This post is from January 31, 2005.

To all those who always see another Vietnam, and who would have cut and run and left Iraqis to the same fate as the South Vietnamese;

To the sunshine lovers of liberty;

To those for whom defeating Bush, at all costs means more than celebrating liberty;

To those who've torn shoulder muscles moving the goalposts;

To those who saw another Stalingrad (and secretly hoped it would be so) in the fall of Baghdad;

To the Party that wanted to see the Eastern Europeans and South and Central Americans languish under Soviet domination into eternity, and that seems to feel the same way about Arabs;

To those who rallied to ANSWER's side, Stalinism be damned, the lives and fortunes of millions be damned;

To those who could not shake the habits of a lifetime of calculated isolationism;

To those who glorify tyrants everywhere, to the point of treating as legitimate Potemkin elections:

I echo two great men, the first:

America must remain freedom's staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally. ..

Now we are standing inside this symbol of our democracy. Now we hear again the echoes of our past: a general falls to his knees in the hard snow of Valley Forge; a lonely President paces the darkened halls, and ponders his struggle to preserve the Union; the men of the Alamo call out encouragement to each other; a settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air.

It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic, daring, decent, and fair. That's our heritage; that is our song. We sing it still. For all our problems, our differences, we are together as of old, as we raise our voices to the God who is the Author of this most tender music. And may He continue to hold us close as we fill the world with our sound—sound in unity, affection, and love—one people under God, dedicated to the dream of freedom that He has placed in the human heart, called upon now to pass that dream on to a waiting and hopeful world.

And the man who built on that:

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.

Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

And I say this:

FREEDOM.

And it's just beginning.

This post dates to November 15, 2006.

This is a long one. Forewarned is forearmed.

I begin by noting that I'm a monarchist.

Well, that's not precisely correct; it's no more accurate than saying I'm a theocrat, an oligarchist, a republican, a democrat, a plutocrat, or even a certain kind of fascist. What I am is someone who does not believe that government needs to be responsive to the people it governs; rather, it needs to be the government to which the people consent. Thus, as I once remarked offhandedly, I'm not opposed to theocracy per se; I'm only opposed to it insofar as it is not the form of government to which its people have consented. Calvin's Geneva, while predictably awful, was legitimate. Based on how the Iranians act, their government is legitimate. The iron test is not voting or some other positive means of assent (although that is a useful measure); a mere negative test, i.e., a lack of a sufficiently large insurgency or insurrection, is sufficient to make the point.

There are certain forms of government, however, which no matter how legitimate, are simply unacceptable, and must be brought down by all means necessary, either because of the human toll they inflict on their own citizenry; because of the dangers they pose to others; or more often than not, both. Thus, the Soviet Union. Thus, Hitler's brand of fascism (but maybe not Mussolini's). Thus, frankly, whatever it is that Kim Jong-Il is running in North Korea, and the People's Republic of China. And, thus, Saddam Hussein's regime.

I'm not going to bother proving all of that; that would result in a thousand irrelevant discussions that step past where this is going. My essential point is that I generally subscribe to the idea that men should be able to sentence themselves to Hell if they so desire, but that we are our brother's keeper when other men are sending them to Hell on Earth. The government of Saudi Arabia, while repellant on a number of levels, appears to be a fairly consented-to one, and for all their small-level atrocities, they don't aim high; as such, it's not our problem. Hussein, by contrast, not only reveled in the little tortures that made his life bearable, he was unapologetic in his view that the rest of the immediate area belonged to him, and he was willing to get it.

Thus, whether or not he had weapons of mass destruction, he regularly tortured his own for fun; he invaded other countries; he undermined the much-ballyhooed sanctions regime to the point where it was a mockery of our power and the power of the (heh) international community; he gassed, he shot, he murdered en masse; and let's be frank, one way or another, he would have had a nuke pointed at us or Israel or both at some point.

Suffice it to say that I have and had no quibble with eliminating that psychopath once and for all.

I'd go a bit farther, in fact: Although I had and have serious doubts about its ability to work, I'm entirely comfy with giving a run at "planting" democracy in Iraq. The reason is because such an idea is, counterintuitively, profoundly conservative -- or more accurately, its impetus is.

My good friend Paul Cella is fond of saying that the Iraq War is a profoundly unconservative one; indeed, he goes so far as to say that it is Liberal. We disagree on this point because the most fundamental Conservative insight is that men are entirely fallible, and keep making the same mistakes again and again. Recognizing those past mistakes, and trying to avoid them (while realizing that your chances are slight), is one of the most conservative activities possible.

We did the Realpolitik thing in the Middle East starting with FDR and one of the original al-Sauds. The net result was despotism unchecked, constant war with Israel, mass murder, theocracy (frequently preferable to the only alternative on the ground), terrorism, inflated oil prices, war unyielding, and, finally, thousands dead on our shores.

The belief that continuing that path would yield a different result is the classic definition of madness. It is not conservative; it is insane.

I add that a very good reason to try what we did is that there are no really new events in history; and one of the great lessons of history is that when a superpower gets punched in the nose, it generally responds with a massacre of whoever was dumb enough to take that swing. Quite simply, while I love my countrymen dearly, I'm not convinced that one nuke floated into Baltimore Harbor would not produce an undeniable demand to turn the Middle East -- and the millions of innocent men, women, and children living there -- into a shiny, well-irradiated parking lot. And if we didn't try something different soon -- I believe this to be the key Bush insight -- then that parking lot was in the undeniable future.

As a Christian, I'm also compelled to note that recognizing that we are our brother's keeper is sort of entrenched as a 2,000 year old teaching, which sounds suspiciously conservative to me.

But all of this is beside the point, now. And it's because of the consent of the governed.

All of the calls for a "Sherman style" general who will ride roughshod over the Iraqi insurgency are pointless. All of the calls not to "cut and run" are irrelevant. We lost the Iraq War last week, because we, as Americans, elected to lose.

I know, I know. The Democrats say they won't "cut and run." Some manner of Republicans, embracing the belief that hope can triumph over experience, believe them, and, showing signs of early madness, suggest that the Democrats don't dare cut and run.

This is foolishness of the first order, and I would respectfully submit that the American people are not so stupid as that. The Democrats' unabashed foreign policy platform since Nixon first pasted them on a Presidential run has been "no American wars." They don't hide it. They got elected en masse in 1974 when Americans knew (or should have known) that the Democrats would abandon the South Vietnamese to mass slaughter and gulags. They made no secret of their positions, and if Americans thought they were repaying the GOP for Nixon, they assuredly didn't care that they were condemning millions to death and torture. The most bellicose Democrat President since 1968 couldn't bring himself to put troops on the ground if there was any chance that their blood would flow. While it's fair to say that the Democrats haven't exactly articulated any meaningful plan with regard to Iraq, they weren't required to do so; they did what any good opposition political party would, and simply stomped their feet and said the opposite of the party in charge. And what they said, removed from all the pretty dressing, was "cut and run." Or redeploy somewhere five thousand miles away. Something like that.

And the American people heard them. Oh, we can sit here and come up with dozens of reasons why the GOP lost last week, and God knows I have a nasty post just waiting to share my thoughts; but at the most basic level, whatever other motivations voters had when they went to the polls, they knew -- or if they had active brain cells, which the overwhelming majority do, should have known -- that every time they pulled the lever for a Democrat, they voted to run tucktail.

In other words, there will be no March to the Sea Through Sadr City. There will be no vicious ground campaign. There will be no long-term assistance to the Iraqi government, even though they seem to want it, because the American people have had enough. Pretending otherwise is for the politicians. Eventually, we will have a point where the popularly elected Democrats in Congress put forth a budget with no appropriations for the war in Iraq. The popularly elected (through the electoral college) President will either sign it, or he will shut down the government. George W. Bush will not shut down the government.

We are basically looking at a situation where black has a queen, a rook, and its king, and white is left with only its king, and we're watching just to see if black is competent enough to steamroll white into checkmate without stalemating him first.

One of our best commenters is fond of predicting the decline of the Pax Americana, and the rise of India and China. I have often disagreed with him, but for a very limited reason: India may or may not rise, but China's doom is written on the wall. Anyone reading through my comment exchanges with him will note that I never say it is because I expect America to continue prevailing of its own weight. Roughly half of our country would be perfectly at home in Europe, if Europe offered the same amenities. They do not have more than one or at most two children. They favor heavy government intervention, relatively high taxation, forced preservation of land that isn't theirs, socially liberal policies, and European bloodlessness to the murder of innocents in different countries. While I disagree stridently with their ideas, that does not make them immoral; its makes them highly rational, but ultimately doomed to head the way of Europe. All humans, as I've noted before, are scum; that half of the country's manifestation as scum merely has the side effect of electing Democrats does not make them more or less scum than the rest of us.

And they just set our foreign policy by convincing enough of their fellows to agree with them.

The problem, of course, is yet another of those history lessons: When a giant -- an empire, a superpower, what have you -- slinks away from a battle, the world knows the giant is weak, and begins tearing it down in every way possible. Behold Rome when she started erecting walls. Behold the Mongols when they started entrenching. Behold the Crusader kingdoms, the Soviet Union, the Byzantines, the Holy Roman Empire, various Chinese Dynasties, the Ottomans, the Spaniards. When a superpower embarks on a military adventure, it must win, or watch its own doom writ on a wall.

Ronald Reagan knew this. Jimmy Carter did not. George Bush, I suspect, knows this. Nancy Pelosi does not.

And so, if I thought we had popular will behind us -- because we only act at the consent of the governed -- I would say we must push on, and leave Iraq in better shape than it was. We must be prepared to mix blood and peace as need be, whether that means slicing Moqtada al-Sadr's throat or shaking hands with him, so long as we win. And when Iraq has a government to which its people can consent, and which threatens no one (especially not us); or if the Iraqi government asks us to leave; then, and only then, should we withdraw. To do otherwise is to leave our fellow men to blood and terror. To do otherwise is to surrender any pretense to authority -- not "moral authority," which is merely Leftese for "agreement with the Left," but rather the kind that actually bends other nations to our will in ways great and small -- on the world stage. To do otherwise, frankly, is to prepare the nuclear launch codes for the day when New York City is so much glowing rubble.

But this is 1974, not 1980. Good or bad, right or wrong, our system has just informed us that today is the day when we abandon Iraq. I frankly wash my hands of it, but there is no denying the popular will.

Thus passes the Pax Americana, because of the consent of the governed.

This dates to February 7, 2007.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

"I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less."

"Only by adopting the techniques of the big lie can the vice president make his case that those opposed to the Iraqi war fail to understand the importance of a firm response to terrorists. In fact, given the deleterious effect it has had on our effort in Afghanistan, and the enormous boost it has given to anti-American forces around the world, the big truth is that the Iraq war has damaged our ability to fight terrorism."

In 1974, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians on his hands. The Democrats responded by feeding the Reaper, as they'd been elected to do. To this day, they congratulate themselves for their noble sacrifice of millions of Asian lives.

In 2006, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Iraqis on his hands. The Democrats have responded by offering non-binding resolutions.

For thirty years, the Republican Party sliced off core Democratic voting groups who had become convinced that the Democrats were and are weaklings, cowards, and faithless allies willing -- joyful -- at the prospect of sending millions to the abattoir. The Democrats are now responding to the same kind of mandate by adopting a new pose of cowardice.

Dhimmicrats. DemocRATS. Surrendercrats. The names come as easily to some lips as Rethuglicans come to others. For every yahoo who elides an argument about foreign policy into a slur, however, there have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters convinced that Democrats are, to put this charitably, unwilling to engage in war. From the homebuilding tyrant enabler to the youthful pugilist to Mickey Mouse in a tank, the Democrats had to live down their response to Vietnam (again, even while they praised themselves for it). Even the serial adulterer had to waste time that could have been spent on White House Hotties proving he was willing to high-altitude bomb someone into submission. Tough and Strong went out of their way to repudiate Tough's own traditional stand on foreign policy, so that voters would be fooled into thinking that Democrats would be willing to go to war without a direct attack on the country first.

Obviously, that didn't work so well.

But oh, the worm has turned! Behold! They ran in 2006 on, well, very little; but the Democrats' consistent message, for anyone who was listening, was that the little party we call the Iraq War is over. And the voters gave them their marching orders. Now, for the first time in a generation, the voters want to try letting people get massacred en masse, and that's precisely what the Democrats were running on. Thus should begin a symphony of synchronicity.

So where are you, you cowards? You've made clear from the Spring of 2003 that you believe this is an illegal, unjustified, awful, soul-destroying war; that a Congress that wasn't a mere rubber stamp for the President would have pulled the cord a long time ago; and that, by a God you don't believe in, if you came to power, there would be no more Iraq War. You've salivated for the chance to truly make this another Vietnam. Your most prominent loons ran on little else. Now's your chance to exercise the only power Congress has in the exercise of war -- the ultimate power, in every sense of the word -- and end the whole thing. Come on, you fevered, yellow-bellied tucktails. Let's all climb to the top of a building and watch the last helicopter leave. Let's have another commission named after that brave milquetoast Frank Church. Let's remind the international community that Americans will fall in line when they demand it. Let's give your neo-McGovernites -- and the voters who agreed with them -- the blood they want.

Come on, you wastes of political skin. Defund the war. Do it. Cut all allocation for the war from the budget. Allow no supplementals. Consummate your promises. Prove those of us who think you spineless cowards that you have the right kind of spine to roll over and pee yourself when the world demands it.

Do it.

Cowards.

To the men and women who would do this, I maintain that you are nothing but a group of tucktails. If the Iraq War is so bad, so immoral, do everything in your power to stop it. Allocate no funds. Bush vetoes? Keep allocating no funds. Force Bush to choose between literal force protection and a staredown.

Stupid, immoral, cowardly excuses for human beings, the lot of you. If this war is merely a waste of lives and treasure, you are honor-bound to stop it at all costs. So do it. Relive the 1970s. Show us that you accept the inevitable slaughter of millions as irrelevant so that we can all watch the evening news without being bothered. Prove that refugees dying on boats and in camps are merely pictures, and not men, women, and children possessed of human dignity, being tortured because the United States won't live up to its promises. Remind the world again that we are a paper tiger, and then grieve when another embassy is held hostage.

Heck, why wait? Why don't we go slaughter a million Iraqis in bombing runs, so this time the blood will be directly on our hands, and we can avoid the irritating images of boat people and other refugees fleeing genocide?

That our Party once knew the value of honor, and words kept, and standing for the weak when they could not; and now accepts in its midst those who would spit on all those things, is a shame to the Republican Party. That the Democrat Party -- a Party that once championed the dignity of all Men -- not only slaughters them in the womb, but would abandon them to slaughter ex utero for political advantage; and that few Americans call them the mass-murdering tyrant enablers they've become -- should shame us all as Americans.

Fall on your face in shame, my fellow Americans, because we are giving away our honor, a piece at a time.

Now, let us speak of war.

Before we go any farther, I should note that I think we're now at war, and it seems broadly self-evident to me that this is so. On September 11, 2001, as I stood in my living room and saw replay after replay of airliners striking the World Trade Center, I thought, So this is war. Strictly speaking, I now see that we've been at war for twenty-five years; we were just so caught up with the bigger war we were fighting, and then the joy at the end of that conflict, that we didn't notice until 3,000 of us died in a single day.

The default conservative position on war, contrary to the overly-feminized bleating of the sham of a Left we have these days, is powerful opposition to anything but obviously defensive war. That position, like most conservative positions, is open to a certain amount of give in the face of reality; but let us not forget that William F. Buckley, for example, was a determined isolationist up until Japan dropped tons of explosives on the U.S.S. Arizona.

I am not an isolationist. I am what Walter Russell Mead (incorrectly) calls a Jacksonian. If the rest of the world prefers to go to Hell in a handbasket, I invite them to make sure the door does not strike them in the posterior as they exit. I abhor nation-building, because although I hold certain truths to be self-evident, I'm not sure everyone else does, and if they don't, it can be one hell of a mess convincing them they're wrong. I don't believe in proxy wars, limited wars, or humanitarian wars. Each, in its way, is an oxymoron. And, worse, they don't work.

I have, historically, made exceptions. I favored at least arms supply to Bosnia and Croatia during the dissolution of Yugoslavia. I truly came to hate Clinton for how he treated Rwanda (for a man who could emote at the drop of a dime, and was allegedly our "first black president," he didn't show a lot of sympathy for the mass murder of thousands of black human beings). I was in favor of bombing Kosovo, though I was worried (not worried enough, as it turns out) about the KLA. (Hey, we bombed the Chinese Embassy -- at worst, it was a mixed-result war.)

I think, and thought, that intervention in Haiti was a mistake. Same goes for Liberia. I'd like to see Chavez executed in a specially arranged coup d'etat, if the CIA could get off its useless behind for ten minutes. (There, it would be All About the Oil and All About Killing an Obnoxious Marxist Dictator.) Same with that old loony in Cuba. We should have blown North Vietnam, then, as needed, China, into the Stone Age. We should probably up our military aid to Taiwan, build more nukes, and point them right at Beijing. We should be prepared to invade Paris on general principle, and especially be ready when either the French begin their genocidal purge of les beurrs, or, more likely, when France adopts sh'ria (yet another reason for the French to hate us -- you have to wonder why they haven't gone that extra mile yet).

Broadly speaking, though, I believe war is only acceptable to achieve some definite national goal, and, once begun, no amount of force should be held back (except in reserve, so you can pound any remaining resistance into the ground afterward). I might make an exception for genocides, but the caveat about unflinching use of overwhelming force remains.

That brings us to Iraq.

Like I said, I hate the idea of nation-building. And strictly speaking, Iraq did not pose an immediate, tanks-at-the-border threat to us. Actually, let's take that in reverse order:

The fundamental truth of the post-Westphalian world is not so much the Nation-State, but the border. Borders imply continuity; they define a State; they are lines from which you can separate the world into discrete pieces. Thus, the French did not place the Maginot Line ten miles from Paris; they placed them on the border with Germany. Up until very very recently, you knew your enemy was planning an invasion because he placed men and materiel on his border with you, and looked menacingly at you the whole time. Thus, one could say, Canada poses an imminent threat to us, because their cutting-edge 1960s military is looking right over the border at Vermont.

Transglobal terrorism changes the rules. An angry Iranian mullah could arm Arabs (or Persians, or Arab-Americans, or Persian-Americans -- while I have no doubt that the vast majority of the latter, American groups would not take part in such a thing, it is impossible to eliminate any possibility of a few malcontents) with nuclear suitcases, send them across the sea, blow up Boston Harbor, and we would never have seen it coming. The post-Westphalian model no longer applies, at least as well as it used to. The danger is not enemies staring at us across a common border, it is enemies walking among us, blowing us to pieces, with no advanced warning.

Hence, Iraq.

Maybe Hussein had no WMDs. Maybe he did. I tend to think he did, as any idiot can make sarin if he really wants to, Baby Assad has been awful nervous lately, and the "Bush lied about WMDs!!!" garbage demands a proof of a negative. Anyway, I think we can all agree that at the very least, it wouldn't have been too tricky for Hussein to make so-called WMDs. (A note: Chemical and biological weapons really aren't "weapons of mass destruction." They tend to burn out or dissipate too quickly for that. Nukes are WMDs. Asteroids could be WMDs. Ebola is a terror weapon.)

And that rather leads to my point: We thought Hussein had those weapons; it would have been far too easy to slip a vial of good ol' Black Death to some death-cult madman to take out a good part of a city to let that loony tune live. We live now in a world where the old certainties created by borders don't exist. Kim Jong-Il could decide to let loose on Seattle with a guided nuke, or with a suitcase nuke. We'd know how to handle the first; we wouldn't know whom to blame for the second.

Thus, it is better to preemptively blow our enemies into little bitty pieces. The stakes are too high to hold hands and sing, "Give peace a chance," on the odd hope that our enemies will do a lamb-and-lion bit with us. So when Bush said, "Hussein is going down," I was there with bells on. He might or might not have been a deadly foe; best not to take the chance, instead of mourn in three months when L.A. is up in glowing flames and NYC celebrities are worried that Americans will overreact. Why we haven't target-nuked every nuclear facility in North Korea is a continuing mystery to me.

These wars, you see, are for the explicit purpose of making sure no more Americans die from hostile, foreign action. No amount of force is "too much." Any amount that accomplishes the end is "just right."

Thus, I'd like to see "just right" amounts of force aimed at the following enemies, in descending order:

Iran
North Korea
Syria
China
Cuba
France

Let us not lie; these people are our enemies. They seek our humiliation, death, and/or subjugation. We no longer have the luxury to employ 19th Century Diplospeak for years on end. When the world is a safer place (for us absolutely, for democracy only as it makes the world safe for us -- see below), then we can retreat to arguments about the marginal tax rate and overtime for union employees, and global environmental initiatives. (That's assuming we reproduce enough to have those debates -- but that's a rant for another time.)

Curiously, that leads to Iraq and nation building.

Like I said, it would be an understatement to say that I detest nation building. Of all the trumped up left-wing idiocies ever, nation building seems one of the very stupidest, and that says a great deal. It combines all of the worst sins of the late British Empire with the worst naiveties and misconceptions of the perpetually stupid left side of the political spectrum into one magnificant waste of time, lives, and resources. And this is me toning it down.

But I'm prepared to start making exceptions.

Iraq might, just might, be the lynch pin that shows the Arab world, Yes, it is possible to live in something other than oppressed, wretched squalor. Maybe we can turn it into a functioning state -- I do not demand, and do not expect, American-style democratic federal republicanism -- but a normal, consent-of-the-governed modern State would do the trick. That's worth a gamble of men and materiel, especially (1) when we have so much of both, especially the latter, and (2) when you think that one of the more telling knocks on us, post-Somalia (another mistake, start to finish, by the way), was that we were an impotent giant.

And, assume for the sake of argument that Iraq falls to pieces. I'll grant that. Suppose it turns into a militant theocracy. I'd gauge that as extremely unlikely, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument. It's still better than what was there before. If we can get that much in place -- and make ourselves safer in the process -- I'll take it.

The old rules went out the window about three years ago. I just kind of wonder how long it'll take the Democratic party to catch on.