So Bush Created a Catastrophe

We are at an inflection point in the War on Terror. Three years of effort to produce democracy in Iraq after the 2003 invasion has demonstrated that the forces of chaos in Iraq are stronger than the move to democracy. “Bush Has Created a Catastrophe,” complains Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian.

Yes, of course. The Middle East is a catastrophe, and Bush created it. That was always understood as a possibility from the beginning.

Back in 2003, some unnamed Bushie said that the administration was throwing all the balls up in the air in the Middle East. He was right, and they have come down in a right mess.

So what? Suppose that Iraq is a catastrophe? What does that mean for us?

The answer is: Not much.

The first best outcome in the Middle East is for democracy to flourish. The next best outcome is for the Middle East to be divided between Sunni and Shia, and for the Sunnis under the leadership of Saudi Arabia to take up arms against the expansionist Shia of Iran.

The one thing we do not want is for the Middle East, its oil, and its oil money to be united under the control of a single murderous dictator.

The reason that progressives like Timothy Garton Ash are upset is that the War on Terror upsets the business-as-usual of the worldwide bureaucratic welfare state.

In the minds of progressives the story, er, the narrative, is supposed to go like this. Progressives discover a festing sore of inequality and oppression and write brilliant manifestos demanding its immediate remediation through the means of a bureaucratic government program funded by tax monies. Then everyone goes back to a life of writing works of creative intellectual brilliance punctuated by the occasional sexual adventure.

But this fantasy becomes impossible when there are young Muslim men running around the world blowing themselves up and beheading people. When that is happening, you must call up young western men of a martial disposition, furnish them with abundant materiel and leadership, and tell them to go at it.

And the progressives of the world hate that more than death itself.

Because they thought that, after a century of work, they had completely extinguished the martial instinct in the young men of North America and Europe.

Yes. They were wrong about that, too.