George Will: The unmaking of a president?

[Tarheelhombre]

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/will/s_208752.html

The war already has lasted longer than the Spanish-American War (230 days), and on Dec. 9, 42 days before the next president is inaugurated, the war will be longer than was the war with Mexico (630 days). It will not last as long as the war against Philippine insurgents (4,000 U.S. and 200,000 Philippine dead) that followed U.S annexation and festered intermittently for 14 years. The annexation was defended in 1901 by the president of Princeton University:

"The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will it or not; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples who have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas. ..."

Such thinking was already an American tradition. In 1846, on the eve of the war with Mexico, a New York poet, whose optimism did not exceed the Polk administration's, said Mexicans would be chanting, "The Saxons are coming, our freedom is nigh."

The Bush campaign is pelting John Kerry with dead cats because of his promise to wage a more "sensitive" war on terrorism -- Democrats tend to think in the vocabulary of the therapeutic society and its "caring professions." But the Bush administration is simultaneously struggling to balance the competing imperatives of economizing American lives and waging a war sensitive to the religious sensibilities at stake in the struggle for control of Najaf.

In all this, the concept of sovereignty is being pounded shapeless. Pre-emptive war was waged, in part, to notify America's enemies that American sovereignty could not be paralyzed by world opinion or the noncooperation of international institutions. And one measure of progress in Iraq was the June 28 transfer of sovereignty to Iraq.

But in a New York Times story from Najaf, readers learn, regarding the problem of Moqtada Sadr and his militia, that a Marine spokesman says "we'll continue operations as the prime minister (Ayad Allawi) sees fit." And readers learn that U.S. commanders "curbed a broader national amnesty proposal announced by Dr. Allawi earlier this week, limiting its terms to exclude any rebels who have taken part in actions killing or wounding American troops."

So does sovereignty reside with the prime minister, whose will evidently commands U.S. commanders? Or with those commanders, who curb the prime minister's will?

A house so divided cannot stand. If it is the prime minister's will, or that of Iraq's embryonic democratic institutions, to conduct with insurgent factions negotiations that strip the Iraqi state of an essential attribute of statehood -- a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence -- the U.S. presence will swiftly become untenable.

Untenable even before what may be coming before November: an Iraqi version of the North Vietnamese Tet offensive of 1968. To say that the coming offensive will be by "Baathists" is, according to one administration official, akin to saying "Nazis" when you mean "the SS" -- the most fearsome of the Nazis. Such an offensive could make Sadr's insurgency seem a minor irritant. And it could unmake a presidency, as Tet did.


George F. Will is a columnist for The Washington Post and Newsweek. E-mail him at [e-mail]

[Julien Sorel]

1. Shorten it to conform with copywrite rules, and you'll have a winner.

Will is scum though, and will be cheerleading for Bush in no time.

[A_Possum]

2. "The Bush campaign is pelting John Kerry with dead cats..."

I gotta admit, that's a nice rhetorical image.

Kinda describes all the negative stuff they're throwing out. Pelting Kerry with dead cats, hah. And about as effective.

[blue neen]

3. Will wonders never cease--They printed this in the Tribune Review

That's news in itself. Was Richard Mellon Scaife taking a nap or something?