Andrew Sullivan cites some worthy reader “dissent”:

Count me among the folks who take the President’s views on foreign policy seriously.

I believe – and have for some time – that the struggle we face is as much between those of us who believe that there is evil in the world and it cannot – will not – go away with appeasement and those who believe that if we can just find the right words that those who hate us will all of a sudden change their ways OR of we just leave them alone “they” will leave us alone.

President Bush is a good man who has tried to do what he thought was best for the country without regard to the political costs. Calling him a war criminal is an easy and unfortunately popular thing to do these days – but the real debate needs to be over what do we do to both protect ourselves and our allies and gain the kind of rights to which we believe all men and women are entitled in the Islamic world.

A religion that permits – indeed requires – the murder of gays and women who go against the principles of a barbaric code is not a religion and it is time we all deal with this “elephant in the room.”

Bush = good. Muslims = evil. The government is owed our unconditional support. It is our duty to defeat the false religions. It’s all sensible because I choose to believe it. I am very brave for saying so. One suspects these few self-evident truths can be repeated at very high volume for long, long periods of time, endurance extended beyond normal human limits by excising any vestigial doubt. This is – minus the charmingly parochial idea that we must wage War on Islam out of a concern for gay rights, obviously – the Republican base, still crazy after all these years.

And it’s this base, and those attracted by the self-serving simplicity of this vision, who John McCain is counting on in November. If the war in Iraq were being managed like any other sort of real-world endeavor, it would have closed down years ago. All the major requirements have either been achieved (Saddam deposed, elections held, etc.) or Overcome By Events (hunt for WMD, connections to al Qaeda, etc.) The top-level MS Project spreadsheet is showing completion, and any sort of dissatisfaction you may have with the results needs to be chalked up to either the inevitable vicissitudes of geopolitics or – if this happens to be one of our infrequent “accountability moments” – fatal errors made in the design phase. You look for answers there.

But the “war” is not, as the President says, the usual kind of war, and so cannot be judged by the usual material standards. (And a good thing, too. War fans like to compare our current struggle to WWII. If WWII ended with allied tanks rolling in to Berlin only to discover that there was no such place as Poland, it would be a near-perfect historical analogy, but probably not be such a popular mythical-historical point of comparison for people looking to justify misconceived and badly-run ventures.) It is, as Sully’s reader has noted, a test of faith. You have to develop your personal relationship with the Iraq War, understand that it loves you and will answer your most tangential prayers, and cultivate your faith that your personal political vindication ( for gonzo libertarianism, liberal interventionism, neocon imperialism, pop eschatology, etc.) will come on this battlefield, and by convincing others to share in your faith. It is, in other words, a religion – albeit one which has required the deaths of 83,000 civilians, or 150,000, or more, as well as thousands of combatants.  Some might consider this “barbaric”, an elephant drenched in blood.  Unbelievers.

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