A Toto Moment

Short excerpt from a report in the LA Times:

Bush said Americans strongly condemned Wednesday's attack on the Golden Mosque and that he understood "the consternation and concern of Iraqi Shias when they see this most holy site wantonly destroyed."

He said the United States would continue to work "with those voices of reason to enable Iraq to continue on the path to democracy" and pledged that the U.S. would help rebuild the shrine.

And this, from the AP:

Top U.S. officials strongly condemned the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine Wednesday, calling it a desperate and despicable act designed to foment sectarian strife.

"Given the historic, cultural and religious importance of this shrine, this attack is a crime against humanity," the U.S. ambassador and the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said in a joint statement. "The Shrine should be rebuilt and the United States will contribute to its reconstruction."

So this is what it's come to. Ponder it for a moment. We are now in the mosque-rebuilding business in the Middle East, smack-dab in the middle of a civil war. (And yes, it is a civil war. For the past week, the phrases "on the brink" and "possibly leading to" have preceded that term. Those waiting for an American style stand-up fight with skirmish line battles a la Antietam will be waiting for a long time.) We are asking 20-year olds from Tulsa and Des Moines and Gary and Fresno to navigate hundreds of years of religious and ethnic hate and to sacrifice their feet, legs, hands, arms, eyes, and lives in the process. We asked them to remove Saddam and his regime, and they did that. We asked them to guard infrastructure, and they did that. We asked them to rebuild an entire nation's military from scratch, and they are doing it. We asked them to find WMD's, and they tried. Now, we're rebuilding mosques.

This is one of those "Toto Moments" when you realize how far from Kansas you've come, and you retrace the path in your mind wondering just how it happened. Soon, five years will have passed since 9/11. During those years, we've lost tens of thousands of troops to death and permanent injury by going "massive, things related and not, sweep it all up." We've spent hundreds of billions, with more to come. And after all of it, Bin Laden---as "marginalized" and "irrelevant" as ever---continues to urge attacks on oil facilities, the latest of which occurred this week at the crucial Abqaiq plant in Saudi Arabia.

And through it all we have a president who can only tell us to trust him because democracy takes time to develop and this is, after all, hard work. "Fret not, little doggies....in a few hundred years the history books will call me a genius." No. Just as patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, citing history's inevitable judgment is the last resort of an incompetent. It's a feckless and faith-based approach to leadership, and it's a cop out.

No, we can't simply decamp and leave Iraq en masse right now. We've broken it, and we own it. And there's a danger in dwelling on the negative and lapsing into paralysis through pessimism. Certainly, constructive criticism and a glass half-full outlook is preferable to ranting for ranting's sake. But if skepticism heightens our vigilance and keeps us focused on who got us to the point at which we're pledging to rebuild mosques, then it's important---particularly as the same bunch compares Venezuela's president to Hitler, beats the war drums on Iran, and presumably sets up more Toto Moments to come.