I told you so

On the charge that the conduct of the war has been incompetent because we did not bring in enough troops: it is true that we don’t have enough to hold what we take after we take it. That is a strong point in favor of those who say we should have gone in stronger. But is can hardly be used by those that say we shouldn’t have gone in the first place. The reason we don’t have enough to hold is that the people we are fighting are terrorists. We have plenty to hold against conventional forces. We only are short handed when we try to hold against people that target civilians, i.e., terrorists. The reason we have to have more on the ground is not to take cities in the first place but to protect people from assassinations after we take something. The big problem for the interim government is that the insurgents kill anyone that cooperates, including people that just keep the water running.

And this is why the anti-war forces have no right to say I told you so. They didn’t say, “See, the people we would be fighting are terrorists and you can’t protect people from terrorists. Their argument is that the forces we would be fighting would be the legitimate rulers of the country, that they would be strong because they in some sense had the support of the population. They can hardly turn around and use as an argument for their position the murderous contempt the insurgents have for the lives of the people of Iraq as an argument for leaving Iraq under their control.

This is the great paradox of fighting insurgents. The competition is for legitimacy. The left and international opinion somehow confers legitimacy on the side that displays the most contempt for the lives of the people in a country. Unlike the old Geneva Convention type rules that penalized those who fought unconventionally, the new ‘international law’ (really the twisted interpretations of it from the international lawyerocracy) confers legitimacy on the side that creates chaos and kills civilians through Guerilla war.

It is true that a good plan for removing the insurgency should have been developed before going in. But what makes this insurgency strong is not its popular support but its utter contempt for the populace. The observations that we don’t have enough people to stay behind to protect the people from murders and kidnappings after we win is a tacit admission of this. The international community that opposed the invasion didn’t say don’t invade because the you won’t be able to protect the people of Iraq from the terrorists you throw out of power, they said that we shouldn’t invade because we would be violating the rights of the Iraqis. They didn’t say don’t invade because you won’t be able to protect their rights afterward, that would have been an admission that the then government of Iraq was not legitimate. If you are arguing that the invading force has to have enough to protect the people from the murder squads of the deposed government after the invasion what are you saying about the nature of the pre-invasion government? The people that say we should have foreseen this didn’t foresee it themselves. If they had they could never have made the argument that the invasion of Iraq was immoral on the grounds that it violated the rights of the people of Iraq. Can you call a government legitimate whose threat against a potential invader is, “don’t topple my government because if you do I will make it ungovernable by murdering school kids and anyone else that tries to keep the lights on?”