A forked and evasive Blog

Vox Day accuses the president of speaking with a forked and evasive tongue, but I think Vox is the one being disingenuous. First he says "The war is undeclared - unlike most other wars in our history - but whatever", giving the impression that Bush is starting a new tradition of fighting undeclared wars. In fact, most military actions in U.S. history have been in undeclared wars. The first Gulf War, the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Civil War were all undeclared. We invaded Panama, Grenada, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic without declarations of war. We fought France in the 1790s and the Barbary Pirates without declaring war. So, President Bush is well within the traditions of American history by fighting an undeclared war. Furthermore, the power of declaring war is given to Congress which has not chosen to exercise that power. By passing resolutions giving the president authority to use military force in Iraq as it had in Afghanistan and in the first gulf war, Congress is in effect waiving its authority and delegating it to the executive branch. This may be unseemly but the fault should properly lie with the legislature, not the executive.

In answer to Bush's refusal to "retreat", Vox asks rhetorically "retreat from what? Having our troops stationed in every corner of the globe in a misguided, quasi-imperial Pax Americana? " It's obvious that Bush doesn't want to keep our army tied down in Iraq. What he's trying to accomplish is the creation of a stable and democratic Iraqi government that can defend itself and maintain internal order. When Vox says that "the Islamic empire has stretched across the Middle East since the 700s", he gives the impression of a monolithic Islamic empire that has been in existence for some 1300 years. Of course, nothing could be futher than the truth. The Islamic Empire that conquered much of the Middle East and Northern Africa from the Byzantines and the Persians quickly fell apart. Since then the region has seen invasions from the Crusaders, the Mongrels and the Ottomans, among others. After several centuries of Ottoman domination, European powers moved in. Bin Laden wants to revive the Caliphate and make the Arab world even more backward than it already is. What Bush is trying to do is to bring the region into the modern age. It may be a futile, Wilsonian pipe dream but considering our dependence on oil and the inevitability of the spread of nuclear weapons in the region, it is definitely worth a shot. But anyway, that's the debate - whether we can successfully export something resembling a democratic, modern government to the region. Based on the election last week, I'm starting to get optimistic.

In response to the President repeating his often made argument that it's better to fight them in Iraq than America, Vox says "This is a weird argument which assumes that because America is attacking Iraqis, non-Iraqis can't attack America. It makes no sense." Nobody said that the terrorists can't attack America because we are in Iraq. The point is that the main front of the war is in Iraq because we went there. Al Quaida is convinced that if we succeed in establishing a decent democratic government in Iraq, we will have dealt them a critical blow from which they won't recover. We know this from intercepted letters. Thus, they are choosing to fight us in Iraq, which is the battleground of our choice. It is perfectly legitimate for Bush to say that our offensive strategy is probably deterring attacks on our home soil. The terrorists have attacked outside of Iraq in places such as Spain, the UK, and Indonesia. There hasn't been a major attack in the US most likely because they know we will hit back.

Vox's then accuses Bush of being "wildly dishonest" and issuing "spin worthy of Clinton" for making the obvious point that we should fight back against the terrorists. Not responding to vicious, murderous attacks does invite further attacks. That's what happened under Clinton when we didn't have a credible response to the first World Trade Center attack, the Khobar Tower attacks, the attacks on our embassies in Africa or the bombing of the USS Cole. Whether or not the terrorists liked us being in Saudi Arabia is irrelevant. Are we supposed to refrain from stationing troops in an allied nation out of fear of what some nutcase terrorist thinks? Is the strongest country in the world supposed to cower in fear of these lunatics and not be engaged in the rest of the world? When we were a lot smaller and weaker, President Jefferson refused to give into fear and pay tribute to the Barbary Pirates. Instead we fought back and defeated them. That's the tradition that President Bush is upholding, not the isolationist tradition that Vox seems to support.

It's true that Bush's reasons for going to Iraq seemed confused and have been weakened by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Our legal justification for invading Iraq is that the Hussein government failed to abide by the cease fire agreement of 1991. The real reason is that we needed to assert ourselves after the 9/11 attacks. There hasn't been a new attack on American soil and we have been making progressing in establish democracy in the region. I think that's pretty good progress.