Credit where it's due

So Afghanistan is now more dangerous than Iraq. For the second month in a row.

Of course, most of the media are very careful to reference this as rising acts of insurgency in Afghanistan rather than falling acts of insurgency in Iraq. Why? Because the latter is the direct result of a George W. Bush policy...the "surge". And God forbid Bush ever do anything right. ESPECIALLY on his own, in defiance of his National Security Advisors.

I'm not going to mount a defense of Bush's overall strategy and tactics in the Iraq war at this late date. I think we can all agree that lies were told, mistakes were made, and bumbles were bumbled badly, even criminally. He never should have gone into Iraq in the first place. But...
he did, and the situation deteriorated, and it was what it was: ghastly. When things were looking their worst in Iraq, Bush argued that more troops needed to be sent in. Pretty much everybody screamed bloody murder at that, and Bush, in true imperial style, ignored them and sent in more troops. And gosh dang it! it's worked.

It shouldn't be a surprise, in this soft age, that there's still a place for "hard power" in the world.
Oh, it's not something we like to talk about (blood! violence! death! get it off my plate!), but the reality is our world exists in its present state--the good and the bad--by virtue of hard power and the threat of it. At some point, the diplomacy must end and measures must be taken.

Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is not going away. We keep asking him to, politely; he thumbs his nose at us and insists he's there for life. And we tsk-tsk and whine and oh, do you believe the nerve of that guy? See, we can talk about this endlessly and convince ourselves that all our talk means we're doing something...that we care. Meanwhile, babble babble rigged elections babble blah blah beatings blah de murders babble rapes...
A cynic would suggest that if somebody discovered oil in Zimbabwe, Mugabe would be removed yesterday. That cynic would probably be right. And let's say it happened, and the U.S. moved in and eliminated Mugabe, putting an end to his atrocities...I imagine there'd be a sizeable contingent of Canadians shaking their fists at those Yankee bastards and accusing of them of things that would make Mugabe's flesh crawl.
Nor is Zimbabwe the only country we've chosen to pretend to care about. The Darfur region of Sudan has been the site of an ongoing genocide (as many as half a million killed) that means diddly-squat to anybody beyond being a suitable topic to mention at dinner parties ("oh, the genocide in Darfur? Yes, isn't it awful? Something should be done, babble-di blah blah blah...)
It goes on. How many of these conflicts does anybody even bother to report on? It's so much easier to bash those good-for-nothing nosey-parker Americans.
It's a parenting thing, I think. As recently as the seventies, if you were a kid and you misbehaved, you could expect retribution that would be swift and unequivocal and usually physical. Contrary to extremely popular belief, being spanked didn't turn us into monsters. (Your grandparents knew the indignity of a belt or a peach switch when they were little and so did their parents and their parents going back unto the dawn of time.) We learned, or most of us did, that if we didn't want to experience the pain and humiliation of a spanking, all we had to do was behave ourselves.
These days, we have the 'time out'. I can tell you right now that that wouldn't have worked on me. Go stand in the corner? Okay! And after that, do I get punished?

As an aside, anti-spanking advocates go on and on about corporal punishment and child abuse. That's not what bothers them about spanking at all, and if they were being honest with themselves, they'd admit it. After all, there's a difference between a whack on the butt and broken bones: nobody's suggesting we should beat our kids. No, what's got those folks in a right rage is the humiliation and indignity of it all. That's what's seen as child abuse in this twisted era when nobody's allowed to fail at anything lest he injure his priceless self-esteem.

Tyrants the world over are not kids and don't need to be treated with kid gloves. A geopolitical "time out" is what these people want: it gives them free license to continue with their agendas, which do involve beatings and worse. If you go in and administer a sound spanking, the humiliation alone will prick the ego like a cheap balloon.

Here's another thing that pisses the world off about America: when it does decide that diplomacy is failing and hard power becomes an option, it doesn't take half measures. Not like the Canadians, who fought an action in Kosovo where the stated mission goal was "to get everybody home safe". Admirable for a school picnic. Stupid for a war.
The U.S. tried in Iraq to balance the need for hard power against world opinion, and found itself in a quagmire. It took guts and gumption from Dubya to insist that more power, not less, was the way out. And whaddaya know? it's working. Credit where it's due.

All you Canadians who wish for nothing more fervently than America to take its fingers out of all the world's pies and mind it's own business? All I can say is, be careful what you wish for.