The War

It is a remarkable feature of this election that in the midst of an unpopular war, the war is all but unmentioned.

Though many, perhaps most, people are viscerally opposed to the war and blame the US for it, the war no longer seems to be a stalemate. The various collections of primitives are beginning to fall into a status quo of some sort, judging by the decline of attacks as against last year. On this calculus, the war is on the way to being won. This is the position of General Petraeus and of George Bush.

On the other hand, the combatants are primitive but not stupid. How great an insight does it take to see that the party of an unpopular president is not likely to win the next election? How great an insight does it take to realize that a wave of attacks after one or the other of the Democratic peace candidates becomes president, will lead to a hasty withdrawal? Why get killed fighting the hated (despised religio-ethnic group) while they are defended from our holy wrath by the American soldiers -- when next year the American soldiers will be gone?

There has been a great deal of quibbling over timetables for withdrawal in both parties (which descended into the worst kind of demeaning petty bickering between McCain and Romney in their last debate) but the mere fact that the two candidates with by far the best chance of being elected are both peace candidates is itself a reliable timetable, declared or not. Not everybody in Iraq is there to commit suicide. Many of them can wait until 2009 to liberate Baghdad from the cowardly (despised religio-ethnic group).

So the defeatist spoutings from the left that the war has mobilized ordinary Muslims to become jihadis against us and that the war is lost, is seen to be false. So too the idea from the right that the decline in attacks means the war is won. I think what we are seeing is neither a defeat nor a victory but a lull pending our elections and the inauguration of the new administration.

Though I admit I know nothing at all about it, the only outcome that could with a straight face be called satsfactory would be if by the time Clinton or Obama is inaugurated and during the timetables for withdrawals each of them has set, the Sunnis can be damaged politically sufficient to permit a stable Shi'ite government. The only outcome that could conceivably be called a victory would be if that government were strong enough to not become an Iranian satellite. Who will actually know and honestly tell us whether that has happened or not?

Which means that unless it is a catastrophic defeat, which isn't likely, we will never know what the outcome of this war actually was.