Iraq is a military and political mess, and it's not getting better. The insurgency by Sunni Baathist cadres backed up by a presence of foreign terrorists is going to grow more violent. Our casualties will continue to increase. Baghdad and other cities are wracked by small arms and remote bomb ambushes and by mortar and rocket attacks, and are closed to commercial air traffic. The mayhem has driven much of the international aid and political community out of the contested zones. Assassins stalk the emerging Iraqi leadership to separate collaborators from the Coalition. Saddam Hussein remains a fugitive and therefore a terror in the minds of all Iraqis, and our allies shrink back from supporting us with serious levels of resources or troops.

 

Our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is in denial of reality. He publicly states the situation on the ground in Iraq is being distorted by the media and characterizes the violence as comparable to Washington, D.C., crime levels. He has denied there is a "guerrilla war" and insisted that the only opposition is a handful of "dead enders." He points with increasing defensiveness to the small number of coalition forces (besides the courageous Brits) and the increasing hours of electricity per day as evidence that his policies are working.

 

Some argue that Mr. Rumsfeld has ill served the president. We claimed victory in the initial war intervention. Our adversaries, however, haven't seen themselves as defeated. Mr. Rumsfeld's critics feel that he dug in his heels and inadequately resourced the campaign's opening phase. In my judgment, the manner in which we intervened, and ended the regime, has been a major source of our subsequent problems. It's not enough to achieve victory--which we did; you've got to achieve a situation in which your adversary recognizes that he's been defeated, and that violent resistance is futile--which we didn't. We went in with a small force that, while unstoppable militarily, was incapable of the sort of "takedown" of an entrenched opposition that our troops now face. We should have front-loaded our military power and withdrawn forces as things got better; instead, we went in light, and augmented power after the regime's fall.

... in debating the war, those of us who opposed it find ourselves drawn into this fairytale.  We are obliged to argue about the relative moral merits of leaving Saddam in place or deposing him, while we know, though we are seldom brave enough to say it, that the moral issue is a distraction.  The genius of the hawks has been to oblige us to accept a fiction as the reference point for debate.

It is no use telling the hawks that bombing a country in which al-Qaida was not operating was unlikely to rid the world of al-Qaida.  It is no use arguing that had the billions spent on the war with Iraq been used instead for intelligence and security, atrocities such as last week's attacks in Istanbul may have been prevented.  As soon as one argument for the invasion and occupation of Iraq collapses, they switch to another.  Over the past month, almost all the warriors - Bush, Blair and the belligerents in both the conservative and the liberal press - have fallen back on the last line of defence, the argument we know as the moral case for war.

I do believe that there was a moral case for deposing Saddam - who was one of the world's most revolting tyrants - by violent means.  I also believe that there was a moral case for not doing so, and that this case was the stronger.  That Saddam is no longer president of Iraq is, without question, a good thing.  But against this we must weigh the killing or mutilation of thousands of people; the possibility of civil war in Iraq; the anger and resentment the invasion has generated throughout the Muslim world and the creation, as a result, of a more hospitable environment in which terrorists can operate; the reassertion of imperial power; and the vitiation of international law.  It seems to me that these costs outweigh the undoubted benefit.

 

But the key point, overlooked by all those who have made the moral case for war, is this: that a moral case is not the same as a moral reason.  Whatever the argument for toppling Saddam on humanitarian grounds may have been, this is not why Bush and Blair went to war.

 

A superpower does not have moral imperatives.  It has strategic imperatives.  Its purpose is not to sustain the lives of other people, but to sustain itself.  Concern for the rights and feelings of others is an impediment to the pursuit of its objectives.  It can make the moral case, but that doesn't mean that it is motivated by the moral case.

When it suits its purposes to append a moral justification to its actions, it will do so.  When it is better served by supporting dictatorships like Uzbekistan's, expansionist governments like Ariel Sharon's and organisations which torture and mutilate and murder, like the Colombian army and (through it) the paramilitary AUC, it will do so.

 

It armed and funded Saddam when it needed to; it knocked him down when it needed to.  In neither case did it act because it cared about the people of his country.  It acted because it cared about its own interests. T he US, like all superpowers, does have a consistent approach to international affairs.  But it is not morally consistent; it is strategically consistent.

When George W. Bush first entered the White House, the conventional wisdom was that his inexperience and lack of vision in foreign policy would be compensated for by his wise and experienced cabinet. This may or may not have been a reasonable view at the time. Right now, however, it is clear that the most visionary and, yes, the wisest and most capable foreign policy-maker in the Bush administration is the president himself. Let's hope the team around him proves willing and capable of fulfilling his clear and historic grand strategy.

There can no longer be any doubt that whatever Republican 'realist' inclinations the president may have inherited from his father and his father's advisers when he took office, he has now abandoned that failed and narrow view and raised the torch previously held high by Ronald Reagan - and before that by John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman.

Bush has broken from the mainstream of his party and become a neoconservative in the true meaning of the term.  For if there is a single principle that today divides neoconservatism from traditional American conservatism, it is the conviction that the promotion of liberal democracy abroad is both a moral imperative and a profound national interest.

Bush's great task now will be to explain his strategy to his own cabinet and commanders and insist that they begin implementing it.

This is a religious war, not against Islam but for Christianity, for a Christian nation.  When this nation was founded, there was nothing like it.  Our founders said there is a God and we are all equal before God.  The ideal of equality and tolerance is like nothing that has ever existed in the world before.  That, too, is a Christian value.  The concept of equality, especially when it comes to gender equality, was not invented by Gloria Steinem.  It was invented by Jesus Christ.  As long as people look long enough, they will always come to Christianity.

Are equality and tolerance historical Christian values?  (Note she does not bother to use the more PR-friendly and inclusive phrase "Judeo-Christian values.")  Ask the victims of the Inquisition or the Crusades.  America's Christian founders may have preached equality, but they hardly practiced it.  See slavery.  Did the 'ideal of equality and tolerance' only appear with the birth of the United States?  Check out the preceding Age of Enlightenment.  (Locke celebrated a state of nature in which people were happy, tolerant, free and equal.)  And Jesus invented feminism?  Then why did the 'Christian nation' of the United States deny women the right to vote?  Why has the Catholic Church refused to ordain female priests?  Why do certain fundamentalist Christians insist that women submit to their husbands? 

And where currently is this tolerance that Coulter speaks of?  Her Christian supremacist comrades - such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell - blast away at Islam and other religions.  General William Boykin, a top Pentagon official, derided Islam while giving talks before evangelical Christians.  And when George W. Bush last week commented that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, fundamentalist Christians howled in protest.  The Reverend Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and a frequent visitor to the White House, said, 'The Christian God encourages freedom, love, forgiveness, prosperity and health. The Muslim god appears to value the opposite.  The personalities of each god are evident in the cultures, civilizations and dispositions of the peoples that serve them.'  How's that for tolerance?

Robertson has even accused Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists of representing "the spirit of the Antichrist" and repeatedly called Hinduism "devil worship."  And Coulter showed little tolerance when she wrote of anti-American Muslims in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Now, we turn to the GOP.  Rather than theologize the war, the Republican National Party and its chairman Ed Gillespie have politicized it.  There's nothing wrong with that.  Bush's conduct of the war on terrorism and his actions in Iraq should be electoral issues.  He should run on his record, and there would be nothing unfair about GOPers telling voters to vote Republican if they're satisfied with developments in Iraq and encouraged by Bush's handling of the terrorist threat.  But that's not what the Republicans are doing.  In its latest - and much-noticed - television ad, the Republican Party claims, "Some are now attacking the President for attacking the terrorists.... Some call for us to retreat, putting our national security in the hands of others."