Iraq

Glass Half full: Reynolds links to Frank Warner’s post on the increasingly popular Iraq War. Surely this uptick partially reflects Bush’s series of speeches (surely a no-brainer). The news, however, hasn’t been particularly positive – Abizaid on Lehrer last night while strongly stay-the-course & long-term optimistic, is not too sunny about the near future. (Lehrer’s questions demonstrate the thesis of another Warner post.)

I suspect two factors may have entered our calculations: a) a sense that comes from the bad news that this is a fight that can be lost and b) a sense from the reaction to the Pope’s speech that losing would be a very, very bad thing. Attacks on churches & the murder of a nun whose life has clearly been given to the service of others provide reality checks. (And yes, random murders by various other obsessives occur in all societies – the attitude of those in authority is everything.)

By the way, this was my introduction to Free Frank Warner’s blog; I like his slogan: A liberal for liberation: Dreams can’t come true if you never wake up.

I’ve often put up glass half full links; today I’ll note half empty ones. Some news is not good. Instapundit links to two. Op-For’s conclusion begins with Michael Yon, who possesses a

focused pessimissm. When he writes that the ground sit in Iraq or Afghanistan is taking a dive, it’s out of a true, apolitical desire to win the war. He understands that selling blood, toil, tears, and sweat didn’t go out of style in the mid-40s. People, Americans especially, respond to challenges. This war is a challenge, and it’s time we start responding to it.

He concludes with what we all, finally, learn: “Half of any fight is how you pull yourself up after you’ve taken one on the chin. If we can’t stand back up, then we stay on the mat. And we lose the war.” (The conclusion fits a site with Tennyson’s “Ulysses” as motto – To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.)

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Instapundit links to a lengthy essay by Martin Amis, “The Age of Horrorism” (in the Guardian). He pierces through to certain truths, but none of us, including him, can easily stand outside ourselves.

Amis follows the experiences of Sayyid Qutb, whose “epiphany” was reached in the dry Greeley, Colorado of 1949; he describes a church “dance hop” which was

‘inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,’ he wrote; ‘the dance-hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.’

. . . ‘Lust’ is Bernard Lewis’s translation, but several other writers prefer the word ‘love’. And while lust has greater immediate impact, love may in the end be more resonant. Why should Qutb mind if the air is full of love? We are forced to wonder whether love can be said to exist, as we understand it, in the ferocious patriarchy of Islamism. If death and hate are the twin opposites of love, then it may not be merely whimsical and mawkish to suggest that the terrorist, the bringer of death and hate, the death-hate cultist, is in essence the enemy of love.

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The way in which Lieberman was tarred, the response of some on the left to the London arrests – exactly what world do these people lived in? And Israel! Like the UN is going to take away the Hez armories. This is kind of “what Lex said” while rambling & personal.

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I don’t think the reports that we have found several hundred old shells of sarin nerve gas in Iraq change the argument on the war very much.

Sarin and almost all other chemical weapons are highly reactive and unstable chemicals with relatively short half-lives. Sarin in particular only has a shelf-life of a few months at most. I think it most likely the shells found in Iraq are probably pre-1991 shells that Saddam lost track of and didn’t destroy when he went on his secret destruction binge after the defection of his sons-in-law in 1995. The contents of the shells would now be almost entirely harmless. On the other hand, if the shells contain almost any remaining Sarin that would be strong evidence that they were manufactured within a couple of years of the liberation.

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