Finally a criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror from the real right. It doesn’t add up to me, but it’s worth a read. Mark Helprin is a beautiful writer and a sober analyst of Arab political culture. He thinks we haven’t been tough enough on the Arab world, and its broader complicity in the politics of resentment that led to 9/11:
The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over. But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.
I’m not sure what such a coup de main would have meant. Nuking Mecca? Presumably not. But Helprin’s argument helps us remember that the American response to a declaration of war has been measured, patient and, now, extremely generous. I also think he’s right about the need for much bigger military expenditures than we now have. We are dangerously vulnerable to a real threat from North Korea, while we are engaged in the Middle East. But if the American political class has been so divided over even the modest measures we have taken to fight back so far, what hope would there have been for a more ambitious campaign?
The Dish 