The Redhunter

These are conservatives who are comfortable using force abroad, but have little patience for a deep entanglement with the Muslim world, which they consider unredeemable, or at least not worth the strenuous effort of trying to redeem. To put their departure from Bush in terms associated with foreign-policy analyst Walter Russell Mead, they want to detach Bush’s Jacksonianism (the hardheaded, somewhat bloody-minded nationalism) from his Wilsonianism (the crusading democratic idealism). Democrats are headed in this direction too. But the tendency is problematic and, in its own way, as naïve and unrealistic as Bush at his dreamiest.

Lowry does not name anyone in his article, but Scott Johnson at Powerline believes he is talking about conservatives such as William F. Buckley, George Will, Jeffrey Hart, and John Derbyshire, and I think he's got it about right.

President Bush calls Islam a "religion of peace", and, not at all happy with simply knocking off the Taliban in Afghanistan and Ba'athists in Iraq, has set ourselves the task of nation-building. Specifically, to install some sort of democracy in the aforementioned countries.

"Nation-building" has been alternatively seen as good and bad in the post World War II era. Obviously it worked with Germany and Japan. We tried it in South Korea, and it seemed to work there, although it took a lot longer for true democracy to take root. Vietnam was just as obviously a failure, and doubt about nation-building began to set in. However, in the 1980s we took it upon ourselves to build up El Salvador as a bastion of hope against communist insurgencies in Central America. After a fitful start, we succeeded. Then, in the 1990s, we abandoned the concept again. Today we are invested in it lock-stock-and-barrel.

The problems that Bush has encountered are several, but Lowry's points can be boiled down to three

1 With the "cartoon intifada" the idea that "Islam" is a "religion of peace" looks ridiculous to many on the right.

2) "The Palestinian elections have undermined Bush’s contention that all people everywhere desire freedom in their hearts"

3) And the big one, Iraq. Lowry says that it "has reminded us of the enduring importance of culture" because it "suffers from a lack of a democratic culture, and its longstanding ethnic and tribal divisions have worked against us"

Unfortunately, given the daily headlines it doesn't help Bush much to point out that

1) One should never characterize an entire religion as anything. The real struggle is within Islam, between the moderates (yes they exist) and the extremists who want to silence them (see this interesting debate between Mansoor Ijaz and Andy McCarthy)

2) No one ever said that voting alone defined democracy. To have democracy you need democrats.

3) Contrary to popular belief, it was thought in the 1940s that democracy would never work in Japan or Germany because those countries had no history of pluralism. Further, in Germany at least the occupation did not go well all in the early years.

What the 'To Hell with Them' Hawks Want

According to Lowry, these hawks want "to write off reforming Islam, since they consider it inherently unreformable" and consider " the Iraq War as essentially lost". They want to pull out as soon as it is feasible.

They are not isolationists, or dreamy-eyed about negotiations or the UN. They have no problem with using force, they just don't want to stick around for very long afterwards.

A Time for Force

Col Harry Summers made the point in On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War that in order to win a war you have to understand it's nature. Further, you have to tune your military strategy to achieve your political goals. This sounds obvious, but it is evidently lost on some people.

As such, there is a time to use overwhelming firepower to achieve your goals, and a time not to. Lowry says that

“To hell with them” hawks misinterpret the Vietnam War as badly as liberals. They are inclined to conclude that, if only the U.S. had really let loose in Vietnam, bringing to bear even more firepower, the war would have been won. On the contrary, it was only near the end of the war, when the U.S. started to fashion a true counterinsurgency strategy focusing on winning hearts and minds, on holding territory, and on training Vietnamese security forces, that we began to succeed. If there hadn’t been a catastrophic loss of political support for the war at home, this strategy might have held South Vietnam, and it didn’t involve — in a tactic “to hell with them” hawks tend to instinctively favor — bombing anyone back to the Stone Age.

As such, "we will need more engagement with the Muslim world rather than less", he says. To turn from the Muslim world after the riots over the cartoons would only be playing into the hands of the Islamofascists.

Lowry's Recommendations

Lowry says that we need to recognize that the wr in iraq is a counterinsurgency and act accordingly. Lt. Col. John Nagl makes just this point in his book Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, reviewed by me here. The question here, I believe, is one of time; now that we've figured out how to fight in Iraq will we be allowed to win before political considerations at home force a troop pullout?

'To Hell with Them Hawks' do not believe that Islam can be reformed. Lowry does. He says that "like Christianity, Islam has within it resources that can be used both to promote liberty and peace and to repress" liberty. This is true, I believe. Only doesn't have to go back very far in Western history to find some truely abominable things. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani says nicer things in English than he does in Arabic, as Lowry concedes, but asks "is this surprising? He is a conservative Shiite cleric, not an Episcopal minister. Not to realize that someone utterly different from us can still be an ally is a flat-out failure of imagination."

Our Dictator?

For much of the Cold War, and especially with regard to policy in the Middle East, the United States was accused of propping up dictators. Unfortunatly, this charge was usually true. The US tolerated and/or supported authoritarian regimes in South Korea, Taiwan, and throughout the Middle East. What do the critics want? A return to the days of "he may be a son of a bitch, but at least he's our son of a bitch"? (I've seen this quote attributed to both LBJ and Nixon)

We tried this once in Iran. In 1953, along with British Intelligence, we orchestrated the removal of Mohammed Mossadegh, and restored the monarchy, putting former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi back on the throne. The Shah became more and more dictatorial as the years went by, prompting a revolution in 1979 that put the Ayatollah Khomeini in power. That didn't work out so well.

What do the 'to Hell with Them Hawks' want to do? According to Lowry

For believers in a clash in civilizations, the “to hell with them” hawks have an odd attitude toward their own. They want to put our civilization in a permanent posture of strategic defense. In Cold War terms, they believe in Containment rather than Rollback. Containment was a successful strategy, but especially so when Ronald Reagan invested it with aspects of Rollback, launching insurgencies against Communist states and engaging in unapologetic evangelism for the Western cause.

In short, they want to play defense. This, Rich says, is unacceptable. He concedes that for the moment, the 'to Hell with them Hawks' are in the ascendency. But "If we try their approach, it won’t be long until we are complaining yet again about the lack of realism in U.S. foreign policy, and yearning for something less simplistic and naïve."

The Response

Jed Babbin has written a piece in The American Spectator called Endgame Conservatives. Babbin is a good conservative. I've heard him on the radio many times, and gave his book Inside the Asylum: Why the United Nations and Old Europe are Worse Than You Think a positive review.

Babbin says that the "neo-Wilsonians such as he are profoundly wrong about the nature of this war and how we must fight it to win in the long haul". This is so, he says, because the " nascent Iraqi democracy is neither the center of gravity in this war nor a factor determinative of victory or defeat. Iraq is but one key campaign in a larger war and if it becomes a democracy that is a collateral accomplishment, nothing more." This is quite different than the assessment of most people who look at Iraq, for whom the establishment of an at least somewhat democratic government is seen as the key to stopping the insurgency.

Here is why Babbin says we are at war

We didn't invade Afghanistan and Iraq because they weren't democracies. If the lack of democracy were a casus belli we'd be at war with about two-thirds of the world. We counterattacked the Taliban because with malice aforethought they provided the base from which Osama bin Laden organized an attack that killed three thousand Americans and then refused to turn him over to us when we gave them the choice between doing so and war. In Iraq we sincerely believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed a threat to Americans and attacked only after the UN failed, as it always does, to deal with such a threat. The only goal of this war, which Lowry and the others lost track of, is to end the threat of radical Islam and the terrorism that is its chosen weapon against us

.

We will win this war, he says, by "destroying the regimes that provide terrorists with weapons, funds, people, and sanctuary" and by defeating "the radical Islamist ideology" just as "we defeated the Soviet communist ideology."

Babbin denies that the global war on terror is like fighting an insurgency. What is it, then"

First, it is a war against nations that has to be fought both diplomatically and on the battlefields, both conventionally and otherwise. Second, it is an ideological war that can't be won with soft words and euphemisms. And third -- in Iraq, the Philippines, and much of the Horn of Africa -- it is both a counterinsurgency and war for ascendancy among tribes and religious sects.

Me: So how exactly do we fight the war? What type of government do we install in Iraq? Maddeningly, Babbin doesn't say. He denies that winning "hearts and minds" was important to winning Vietnam, and blames instead Johnson's on-again off-again incrementalist approach. Maybe so.

But by not offering any concrete alternative, Babbin opens himself to two criticisms:

1) That he just wants to 'bomb them back to the stone age' and leave it at that. Break it and then leave.

2) That all he wants to do is install another dictator, albeit one that is not as murderous as the old one, and is friendly to the US.

Neither of these are acceptable to me.

On the Positive Side for Babbin

Let's be clear that Babbin's criticism is from the right. He wants Bush to be more, not less, aggressive. He's upset because we're stalled in Iraq. In conclusion, he says that

Mr. Bush's democratization strategy, naive and Wilsonian, has put us in the posture of strategic defense. His original formulation -- that nations are either with us or against us -- has been whittled away to a confrontation-cum-engagement strategy that enables Iran to offer cooperation in Iraq while buying time to build nuclear weapons. The President is in the process of putting the UN in control of the Iran nuclear issue. This will result, in all probability, in allowing Iran enough time to achieve nuclear weapons. In Iraq, we are on the defensive because we haven't taken sufficient action to end the foreign interference that disrupts the nation-building effort. It's time to extricate ourselves from the Wilsonian policy quagmire....Let's press on with this war through the endgame and defeat the enemy decisively on both the military and ideological fronts.

Unfortunately, he never says how we are to extricate ourselves. However, I agree that we need to move on to dealing with Iran.