Peace is Messy

Irritating lefty trope of the week: "Bush Didn't Have A Plan to Win The Peace".

The statement is tripe, of course; nobody ever knows that.

Steven Green in TCS articulates that fact.

One of a wallet full of moneyquotes:

Nobody ever knows what the peace will look like. At Fort Sumter, who could have predicted the KKK, Jim Crow, or Radical Reconstruction? Who knew in August, 1914 that the European War would result in 20 million deaths, Russian Communism, or Nazi Germany? If you can find me the words of some prophet detailing, in 1940, the UN, the Cold War, or even the complete assimilation of western Germany into Western Europe. . . then I'll print this essay on some very heavy paper, and eat it. With aluminum foil as a garnish.

It simply isn't possible to plan for the peace. "No peace plan survives the last battle" is Green's Corollary to von Moltke's dictum that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

So then -- how do we win this Terror War, and what will the peace look like?

Let's tackle the second part first: I don't have any idea how it will end, neither do you. If you meet anyone who claims to know, feel free to laugh at them really hard. So hard, you get a little spit on their face. Sometimes, justice can be small and spiteful -- just ask a meter maid.

When peace comes, it could look like whatever Mecca, Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh, Pyongyang, Cairo, etc., look like after nuclear strikes. Or it could end with the entire Arab and Muslim world looking like the really well-manicured bits of Connecticut. It could even end with a terror strike on America so awful that we sue for peace -- not that we'd get it.

However, just because we don't know where we're going, doesn't mean we can't figure out how to get there.

Which is, of course, a process that Bush started, and that John Kerry wants to abdicate...

...although not in as many words.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Mitch at August 12, 2004 08:29 AM | TrackBack