Friends,
I have a confession to make. Driving home last night, on my latte-sipping, French-speaking, sissified radio station, Terry Gross interviewed Bill Kristol.
I hadn't heard Kristol speak before, and -- Bilmore, Club, Hank -- I actually liked him. I don't agree with his approach but found him articulate and capable of maintaining a coherent argument. Links to audio are on npr.org, but I don't think there's a transcript. In earlier versions of this post, I tried to summarize portions of it, but realized that it sounded like familiar paths that have been well-trod on this board, so I'll spare you the pablum.
The one point I will make, though, is that for someone who got his OWN WAR named after him (at least colloquially), he's awfully pissed at Bush for how they've tried to do this on the cheap, and then fucked it up by futzing around during the occupation and allowin the insurgents to organize to the extent that we've got daily car bombs at the gates to the Green Zone.
His other point, with which I agree, is that this is a conflict that we CAN'T permit ourselves to really lose (and here he's defining "lose" as a Vietnam-like withdrawal). Bush, Kerry, whoever, is most likely going to be stuck there for several more years, because withdrawing will (a) create a cesspool of jihadists in Iraq, which is unacceptable, and (b) the impression that this creates of a weakened superpower will make others in the world feel less comfortable, now that the big kid on the playground doesn't appear to have control over all the sand. It would encourage places like Turkey, S. Korea, Japan, and others who depend on the US umbrella to keep things calm in various regions of the world to think long and hard about whether this is still true, and if they conclude it's not, it'll encourage an accelerated arms race, including nuclear proliferation.
None of this is groundbreaking news, of course, but it's a bit depressing to reconsider.
Now that I've tried to spread that to the board, my work here is done! Carrry on.
Gattigap
eta: More from Kristol can be found here. -- T.S.
