Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tells it like it is. Yesterday, he told his colleagues on the Senate floor:
“Is the war in Iraq making America safer? By all accounts, the answer…is ‘no.’”
He’s right, of course, but for the wrong reason. Of course the Iraq War isn’t making us safer, not in the sense that seatbelts make us safer.
But it is pretty certain that a pullout from Iraq, as Gen. Petraeus testified yesterday, would make us less safe.
The war in Iraq is a battle in the great western war of conquest, the war of the modern commercial world of cities and trading against the ancient world of tribe and pillage.
The Middle East is the last holdout against this vast project and so that is where the battle is being joined.
Five hundred years ago when traders from Europe wanted to trade with the fabulously rich country of India they had to wait until they could do ocean navigation, build ships big enough to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean. They had to do that because the rapacious rulers of the Middle East, like robber barons in the mountain passes of the Alps, took too much in tribute from the trade between India and Europe to make it worthwhile.
Yesterday General Petraeus reported on the gradual progress that the United States is making in Iraq. Nobody can know if it will all work out.
So we cannot know if we are safer.
But we do know that the world of cities and freedom and trading and trust, and the world of the western team is our way. And the world of the tribe, of piracy and slavery and plunder, is their way.
Some people say that there is no good reason for the conflict in the Middle East. Maybe there isn’t
But we know that the west has always needed a navy and an army to enforce its regime of trading and trust. So why should things be any different now?
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