The Phony Debate

...military dominance is now so overwhelming that the rules of conflict are being rewritten...

...Charles Krauthammer has written a characteristically bold column arguing against going back to the U.N...

...This is some vague but mighty shift in expectations...

...Or we could be entering the age of decapitating wars, in which the United States can change evil regimes without widespread loss of life...

...Dennis Ross has published a fascinating piece in the Wall Street Journal describing how leaders across the Arab world, sensing the prevailing winds, have begun repositioning themselves as democratic reformers...

...Has there ever been a conflict in the history of man in which the one army strove so mightily to not kill the soldiers of the other army...

...None of the terrible things the doves predicted has yet come to pass: no mass riots on the Arab street, no coup in Pakistan or Jordan, no Scuds landing on Tel Aviv, no surge in oil prices, no fierce resistance from the Iraqis, either from the soldiers or the men in the streets...

...I suspect the reason there is so little political analysis of the war itself is that we are all conditioned by memories of Desert Storm...

...That's too bad, because the conduct of this war is so strikingly political...

...Most Americans, polls revealed, believed the war would take longer than six months...

...It is only in retrospect that we see Desert Storm as a cakewalk...

...And about this too there has been relatively little discussion...

...you have to beat them without becoming unpopular amongst them...

...Some people, mostly on the left, are still rehashing yesterday's debate on whether to go to war in the first place...

...BY DAVID BROOKS AS I WRITE, a couple of days into the war, the hawks are optimistic and the liberals are bracing to get beaten about with sticks...

...policy in the Gulf were negative...

...Either way, the politics of warfare is being transformed, and someday we are going to sit back and marvel that we didn't pay more attention to the political considerations embedded in the conduct of this war itself...

...The striking thing about the early commentary on the war is that very little of it is actually on the war...

...Today, we could be just as wrong amidst this war as we were amidst that one...

...Now, everybody seems to assume, it isn't enough just to beat the enemy...

...The hawks are quick to feel vindicated because they were vindicated by the incredible success of that earlier fight, and the doves are prepared for another round of patriotic chest-thumping...

...Kanan Makiya, in his superb online diary for the New Republic, has issued daily updates on the Iraqi opposition movement...

...But it should be said that we are all mis-remembering the earlier war...

...once the conflict is over...

...Both sides assume that the war is a momentary pause between political debates...

...Leon Fuerth, Al Gore's foreign policy guru, published an antiwar op-ed in the Washington Post the day after hostilities started...

...According to a study done by Robert Lichter at the time, nearly 60 percent of media stories about U.S...

...Four days after the U.N...

...A New York Times editorial aptly summarizes their conflicted mood: "If things go as well as we hope, even those who sharply disagree with the logic behind this war are likely to end up feeling reassured, almost against their will, by the successful projection of American power...

...One gets the impression that U.S...

...If you go back and read the media amidst the air campaign in 1991, you find that Americans were gloomy about how things were going: Iraqi women and children were being killed, and nothing good seemed to be happening...

...Honorable liberals also find themselves twisted into an emotional pretzel, hoping that their forebodings about the war are proven wrong, but not quite looking forward to a moment when Donald Rumsfeld and David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Meanwhile, others, mostly on the hawkish side, are deep in the middle of the argument about the post-Saddam world...

...process ended, Michael Kinsley wrote a column rehashing the arguments for working within the U.N...

...War opponents emphasize that while things might go well in the short term, in the long term, Iraq is likely to be a mess...

...troops were surging into Iraq...

...It is as if you had one prewar political debate about whether to go to war, and another debate on how to rebuild Iraq postwar, but the war itself is a political vacuum that only military analysts and retired generals are qualified to talk about...

...You have to beat them without making yourself more unpopular with the world...

...The hawks are optimistic because the Iraqi regime seems to be crumbling...

...Americans, Time magazine reported on February 18, 1991, "have a vague feeling of unease, if not outright disillusionment, that the fighting seems nowhere near a conclusion...

...Has there ever been a war that began, even before the enemy was engaged, with the secretary of defense issuing instructions on how the other side should surrender...

...A group of liberal Jews took out a full-page ad urging Bush not to go to war as U.S...

...Surging hope" is how Andrew Sullivan describes his mood Meanwhile on the left, it's like settling in rf^^^^H for a long, cold winter, "Brace yourself for a round of I-told-you-sos from Iraq hawks," Robert Wright writes ^I^H in Slate...

...One also gets the sense that the standards of victory have shifted...

...Paul Wolfowitz might be proven right...

...And yet there was little discussion, at least at the outset, over exactly what this means...

...In the fore-seeable future," A1 Hunt concedes in the |B||H|m Wall Street Journal, "the Bush critics will be very much on the defensive...

...Toward the end of it, Kinsley declared that "George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world," elevating him to Napoleon and Caesar rank...