Alan Caruba, a conservative who runs something called the National Anxiety Center (probably because he stokes much of it), is certain that we are doomed unless the U.S. really sticks it to the Iraqis and the Iranians. In a column tellingly entitled "The Trouble with Peace," he argues against retreating from Iraq as follows:
In blunt terms, it cannot be done. We live our lives forward, not retreating into the past. As such, men who [sic] we entrust with power have no choice but to exercise it today with the hope it will work out tomorrow.
How nice! Let's just give Dubya a free hand to exercise power in the Middle East "with the hope it will work out tomorrow."
In typical modern-day conservative fashion, Caruba sees terrorism not as a response to overweening U.S. power but as a result of a failure to deploy U.S. power sufficiently:
America wants to rest from a war it did not start and wants to end. We have discovered that we need to build up our troop strength. The reluctance of several previous presidents to engage the enemy has cost us 3,000 American lives on 9-11 and quite a few in the years leading up to it.
Then Caruba tips his hand; his desired wars are really about protecting Israel: "Failure, for America, Israel, and the West is not an option. Like the canary in the coal mine, what happens to Israel will happen to us."
He concludes that the only option on the table is to give it to them Ay-rabs good and hard:
I do not know what the President will do in these final two years of office, but if George W. Bush decides to reduce large portions of Baghdad to rubble or obliterate big chunks of Iran, history will likely say he was right to do so.
Conveniently, he fails to mention that destroying Baghdad and "big chunks of Iran" will necessarily involve the deaths of thousands or even millions. Then again, since, as Caruba puts it, "[h]umanitarian behavior is not high on the list of priorities for Arabs," it needn't cause us any national anxiety, either.
