The irreplaceable nation

Rich Lowry make some good points on NRO:

The root of our seeming naïveté is the earnest desire to deal with world problems. Saddam was a menace, but France and Germany were content to play diplomatic and political games at our expense. Southern Lebanon is, as we have seen in recent weeks, a deep source of instability in the region. The U.S. wanted to craft a long-term solution, but since we weren’t going to send troops ourselves, we needed a partner. Enter: France. Exit: any chance of a real settlement.

Civilization simply lacks backbone without the United States in the lead. Everyone agrees that a nuclear North Korea is a danger, but Russia and China play the role of enablers. Everyone thinks the same about Iran, but Europe is willing only to dither. Everyone thinks Iraq descending into chaos would be a disaster, but only the U.S. is pouring major resources into preventing it (granted, it’s our baby). Everyone supports the Afghan war, and NATO is actually pitching in there, but the Taliban is emboldened on the assumption that our European allies won’t have the same commitment to doing the job that we do.

This is not to say that the U.S. is flawless. Our mistakes, however, tend to be the products of an excess of zeal and idealism. We don’t do coldblooded calculation well. Some of this is the product of being a superpower — dishonest diplomatic ploys are beneath us. Some of it is the nature of our democracy, which values openness and honesty.

Paranoid critics charge that we are in Iraq to control its oil. The French could have pulled off such a self-serving maneuver clothed in idealism, but we are in Iraq for exactly the achingly innocent reasons we say. We are spending and bleeding there trying to plant a liberal democracy in the hardscrabble soil of Mesopotamia.

He is right on all counts. French involvement in the Lebanese settlement guaranteed that it would not be serious and our involvement in Iraq is out of a sincere desire to bring freedom to the Middle East.

You want to know something else? We might fail in Iraq. Not because we might lack the will to see the job through (although if the left-liberals have their way that will happen) and not because the terrorists might defeat us on the battlefield. We might fail because Islam just might have eaten too deeply into the Iraqi “national soul” (for lack of a better term) to allow them to ever be anything but savages.

But the effort has to be made. If it can be proven that an Arab Muslim nation can be successfully democratized and join the 21st Century as a peaceful and prosperous member of the community of civilized nations then that means that we will not have to exterminate the Arab Muslims off the face of the globe.

Think about it. If the German people had proven to be incapable of ever being anything but genocidal Nazis could we have allowed them to continue to live?