To the contrary, the relentless harping on American casualties by the mainstream media is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal. ~Norman Podhoretz, OpinionJournal.com

Via Orthodoxy Today Blog.

The Pod is surprisingly perceptive in this one statement (the rest of the article might provide a quick cure to insomnia), though I suspect he gives the MSM far too much credit in advancing this agenda with much zeal and is far too ready to believe that this portrayal of Iraq is “increasingly desperate.” The one who reeks of desperation, who appears like the drowning man flailing for a lifeline, is Pod himself as he thrashes about in unfocused hostility now at the MSM, now at Zbig, now at Scowcroft. The “why aren’t they reporting the good news?” obsession stinks of late 2003 jingo agitation and betrays the same staleness and repetitiveness of thought that is both perfectly normally for Pod and representative of the administration’s own deer-in-headlights response to mounting criticism and opposition. Were Pod to have gone on much longer, he would have had to dig deep into the bag of neocon trops and mention French perfidy, the lie of “Werewolf” terrorism in post-war Germany and the reconstruction of Japan (the latter being dusted off for the President’s speech on Wednesday morning). Invoking the later Jacobin-loving Tom Paine as some sort of moral and political guide and cursing opponents of the war as Tories (a designation I regard as a badge of honour for a number of reasons) can only be understood as a measure of how delusional Pod is (nothing new there).

If corporate media outlets were the dedicated ‘subversives’ Pod casts them as being, it is difficult to see how Mr. Bush’s War could ever have received the sort of favourable, credulous coverage it received from early 2002 through the start of the invasion. The preoccupation of the (liberal) MSM with mistakes, failures and “bad news” in Iraq has been exceeded only by the astonishing credulity with which they have dutifully accepted every lame rationale thrown at them–what Pod and friends dislike is the media’s all-too-naive attempt to match the administration’s stated goals with its actual ‘accomplishments’ (thus mainstream reporters can seriously talk about things like ‘election fraud’, Sunni turnout or possible coalition-building as if Iraqi democracy were a genuinely viable thing to be understood and analysed as other democracies are).

Where the loyalist MSM media more or less unquestioningly parrot what the administration wants to hear (look, Iraqis are fighting terrorists and voting, just like the Master said they would!), the liberal MSM media have the temerity to question the practicability of some of the administration’s goals, but they never seriously questioned the war in principle or the ludicrous claims about Iraq and terrorism. If the MSM quibbles with the administration designation of Iraq as the “central front” in the “War on Terror,” they never really question that it is a front. Indeed, “quibble” is the only way to describe most MSM criticism of the administration–were it not for the amazingly slipshod governing style of this buffoonish crowd, the MSM would have nothing to feed on. These reporters simply have not full-throatedly, unthinkingly endorsed administration claims as happened at the WSJ and FoxNews–that is their unforgiveable error.

But there is no voice in the MSM today questioning the basic desirability of “democracy” in the Near East or in the Islamic world in general (even though it seems extremely questionable whether it is either intrinsically good or good for American security to encourage such things), and every conventional Democratic criticism from Rep. Murtha to Howard Dean rests on the assumption that Iraq has been bad for American hegemony and, especially in Dean’s case, for policy against Iran. Even NPR has been covering the prospects for the Iraqi election with all the diligence and seriousness of people who are, alas, genuine believers along with the President in the wonders of democracy. The realists also never deny the desirability of all of Mr. Bush’s objectives, including democratisation–they only question whether they can be achieved and find Mr. Bush and his team (not surprisingly) insufficiently technocratic and competent to reach them. Pod (who, I believe, once enthused about Mr. Bush as a “most eloquent” man) is not exactly a reliable judge of the administration’s abilities.

One of the great interventionist tricks is for interventionist members of each party to convince their respective fellows that the other party desires “retreat and defeat” (as the GOP has begun saying of the Democrats) or some other slanderous accusation of abandoning America’s strategic position in the world. Coming from a genuine opposition to hegemony and empire, I can assure Pod that the liberal MSM, like most of the Democratic Party, remains firmly committed to both–they simply want a different management style and a different set of managers. In a sense, though, that is really the worst for a lackey like Pod: an insider rival who stands a good chance of replacing you and your crowd in the top positions of privilege and access, and who basically agrees with you often enough to be able to replace you fairly easily, is far more threatening and frightening than the marginal critic who rejects your entire system.

In 1975 the charge of “retreat and defeat” could be credibly made because there was real truth to it, when there was an instinct on the left for withdrawal and accommodation with an enemy that plausibly appeared as a dire and immediate threat to national security. Today the enemy is neither so dire nor immediate, and the connection between Iraq and the enemy is so tenuous as to invite skepticism at best. Yet today, because Iraq has been dishonestly (or ignorantly) conflated with the ever-receding, vanishing war against al-Qaeda, there is a mistaken impression (encouraged by villains such as Pod) that desiring withdrawal from Iraq represents a similar lack of commitment to the fight against al-Qaeda. It is the jingoes who invoke Vietnam in the Iraq debate–or, rather, they invoke Cambodia after the collapse of South Vietnam. Yet if the overt victory of a communist invader against a then-nominal ally, and all of the real horrors that followed in South Vietnam and Cambodia, did not ultimately have any meaningful impact on the geopolitical struggle with which it was closely tied (i.e., the Cold War), how can anyone seriously believe that withdrawing from Iraq will make an iota of difference in an antiterrorist campaign with which the Iraq war has only phantasmagorical connections?

A few things need to be appreciated: 1) pouring an indefinite amount of blood into the Iraqi sand will probably not nourish a democratic Eden; 2) if the effort should create some passable form of democratic politics, Iraq’s successful democratisation will in all likelihood severely damage American interests in the region, especially as they are defined by internationalists; 3) the longer the overwhelming bulk of our armed forces, intelligence and attention is focused on Iraq, the greater the opportunities for the real enemies of this country to operate undetected and unchecked. To use a WWII comparison (since Pod and friends hardly know any other kind), the current obsession with Iraq is as strategically sound as diverting the bulk of our forces and energies in 1943 away from Germany and Japan to occupy the Transvaal on the off-chance that some of the Afrikaners might side with the Axis.

What the Pod calls “panic” is partly the growing recognition in some previously pro-war circles that fighting in Iraq has nothing really to do with fighting al-Qaeda, that remaining in Iraq serves al-Qaeda’s goals and does not serve our interests, that Iraq is becoming effectively our Afghanistan (forget Vietnam–this is the far more relevant and sobering comparison), and that the war is acting like a wrecking ball on the increasingly shaky edifice of hegemony.

It is probably in the interests of domestic opponents of the hegemony to ensure that the Iraq war lasts 10 or 15 years–the political backlash against such a persistent, pointless war might be enough to tear down the interventionist foreign policy establishment for a brief time and open the door for America First policies–but unlike Pod and friends we are not willing to waste American lives and security to achieve our aspirations.

Whether or not they repudiate interventionism, war supporters must understand that every day we spend in Iraq weakens us militarily and politically, as every day is both a very public reminder of the limitations of our hard power and and steady drain on a volunteer military that is breaking under the strain in spite of admirably enduring the unreasonable, foolish demands of incompetents. There may be a handful of true believers who think Arabs voting for shari’a and sectarianism is worth destroying American strength–this is what it means to continue supporting the Iraq war at this point–but if most Americans paused to consider the consequences of this adventure even the most ardent nationalists and hegemonists would be leading the charge to get us out as soon as possible.

What Pod fails to do in all of his prattling is to demonstrate why anyone would be wrong to depict the war as a foolish and futile (as well as immoral and illegal) resort to military power for a worthless goal. Instead, his flailing attack on the press is a sure sign that his side is losing the domestic debate and has nothing left to do but shoot the messenger.