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FAILURE OF THE WILL. Via The Corner, conservative mil-pundit Ralph Peters has thrown in the towel on Iraq. What's revealing about the piece is that it's impossible to see why he bought into the Bush line in the first place. In a typical passage, Peters writes that "I believed that Arabs deserved a chance to build a rule-of-law democracy in the Middle East. Based upon firsthand experience, I was convinced that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and intellectually stagnant that we had to risk intervention -- or face generations of terrorism and tumult." OK, based on firsthand experience? What in the world does this mean? And what sort of basis can it be for the most gigantic foreign-policy undertaking in a generation? More importantly, there's this:
This chaos wasn't inevitable. While in Iraq late last winter, I remained soberly hopeful. Since then, the strength of will of our opponents -- their readiness to pay any price and go to any length to win -- has eclipsed our own. The valor of our enemies never surpassed that of our troops, but it far exceeded the fair-weather courage of the Bush administration.Ralph, are you kidding? Perhaps you could say why the chaos wasn't inevitable. Perhaps you could say why you remained "soberly hopeful" late last winter, and why the conditions that once produced optimism in your swelled breast have only left you awash in despair. I mean, the bed that we're reaping now was seeded, at the very latest, in the summer of 2005, and in all likelihood before the invasion. While you're at it, you might want to reconsider the rather juvenile idea that "valor" and "will" are sufficient to win a war.I don't mean to pick on Peters, who has produced some very good work in the past, and is clearly coming to terms with something extremely unpalatable to him. He deserves credit for that. But the trouble here is a failure to ask one's self the truly hard questions about why we wanted to believe what many of us did before the war -- and unless we do that, it's only a matter of time until the next Iraq.
--Spencer Ackerman
