Et Tu, Kristol

Most of the sound and fury among pundits these days has a common source.  The people lambasting Donald Rumsfeld for every procurement glitch and every casualty have, metaphorically, joined hands with those who are complaining vociferously that Paul Bremer and Tommy Franks don't deserve their shiny new Presidential Medals of Freedom. 

What all these pundits have in common is a nearly psychotic need to portray Operation Iraqi Freedom as a failure regardless of the facts.  Most of the critics are people of the left who have been peddling prophesies of disaster since before we began our operations in Afghanistan.  They need a failure because, without one, their entire world view will stand discredited.  They won't recognize success even when it grabs them by the throat and hangs on like a bulldog.

William Kristol is not a man of the left, but sometimes he sings from the same hymnal as the other critics.  Yesterday he published a piece in the Washington Post bitterly criticizing The Secretary of Defense.  He had two points.  First, Secretary Rumsfeld has failed to overcome more than 200 years of Army tradition and ensure that procurement of supplemental armor for Humvees runs with perfect efficiency.  Kristol knows better than to commit such foolishness to print.  The course of military procurement never runs smooth and no Secretary of Defense has ever done more than Rumsfeld to make the armed forces rational and efficient.

Kristol's second point is the old chestnut about our supposedly inadequate troop commitment to Iraq.  This has become an article of faith in anti-Bush circles.  But nobody has ever explained how an additional hundred thousand troops (to pick a number at random) would have improved our situation.  More troops would have given our enemies more targets, but unless we used them to kill more hostile Arabs they would have done no good. 

We decided early on to emphasize the political aspects of our Iraqi involvement.  That meant avoiding confrontations so as to kill as few natives as possible.  The troops we had were grossly underemployed. They watched and waited as terrorists took refuge in Fallujah and turned it into a theocratic city state.  Watching and waiting isn't particularly labor intensive.  A small force can watch and wait just as well as a large one. 

When, quite recently, we got around to fighting our post-Saddam enemies in Iraq, the force available proved to be more than sufficient.  We can operate anywhere and destroy any target that our intelligence can identify.  Where is the evidence that more troops would have been useful, let alone decisive?  There is none.

From Alexander to William I to Cortes to Lord Kitchener to Tommy Franks in Afghanistan, the history of conquest teaches that small, lethal forces can control large populations and territories.  The key to a successful occupation has always been ruthless determination not large troop deployments. 

Maybe we need a bigger Army.  Maybe we need more troops in Iraq.  But if we do, neither Bill Kristol nor anyone else has ever explained why.  Kristol has been calling for more troops, both in general and in Iraq, for years.  But he never makes a convincing case that more troops will solve more problems than they create.  He seems to think the need for more troops is self-evident, as if he received a stone tablet about military manpower on some mountaintop. 

It is silly to criticize Rumsfeld merely because he hasn't conformed our military to some mystic vision Bill Kristol shares with John McCain.  In fact, it's silly for the likes of Bill Kristol to criticize Rumsfeld at all.  Rumsfeld is the architect of a war effort that, so far, has succeeded in liberating both Afghanistan and Iraq from brutal dictatorships and putting our terrorist enemies on the defensive in the Arabian heartland.  Bill Kristol publishes a magazine that is highly influential among the dozens of conservatives who supported John McCain in 2000.   

This brings us to the $64,000 question:  Why is Bill Kristol putting his reputation at risk by writing nonsense and placing it in the Washington Post where people are bound to notice?  The only likely explanation is that Kristol is a bitterly disappointed man who can't help striking out at the administration that is the source of his disappointment. 

Kristol was a player in the first Bush administration as Vice President Quayle's chief of staff.  He might have been an insider once again after the Republican restoration of 2000, but he wasn't.  When he backed McCain he fell from grace.  Bush loyalists are likely to be running the Republican Party for the rest of Kristol's life and they will neither forgive nor forget.

Bill Kristol, in sum, is a man with a great future behind him.  Maybe that's got something to do with his petty, shallow attack on Rumsfeld. 

Comments

[Dan M., Esq.]

Hard words, hard words.

The numbers point I agree with, I too am waiting for a case, conclusions, which one is led to by major and minor premises. It seems we will wait in vain. The more the chattering class chirps about numbers, the more I am suspecting that the present number in Iraq is enough for the task.

Actually, I am beginning to think that Kristol is hedging his bets. He urged the Iraq campaign as much as anybody. IF IT turns south, he has an out by saying the number of troops was insufficent. I am starting to see Kristol exude nervousness, skittishness, unsteadiness. His performance covering the election day drama was not a banner one either.

Kristol could be jumping on Rumsfeld to preserve some aspect of creditibility on the left. Kind of a journalistic strange new respect line. The only thing worse than calling for the head of Rumsfeld, was the one he called on to replace him. JOE LIEBERMAN. The voice alone of Lieberman should forever disqualify him. Unbelievable. What is Kristol's fascination with Lieberman, why is he forever urging him upon the President. Bizarre, truly bizarre.