As I’m sure you’re already aware, Michelle is off with her family on vacation for a couple of days. While she’s gone she left a set of her keys with me. From the JunkYard to the top of the ecosystem in one day–the view from up here almost makes me dizzy.

Like Michelle, I’ve been on a mini-vacation with the family. We went camping, purposely leaving behind the WiFi etc for a couple of days to battle with nature, or at least the state park version of nature. Which amounts to the odd squirrel and really tiny perch, a few dozen of which weren’t smart enough to avoid the fishhooks we tossed at them.

Had I been surfing instead of fishing, I’d probably have taken issue with Prof. Bainbridge’s assessment of the war and the Bush legacy. The essence of the Prof’s argument is that by taking us to war in Iraq, President Bush squandered a “conservative moment” and has done lasting damage to the cause of conservatism. I think that argument’s conclusion has some merit, but arrives there by taking mostly wrong turns. Two lefts don’t make a right, but three do I guess.

The Prof writes:

[I]f Iraq’s alleged WMD programs were the casus belli, why aren’t we at war with Iran and North Korea? Not to mention Pakistan, which remains the odds-on favorite to supply the Islamofascists with a working nuke. If Saddam’s cruelty to his own people was the casus belli, why aren’t we taking out Kim Jong Il or any number of other nasty dictators? Indeed, what happened to the W of 2000, who correctly proclaimed nation building a failed cause and an inappropriate use of American military might?

This is straight out of the WhyCan’tTheyJustMoveOn.org playbook–all the left’s anti-war canards are there. WMD weren’t the only cause for war, as the Prof surely knows by now–human rights and the attempt to break the back of tyranny in the MidEast were part of the deal from the beginning. A little event that happened in September 2001 in NYC, DC and PA had a little something to do with chanGing lots of right minds on the subject of nation building, mine included. And we didn’t go after North Korea because a) all signs pointed to North Korea already having nukes by 2003; and b) Seoul’s proximity to the North’s artillery batteries–about thirty miles or so, within easy range of Kim’s probable NBC weapons–made attacking North Korea problematic to say the least; and c) North Korea didn’t have a decade of UN sanctions against it, the violation of which should have triggered a resumption of the Gulf War by 1998 at the latest; and d) North Korea isn’t in the Middle East, the swamp from which the monsters of caliphascism rise to menace us. Similar arguments can be used for Pakistan (notably the lack of UN sanctions against it that carried war implications), plus the fact that we didn’t know about the AQ Khan network in 2002 and 2003, when the Iraq war was on the table. And we only learned about the AQ Khan network thanks to the hard work of nuclear anti-proliferation under the Proliferation Security Initiative aegis–a Bush initiative that helped lead to the disarmament of Libya without actually having to attack that rogue state directly. Isn’t there something to be said in the positive for that notable triumph of Bush foreign policy? Then why am I the only one who ever says it? Even conservatives do a dismal job of assessing Bush foreign policy in any context other than the Iraq war within Iraq’s own borders. The fact is, that war helped wake Ghadaffi (your spelling may vary) up to the new reality. His nuke program sits in Tennessee today as a tangible result.

The rest of the Prof’s foreign policy arguments are either ill-informed or made in bad faith (it has to be the former, because the Prof is a man of honor), but he could score points on the domestic side of things. Yes, the Bush 43 administration has spent money like drunken sailors (and having been around drunken sailors, I know that like the Bush 43 administration they mostly spend other people’s money). Yes, the Bush 43 administration is terrible to the point of obscenity on illegal immigration. And on affirmative action and one or two other domestic issues, Bush 43 is a little too much of a compassionate conservative for my tastes. Give me a little bit meaner conservatism, thanks.

But on judges–this administration is rock solid, probably better than Reagan. I think from what we know about John Roberts so far, we’re getting a generation of conservative thinking on SCOTUS. And we’ve already gotten a bit of NARAL wreckage as a bonus. On taxes–this administration is rock solid. On the economy–we’re getting 5% unemployment and rock solid growth. Gas prices are way too high, but if you think that the administration has much influence over that you don’t know basic economics.

And on foreign policy, I’ll part from Prof. Bainbridge and other panicked conservatives (and the left, from whom the panicked hawks seem to be borrowing their arguments these days) and say that I still stand with the Bush administration on Iraq, which was not a war of choice but a war of defense undertaken in good faith to rid the Middle East of a menace and provide a chance for some kind of sanity to take root in that beleaguered region. It hasn’t gone perfectly, but wars never ever do. The situation on the ground is proving to be more nettlesome than any of us supporters expected, but honestly it could be a great deal worse. To date we have in more than two years’ fighting in a very hostile environment lost fewer troops than any of us had a right to expect, and the three major Iraqi factions aren’t really on the point of that civil war that might well have happened. They’re drafting a constitution, something it took our founders about three years to pull off–and they had the Magna Charta and a real history of gradual movement toward representative republicanism to guide them, and our founders were an exceptionally experienced and brilliant assembly. Yet their first attempt at something like a constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was a mess. The American founders got things right on a do-over. Of course, they locked the media out of their deliberations.

The Iraqis have distant memories of a short-lived democracy and US, yet they’re managing so far to not threaten suicide belts at dawn over all their disagreements. There are worrisome signs that sharia is going to have some role in the Iraqi body of law, and if sharia forms the basis of that law it will be a very bad thing. But the Iraqi people themselves don’t support that, a good sign that after spits and sputters they may manage to get things right in spite of all our fretting.

The GWOT still seems to be going well in spite of Osama bin Laden’s continued sprints from one Iranian safehouse to the next. For all of al Qaeda in Iraq’s bluster, the job of “top aide to Zarqawi” has to rate as one of the worst gigs on earth–no one seems to last a month in that office before a stray missile or the Iraqi security forces finds him. The best al Qaeda seems to be able to manage in terms of striking at us again is sending a new tape to Al Jazeera showing Osama aping Michael Moore. I guess next time he’ll turn up subhosting for Paul Begala via satellite feed from his shack in the Tehran suburbs on CNN. True, al Qaeda did manage to paint Spain’s spine a nice shade of yellow, but they made the mistake of attacking multi-culti Britian in ways that conclusively demonstrate that multi-culti equals national suicide. Nice move, Mohammed. Now maybe even Cherie Blair will acknowledge that threats to human rights who aren’t UK subjects but live off the crown’s generous dole ought to be sent back to the countries that chucked them out in the first place. All the jihadis need to do now is attack Japan just to make sure Tokyo jumpstarts its own re-armament and adds its high tech samurai to the mix. I’ve seen the Japan Self Defense Forces up close. They’re good, and they’re a constitutional revision away from returning to superpower status. And this time, thanks in large part to steady Bush administration diplomacy, they’ll be on our side.

Returning for a moment to Prof. Bainbridge’s argument, Japan’s military re-emergence might have an impact on negotiations with the North Koreans, no?

It seems that the Summer of Sheehan has everyone a little on edge. The fact is al Qaeda hasn’t attacked us on our soil in four years. The fact is Saddam Hussein, once the nascent Nebuchadnezzar, will soon stand trial for his thirty years of crimes against humanity. His rape rooms are closed, and his boys have found out that the 72 virgins weren’t waiting for them. Afghanistan and Iraq are still troubled, but on balance less menacing than they were on 9-10-01. AQ Khan is out of business, and Europe is finally waking up to just what a menace a nuclear armed Iran would pose. If only we could get the CIA to see the light on that.

Things could be better, but they could also be a heckuva lot worse. We could have been stuck with Al Gore…

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