empire:

Now and then I hear someone talk about a "1945 solution" for the Middle East. That is, we should wreak utter devastation on those places that have declared themselves our enemies. Then, as in Germany and Japan in 1945, we should move in an occupation administration and set the survivors on the path to civilized government.

Well, perhaps we should do this. It is certain, however, that we are not going to, unless our collective mentality undergoes some dramatic change. A "1945 solution" is not possible because, for better or worse, we are not who we were in 1945.

Derbyshire's article dovetails nicely with Asla Aydintasbas' well-intentioned criticism on NRO today: Has America's extreme politeness resulted in a far more dangerous, difficult task in Iraq?

I'm a Douglas MacArthur sort of man: what modest reading I have done of the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Tokyo has me convinced that to spare the rod is to spoil the infant liberal society. Occupied Japan did, of course, have its share of troubles and discord: a famine, a jaw-dropping black market and crime rate, Diets and Prime Ministers who did much to frustrate reforms and doing so with increasing success as the Occupation wore on. (There was an eventual "Reverse Course," that undid several reforms, directed by the State Department.) Attempts at purging government officials complicit in the militarist regime's atrocities were largely unsuccessful. I laugh whenever people claim that the Meiji Restoration placed the Japanese in a better position from which to adopt modern democracy (usually the antecedent for a claim that Arabs will never catch on). The Japanese introduction to liberty was quite an awkward one, a comedy of errors.

Nevertheless, we benefited from three things between 1945 and 1952, advantages absent in Iraq. The first was the fact that the Japanese owed us plenty; we were at war with them, not just their totalitarian regime. We had an enormous amount of political capital to wield.

The second was the Japanese penchant for conformity and obedience. Once they nominally understood the rules of the new game, most saw to it to dutifully follow (with the exception of a wave of cultural nihilism that swept in during the early 1950s). And there were no international press organizations egging the Japanese on to defy their occupiers.

The third advantage was exclusively American and pertinent to Derbyshire's article: the Baby Boomer generation - nursed on obnoxious, empty disestablishmentarianism - were only wisps of their harder, sterner fathers' fancy at the time. MacArthur stared down the naysayers, and the White House supported his progressive agenda through most of the Occupation. Now the kids of those men are calling the shots. Many of them are still lost in the ecstasy of their salad days, when they succeeded in unmercifully dooming millions of Vietnamese to Communist purgatory with civil violence, low-grade stimulants and bad music. Today they make television shows and write op-ed columns encouraging the Third World to take pride in squalor. Others, like President Bush and Paul Wolfowitz, have enough sense to buck the amoral, reflexively anti-American trend - but are perhaps too molded or constricted by political correctness to defy the Law of Being Really Nice to People Who Will Take Advantage of Said Niceness at the Expense of the People to Whom You Wanted to Be Nice in the First Place. At least the change won't happen overnight.

An optimist, I believe that Western meekness is partly an occupational hazard of liberal democracy, the acuteness of our current spell directly attributable to two generations of brats - and that September 11th has indeed reversed the supersaturation of complacency we suffered in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Withdrawal will be slow and the left's reactionaries insufferable. Iraq, it seems, is indeed the key to newfound Western confidence in both itself and the universality of democracy.

We can claim our own advantages today. Iraqis have bottom-level access to Western concepts via the internet - some are more intimate with the Founding Fathers than people my age. Modern technology has prevented humanitarian catastrophe. De-Ba'athification appears to be far more exacting than similar efforts in Germany and Japan. American military technology does well to compensate for the reluctance with which it is used. And, finally, as the president himself said last night: All good people want to be free and will work towards that end when given the opportunity. Americans are beginning to recognize that transcendence as a national ambition, younger people particularly, while they see professional "protesters" for the vain, unconcerned, unhelpful rabble that they are. Despite the failures and ominous portents, the Iraqi occupation has run circles around skeptics and critics alike. Our circumstances are the best they will and can be; I'm confident that they're good enough for victory.

INVERTEBRAES: An Iraqi expounds on the danger of negotiating with one's sworn enemies in the name of "diversity."

She's not just a stunner in or out of a swimsuit with an obscure, well-practiced talent to match. 2004's Miss USA, Shandi Finnessey, supports the liberation of Iraq:

Finnessey, a statuesque 5-foot-11 blonde from St. Louis, wrote a book called "The Furrtails," as part of her aim to integrate mentally retarded children into regular classrooms. She has a master's degree in counseling and also plays piano and violin.

...A Republican, she told Reuters she would use her position to help explain America's involvement in Iraq. "What needed to be done had to be done," she said.

I'm fond of saying that world peace is possible — with universal democracy. Given that [in the other pageant], Miss America contestants are stereotyped as carrying vanilla, obscure ambitions like "Feeding the Hungry" and "Saving the Whales," this fine young woman seems to have turned the tables, matching high-minded ideals with the people working for their realization. This is a tour I'm looking forward to. (Link via IP.)

MISTAKES YOU'D EXPECT A MAN TO MAKE: Miss USA and Miss America are not the same event. This is Miss USA. [Aren't USA and America the same? -ed] I plead being male. I suppose this is on the level of outsider knowledge as "Superman was the best comic Marvel ever put out!" Thanks to Megan Householder, who may be more embarrassed to actually know the difference than I am to have made the error.

From the country that brought us the Cold War: a Russian military analyst tells us why Ted Kennedy is as out to lunch now as he was thirty-five years ago. Bottom line: the Marine who sent Andrew Sullivan a letter predicting that "the Marine Corps will either reaffirm its place in history as one of the greatest fighting organizations in the world or we will die trying" in Fallujah was right. That's "reaffirmed." Read the analyst's essay. Iraqi politics aside, I don't believe the thugs in Fallujah had any idea what whirlwind they would reap. (Via IP.)