Good news on the home front

Support for the war in Iraq is going back up, the New York Times reported Wednesday. It's still low -- 42% of Americans now think the initial invasion was a good idea, up from 35% in May, and only 35% think the war is going "very badly," down from 45%. No victory parties yet. Still, if this is a trend -- and it's largely tracking with the facts on the ground -- it might be just enough for us to avoid an ugly surrender before Petraeus has a chance to do his thing.

My hope is that this means the country is climbing away from the second of two sillyheaded extremes we've passed through in the last few years. The first, of course, was Bush's democratic messianism -- "freedom is the desire of every human heart" and all that. Which may be true in some eschatological sense, but neglects the reality St. Paul pointed out 2,000 years ago, and which Bush should have known better -- that we're very very good at not doing that which, on a cosmic level, we probably really want.

Or, as Charles Kesler put it, the problem with neoconservatism is not that it thinks too highly of democracy, but that it doesn't think highly enough of it, minimizing its special genius by underestimating the level of virtue it actually requires of its citizens.

But as we learned that lesson the hard way by watching Iraq fall to pieces, a strange sort of cultural determinism set in. And along with a serious rethink of whether Islam is actually compatible with liberal democracy came the sentiment that, well, Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other for a thousand years, and there's really nothing we can do about it.

Which is not quite true either. In the grand debate over whether politics influences culture or culture politics, the truth is a little of both. Certainly cultures can't be changed on the cheap, with a few quick elections and a truckload of Federalist Papers, but over the long term, major shifts can happen as a result of the way institutions are structured. Isn't that why we fight culture wars in the first place?

And it's also why, now that we've given up trying to push a strangely-deformed Iraqi democracy out of the nest and gotten down to the serious business of stopping violence our way, we've seen some significant fruit, and we can hope to see more. Stabilize more and more areas with an active troop presence, and we'll start to see a grassroots civil society emerge, which will do a lot more in the long run than any fragile political compromise we force together at the top.

There's no question that 3 years of American bungling is what got us into this mess, but I think we've finally bungled for long enough that our long-term strategic advantages are starting to emerge and the way forward (assuming we stay in) is becoming clearer. This is what often happens in war. Modern hawks like to compare everything that happens in this war to WWII, because it's recent and convenient. But I think an apter analogy might be Britain's situation during the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars. Basically, Britain suffered from political pettiness and division -- and hence poor military strategy -- far worse than ours as the Revolutionary armies kicked allied ass all over Europe. And then she got her act together. But that's a tangent for another time -- once I brush up on my Churchill.

In any case, our chief long-term strategic advantage -- and it's a huge one -- is that whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy, and despite all the dumb things we've done that Iraqis resent us for, it's becoming increasingly obvious that our aims and our methods are far better than anything else competing for dominance in Iraq. Let's keep working with that.

...

Until Iraq stops being Muslim, we will probably never see a real western-style liberal democracy there. As Richard John Neuhaus points out in his brilliant "America, Islam, and a Somewhat More Peaceful World," our language about "freedom" and such just doesn't jive with Muslim religious sensibilities. But, he continues,

It is more than conceivable that millions of Muslims desire to live under a government that can make a plausible claim to be Islamic and that is respectful of basic human rights... There are Muslim thinkers -- usually and somewhat misleadingly called moderates -- who believe that such a form of government is possible, and we should be listening to them.

In other words, Islam may not know what to do with "liberal democracy," but a Muslim can recognize a good government when he sees one. And if that government happens to keep the peace, uphold equal treatment under the law, and is to some extent determined through elections... is it that much of a stretch that Sunnis and Shiites might decide it's not worth it anymore to keep killing each other?

The caveat, of course, is that I know I'm speaking largely in general principles, and I have little clue whether certain inconvenient facts on the ground bely my musings. Like whether we have anywhere close to enough troops to keep this up. But facts need to be filtered through principles before they become meaningful analysis, and I think the pessimists' larger assumptions are off. And that gives me hope.

And now that I've written something a bit more controversial than "God loves us" or "Riverside Park is pretty," can I please get some comments?