The "Weakness" Thing

Bernard Lewis writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal saying essentially that the Soviets were feared in the Middle East because it was known they would retaliate whereas we would wring our hands and try to apologize. All until The Decider came to save the day and unleashed a shocking counter-attack (despite, perhaps, attacking the wrong target), but now that liberals are in charge again Muslims have regained hope of destroying our will to fight.

A couple of thoughts:

First, the idea that people will think you are weak if you don't retaliate has some merit, but it's constantly employed as if it were an absolute, and no other considerations should be made. And while we may be feared if our response to anything that displeased us was massive retaliation, it's not hard to see how that could unite smaller countries against us and make us less safe. It's not like other countries couldn't also adopt a policy of escalation in response to the slightest provocation. Oh yeah, and there's that thing about how it's wrong to kill people.

There are some quibbles with the history Lewis is recounting. I don't know much about the period, but the two examples he gave where an instance in which the USSR retaliated for a kidnapping through local agents murdering some of the perpetrators, and the Afghan war. While covert assasination may achieve some ends, I marvel at how the world has changed when the burden of proof is on those who DON'T want to use methods that characterized Soviet Russia. And while Muslim countries may have equivocated in opposing Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, this may reflect the fact that the Islamic world is not, in fact, united, and ethnic loyalties are at least as important as religious ones. And again, Russia's war in Afghanistan is hardly the kind of thing we want to emulate. As Yglesias points out, the Russians have been fighting Muslims for over 200 years, and they're still dealing with the problem. Is that what we want?

Finally, if our goal is simply to establish that we retaliate when provoked, why didn't we just bomb the shit out of Iraq (and presumably now do the same to Iran)? We'd have saved a lot of money, our armed forces would be better off, and we would not be dealing with falling public support for the war, which would now be over. Moreover, none of our potential enemies would see us as bogged down in a war and therefore unable to do the same to them. Hell, given the ethnic violence we've unleashed, the total Iraqi casualties may well have been the same.

If you think the above is what we should have done in Iraq, you may not like the democrats, but Bush is hardly your man. Again, the only problem here is our principles. We like to think we've entered an age in which mass slaughter of civillians is an innappropriat way to achieve policy goals, but maybe it's not true. If not, we should come out and admit it, and forget this "freedom is on the march" bullshit.