Fair Analogy
The crime is so bad in DC that the police are going to implement no go zones. This decision has prompted Instapundit to remark:
IT’S A QUAGMIRE: U.S. out of D.C. now!…. Nothing we can do will stop these people from committing senseless acts of violence. It’s in their culture. The best thing we can do is to withdraw and leave them to each other. . . .
His comments are based on this quote:
D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.
Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.
Is this a fair application of the Anti-war argument that Iraqis are incapable of peaceful democracy? If not why? Giving the obvious answer that because DC is the capitol of our country is uninteresting.
Its worth noting that DC has banned handguns and the violence is so bad that the police are going to apply some rather extreme methods to control it. Gun control is certainly the solution to gun violence.
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UPDATE: Welcome to those from Instapundit! Make sure you check out my libertarian web comic Smith and Engels. Its freaking awesome.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
What irritates me about analogies like this is that it seems to imply that we won’t be out of Iraq until it’s as stable as Washington D.C. Does the analogy cut both ways? Or are we just making fun of an argument that hasn’t been made in a while?
What ARE we doing in Iraq any more, really? What’s the benchmark for victory? No one’s giving a good answer, and asking for one always gets cast as “defeatist”.
June 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Matthew, how about we start by agreeing that an acceptable level of violence in Baghdad is somewhere above zero? I mean, the anti-war argument appears, most of the time, to be based on some standard of perfect, without defining perfect.
There *is* no benchmark from the anti-war crowd for victory. Victory is impossible by definition, and therefore, no definition is possible.
The DC analogy points out that there are imperfections, and that defining them is necessary if difficult.
When any anti-war person (I don’t know if you’re one or not) will offer me *their* definition of what victory in Iraq would look like, I’m ready to discuss both the definition and the possibility of meeting it.
Personally, I would think a minimal definition would include: a) a functioning democratically elected government, and; b) no more violence than was being perpetrated by Saddam. YMMV, but since you haven’t given me a benchmark, I can’t know.
June 5th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
What’s the benchmark for victory? No one’s giving a good answer, and asking for one always gets cast as “defeatist”.
Or as “warmonger”, depending on who was asked the question.
June 5th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Jorg:
I’ll agree with you that a level above zero is a good standard for victory. We had twenty deaths last month. Is that a good number? Can we bring the troops home now? If not now, when?
We’ve had elections. We have a governing body. It’s imperfect, but it’s no less sane than a lot of other democracies that we play nice with. Is it good enough? If not, then what is the definition of “functional”?
I’m not looking for the “we lost, let’s cut and run” threshold. I’m looking for the “mission accomplished” threshold, when we can declare the job done.
Unless we just plain old aren’t going to declare “victory”. Maybe the plan is to keep Iraq as a permanent base of operation for America in the Middle East.
Somehow that’s looking more and more likely… although no one seems willing to put an honest argument for it out there.
June 5th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Matthew:
I would suggest you look at how we’ve handled things since World War II, We were victorious in winning yet we are still in Germany, Japan, England and have bases through-out the world. Iraq will take a very long time to become a stable country and the middle-east will force us to remain engaged there for the foreseeable future.
June 5th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
That’s hardly an honest argument. We remained in those countries to fight yet another war - the Cold War. Are we in England, Japan, and Germany to maintain stability and keep the peace, or as forward deployment stations for further military action?
June 5th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Good questions Matt.
Initially we were a peacekeeping force in the Europe and Asia. Since we moved into Europe and Japan after WWII, there haven’t been any regional/world wars in either region.
I believe a stable democratic government in the Heart of the mid-east, maintained by reasonable force of arms if necessary, can do more good for the ideals of freedom and Liberty than any other Iraq end result I can think of. Iraq doesn’t have to be the good old US of A to be a good thing. An allied Turkey level Democracy would be far superior to the previous status quo. He’ll I’d even settle for an Italian level of Democracy and corruption…
I hope that we plan to stay in Iraq as a stabilizing force in the Mid East. US bases in Iraq could be a very good thing for the region.
Petraeus ‘ strategy has set us on a good course. If we can keep it up we shouldn’t need to do much else kinetically than help the Iraqi’s defend their own soil. Hopefully the next POTUS will be deft enough to maintain the momentum.
OK Matt, I showed you mine, now you show me yours: What’s your end game strategy? Where should we go from here?
June 6th, 2008 at 10:07 am
I think it’s time to stop fighting the cold war, and perhaps close the foreign bases. Keeping these bases going around the world is an expensive and unnecessary proposition. Air superiority has made large scale ground war obsolete, so why do we need to keep battalions on hand when our most powerful weapons can be deployed from aircraft carriers to any spot on the globe in a few hours? And where ground forces ARE necessary (i.e. modern urban warfare) they can be deployed by our air forces as well. I am simply not convinced that it is worth the cost to maintain our powerful forward operations when the conflicts we DO engage in are much smaller than said forward operations were created for.
June 6th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Fair enough, Ben. Mind you, I’ve got a fair share of annoyance about how the president sold this war to us - it was most decidedly *not* as a means of creating a forward base to control the Middle East. But going forward…
I strongly feel that the cause of democracy, if serving it is our intent, is best served by us leaving the country as soon as possible without causing chaos. A democracy held in place by force of arms is no democracy - at best, it a Pakistani, third-world sort of democracy where the military always gets the veto. Real democracy in Iraq means having the courage to let them elect people we don’t like and come up with policies we don’t enjoy. “As soon as possible” is by no means necessarily speedily, though. We’re talking years, not months. But we need to go if we honestly believe that democracy is our cause.
If Iraq as a forward base is our goal… why? Why not Saudi Arabia, where the oil and the enemies really are? Or Kuwait? Or, if those aren’t politically viable, Dijibouti? It’s perfectly positioned to control the Gulf, there’s no government to speak of, there’s no people to speak of. Why Iraq? It makes little to no tactical sense. It was never mentioned as a rationale for the war at its inception, and there are much better strategic choices out there.