Kraft is not wrong about the aims of the radical Islamists. They do, indeed, wish to recreate the long-gone glories of Islam, and that means subjugating the West and replacing our system of humanistic individual rights with a system of laws based on the Qur'an. If they were to succeed, Kraft is correct that little or nothing would be left of what we recognize as our basic rights and liberties. (At its peak, Islamic civilization was quite tolerant and fairly liberal in comparison to Western civilization at the time, but if the jihadists were to win their battle, that's not the type of society they would set up.)

Where Kraft is entirely wrong is in seeing the war in Iraq as part of the fight to hold off the radical Islamists. It isn't, and it never was. Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator who occasionally used Islamic tropes and means to better control the people of Iraq, and he had the normal amount of relations with the Islamic countries around him, just as any ruler of a country looking out for his own interests would, but he was never a radical Islamist, and never a hater of the West. Sure, he played the West off against the USSR, as did many other countries during the Cold War, but he eventually turned against Moscow and developed a strong relationship with the U.S., which saw him as one of the pillars of stability in the Middle East. (The Persian Gulf War changed that, of course.)

What's more, Saddam never had strong relationships with Islamist terrorists -- that was, and continues to be, true of Iran -- and he kept the ultra-Islamists in his own country out of power and under his thumb. Saddam's dictatorship was a horror and a terrible place to live in, but not because Saddam was promoting an Islamist agenda -- he was out for himself, his family, and his tribe, in that order, and would never put any other agenda above that. Radical Islamists couldn't and didn't operate with impunity in Iraq, because Saddam did not allow it.

No, the only thing which allowed jihadists to operate at will in Iraq was the American invasion of the country, the toppling of Saddam, and, more than anything else, the criminal lack of planning and foresight on the part of the Bush Administration in moving from the invasion to the occupation. Once Saddam was overthrown, which took very little effort (as expected) our concern should have been to immediately maintain and sustain security within the country, not only for the good of our troops, but for the good of the Iraqi people, and to allow a new society to be built. It's an open question if it was actually possible to unite Iraqis into a complete and viable country, but it's dead certain that the only possible way for any such plan to succeed was to immediately establish security within the country. We clearly didn't do that, and didn't even show much interest in doing it. As a result, the insurgency was able to establish itself, and to garner growing support within the country -- and the insurgency begat the civil war, and that's where we are now.

Kraft's paen to liberal values, as well as the Bush Administration's supposed avowed aim of bringing democracy to Iraq, would be somewhat more believable if they supported those values here in the U.S. as well, but the actions of the Bush Administration indicate that they don't fundamentally believe in, or even really understand in their hearts, our Constitution or the foundational concepts of the United States. They are basically hard-nosed authoritarians who would tell us what to do whether we want to do it or not, which is hardly a democratic viewpoint. In their opinions, it's our job to jump to attention and obey blindly and without question whatever order they deign to give us, and just forget about whether those orders are lawful or justified.

But, as I said, Kraft is right that the radical Islamists are out to get us. That's why it's such a shame that when the Administration had the opportunity to do something positive to hurt them and to further our cause, in Afghanistan, they failed so completely to follow through on their initial actions. Oh, they took down the Taliban, of course, but they were so anxious to move on to Iraq that they failed to capture Osama bin Laden, and they abandoned the country to once again be a power vacuum in which radical Islamists can thrive. The "national government" we established basically controls Kabul only, and the rest of the country is in the same shape (or worse) as it was when the Russians left and the Taliban eventually took over. Our failure there makes it probable that Afghanistan will once again become a serious problem, and an open base of operation for the jihadists.

We are in a period of conflict with forces that are implacably opposed to us, but that force isn't Islam itself, it's a particular type of Islamic belief, and the way to fight it isn't with a "Global War on Terrorism", unless "war" is understood to be a metaphorical usage. You can't fight "terrorism", you can only work, in myriad ways, some military, but most of them diplomatic and economic and cultural, to get rid of the conditions which allow people who use terror to thrive. We've done essentially nothing to do that, wasting the 4 1/2 years since the attacks of 9/11 on military half-measures where full measures were needed, and a pre-emptive attack against a threat that was never imminent. Otherwise, we have done next to nothing except assign Karen Hughes to speak baby talk to Moslems and insult their intelligence and their culture.

Since 9/11, and even before, Bush and his advisors have shown us again and again that they don't know how run a government, don't know how to get concrete results at anything except stealing elections and spinning the media, don't have any feel for what policies will and will not do what needs to be done, and, worst of all, don't have smallest amount of feeling for the humanity of others, especially those who oppose them. Mr. Kraft continues in that tradition, despite his protestations of belief in values that liberals do indeed hold dear, and work hard to maintain and extend.

There's a good rebuttal to Kraft here.

[Thanks to Joan]