Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Busybodies And Supermen
November 7, 2003
Just about everyone on the left of the political spectrum has attacked the Bush Administration for its "lack of a plan" for post-Saddam-Hussein Iraq. Behind the statements of the various Democratic Party presidential contenders to this effect, and the comparable statements of many lesser figures -- yes, yes, it's hard to imagine a public figure lesser than the Democratic presidency seekers -- is the implication that it's possible to plan out every twist and turn of the evolution of a free and democratic society.
If you're feeling offended by the whole gambit, you've got the right slant on it. "Plan" piffle is predicated on the assumption that the American people are dimbulbs.
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev was hoping to hold onto political power while the USSR's economy went free-market, a story reached your Curmudgeon, who has some contacts in the State Department, that Gorbachev's chiefest advisers had approached Washington with a request for assistance in the transition. What baffled them most was the planning problem. They wanted to script the rebirth of the Soviet economy. They couldn't grasp why that wasn't possible. Events overtook them, in the form of the abortive counter-revolution that the Soviet people summarily rejected, but all the same, the plaint was a poignant one. It depicted the rigidities of their mindset quite vividly.
The nine Democratic dwarves don't have that excuse.
It should be quite clear from the fundamentals of the thing that one cannot plan others' lives in a free order. Economics is life, the very heart of it. An economy develops as the private citizens creating it live their lives, decide what they want and what they're willing to do to get it. The "overhead" arrangements we make for the protection of nonaggressing others -- the "Guards for their future Security" that the government of a free people is expected to provide -- are suspenders to keep society's pants from falling down, rather than a design for the pants themselves.
Even matters such as a constitution for the liberated Iraq could not have been planned in Washington beforehand; they had to emerge from the Iraqi people. Moreover, when they're in their right minds -- no, your Curmudgeon doesn't possess that particular schedule -- the various Democratic carpers are aware of this. The "plan" garbage is just more mud being hurled at the Bush Administration in the hope that something, anything, will stick. Present trends continuing, we'll soon be hearing accusations that the "rape rooms" were built and maintained by Halliburton.
As has recently become usual, the most execrable of the mud-flingers is the Dishonorable Charles Rangel of New York. In recent statements to the press, Rangel has managed to suggest that the brilliantly managed Operation Iraqi Freedom, the least bloody wholly victorious campaign in the history of warfare, was a failure because low-level violence is still a problem for the occupation forces.
Your Curmudgeon thinks Mr. Rangel's constituency ought to retire him. He's either gone cleanly around the bend, or is completely clueless about the nature of Middle Eastern conflict, or he's descended so far into partisan viciousness that he'll efface any fact, however critical, to score a rhetorical point against his Republican adversaries. Inasmuch as he's suggested that the military prosecute the War on Drugs, despite the Posse Comitatus Act and the panoply of Constitutionally guaranteed rights this would require suspending, your Curmudgeon inclines toward the first explanation. It's the kindest thing one could assume about a Korean War veteran, anyway.
It's easy to imagine Saddam Hussein assessing his prospects for resisting the American incursion, noting the enduring influence the terror-squads of the Palestinians and al-Qaeda have had, and saying to himself, "this is the best chance I have." Terrorism is extremely difficult for a conventional army to combat. It gets large returns from the expenditure of modest resources. It submerges its forces in a homogeneous population likely to provide passive concealment if nothing else. It poses us a terrible dilemma: whether we should go after the terrorists at the risk of damaging and alienating uninvolved civilians, or accept the damage it inflicts until the surrounding populace rallies to our cause. It's a thrust we have not yet learned to counter.
America is a superpower, the mightiest nation-state history has yet seen, but it is not peopled nor directed by supermen. But if you're an opponent of the current Administration, who hopes to displace its Big Swinger and his colleagues at the next general election, you'll do your best to pass by that consideration in silence.
In one way, it's appropriate that these "plan" fusillades should be fired from the Democratic ranks. The Democratic Party has yet to outgrow its love affair with socialism. Its platform has imbedded one socialist proposal after another for seventy years. Socialism is the would-be planner's central credo. The autonomy of us groundlings offends him; he doesn't think it should be allowed any space. He assumes that, were he given the power, his Godlike intellect would produce a plan for each of our lives that would be plainly superior to whatever we untutored ones could come up with on our own. It's the reverse of humility: hubris written on the sky in letters of fire.
For politicians to represent themselves as superior to the rest of us is nothing new, of course. What the present situation offers is the possibility of assessing such claims in a venue that owes nothing to American conditions or standards. The Democratic candidates are running against; that's the nature of politics. It's easy to be against; it's much harder to be for. And none of the carpers from the Left, who find it so easy to disparage the efforts of the Bush Administration to bring freedom and a peaceful, stable, democratic order to Iraq, have yet offered a detailed, substantive "plan" of their own.
Inasmuch as such a plan would require the wisdom of a million Solons to compose and the power of a million Supermen to implement, your Curmudgeon is not surprised. Solon has been dead a long time, and Superman...well, let's be kind and say he's occupied elsewhere.
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