An interesting op-ed in the New York Times today:

...despite the defeat in 1975, America’s 10 years in Indochina had positive effects. Lee Kuan Yew, then prime minister of Singapore, has well articulated how the consequences would have been worse if the United States had not made the effort in Indochina. “Had there been no U.S. intervention,” he argues, the will of non-communist countries to resist communist revolution in the 1960s “would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely have gone communist.” The domino theory would have proved correct.

Today, in Iraq, there should be no illusion that defeat would come at an acceptable price. George Orwell wrote that the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. But anyone who thinks an American defeat in Iraq will bring a merciful end to this conflict is deluded. Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.

What's particularly interesting about it is that one of the authors is William Shawcross, who in decades past has been one of the great critics of US foreign policy, blaming us for the catastrophe in Cambodia. He has come around, finally, and recognizes the reality--that the US is one of the few forces for good in a very hostile world.

As they note, the opponents of the war live in a dreamland, in which US defeat in Iraq won't lead to a slaughter, and a great resurgence in the appeal of Jihad and a moral victory for the hirabis.

I've been told for years by Indonesia-area experts that without the US forces in south vietnam in 1964, the Indonesian army and private groups would not have dared stand up against the Sukarno-puppet communist coup attempt. A communist Indonesia, even compared to the massacres that occurred from the other direction, would have been a continental calamity, including war of attrition against Australia in New Guinea,
not even a hiccup in absorbing Timor, confrontation and subverting the Philippines, and of course, in control of its oil. Bad things DID happen, but maybe they were far from the worst things that otherwise MIGHT have happened.

I remember the bitterness of friends who had been in Vietnam. They exclaimed, "We didn't lose, the government gave up." I see a new generation of soldiers saying the same thing if we leave.

Peter Hitchens (Christopher's younger brother) writes this:

Quote #1

In the great square at Esfahan, I talked to a group of teenage girls about to graduate from high school—one strictly veiled, one less so, one whose scarf was subversively far back on her head. They all thought war was coming, all believed that the U.S. was not a truly free country and that Iranians and Muslims were persecuted and mistreated there. These opinions arose from state-sponsored ignorance and were fanned by our own militant hostility. The students were not in themselves hostile to the West—like almost all Iranians, they yearned to live there. They were personally friendly and open to me. But they warned that an attack on Iran would drive them closer to their government. And this was not just their view. I heard the same from many far more liberal-minded and skeptical. Before the Iraq War, many such people were all but wishing for an American invasion to free them from the ayatollahs. But having seen what American liberation has done for Iraq and Afghanistan, they have turned away from any such thoughts.

The Islamic leadership knows this and is glad of the threats and grumbling coming from Washington. Once it was able to use the great national trauma of the war with Iraq to unite the nation around its leadership, much as the Kremlin used the war against Hitler to give itself legitimacy. Now memories of that war are growing weaker among Iran’s incredibly youthful population, and something else is needed to bind the state and the people. The mullahs also wish to close the gap between Shia and Sunni so as to make a united front against the Great Satan. They are using the crudest tactics to achieve this. While ordinary Iranian Shia are coldly welcomed in Sunni lands, Mahmoud Ahamadinejad is the hero of every Muslim cabdriver from Morocco to Malaysia because of his disreputable Holocaust denial. During Friday prayers, I heard a mullah urge reconciliation between Shia and Sunni, claiming that the wicked, slippery English had been trying to split the two branches of the religion for centuries.

Quote #2

I do not want to give him, or those like him, any pleasure. Their rule is stupid, oppressive, cruel, lawless, and intolerant. Nor do I want to peddle foolish complacency, like those who invented the tale of the cardboard tanks. But I would like to give pause to all those who imagine that Iran is a place of undifferentiated evil, malice, oppression, and fanaticism, or our natural and rightful enemy. There is hope there. The difficult question is how best we might nurture it.

A foolish attack by us will undermine our long term objectives in Iran.

And, unless Hitch-the-Younger is mistaken, our adventure in Iraq has lessened the fervor among liberal anti-mullah Iranians for our intervention.

Perhaps there is a lesson, there.

Yeah, never elect peanut farmers from Georgia. Why we don't broadcast Baywatch from Iraq to Iran is beyond me.

The problem of militant Islam orchestrated by Iran can be solved in a couple of hours, at virtually zero cost. We should solve it.

A few radio messages and a few keys turned - that's all it takes.

A successful, capitalist, modern, iranian-american woman fairly recently went on a privately funded trip to low earth orbit --visiting and staying at the ISS. Her surname was Ansari. The same family provided much-needed investement in what became known as the Ansari X-Prize.

Ansari's trip to the ISS was very popular with iranians although not quite so with their government.

Iranians in general aren't any more stupid than any other group of people and I'm sure they can figure it out on their own. If they haven't and don't see greater freedom --including freedom to be successful-- abroad than at home then why would any at all of them want to move (or rather escape) to the western world?

I'm not saying there isn't national pride among iranians nor that the regime won't do their best to capitalize on it but most people will almost automatically say whatever known to create the least amount of trouble for themselves even if they don't live in a dictatorship where they're likely to get beat up or worse. Especially so if in public or if you know that what you say will eventually become public one way or the other.

Will prolonging the current status quo prevent the present regime from manufacturing any stories they see fit to keep their power and do whatever they like? No.

It would be preferrable if iranians themselves changed their government but that option is both unlikely and running out of time.

It's quite ironic but I think the nuclear facilities will be the safest place to be when the ball gets rolling.

The administration had 3 years of relative peace with the news media and democratic opposition to do pretty much whatever it pleased against the Islamic extremists. They kicked the sh*t out of one extremist regime and smashed an anti-US terrorist supporting state and captured it's leader. At this, the war was won.

Any government which protected and or encouraged an organized terrorist organization which again struck the US could expect the same treatment. This in itself is the main reason that there have so few terrorist plots in this country since 9/11. IOWs, mission accomplished.

Redefining the "War" as a multiyear exercise in nation building, while leaving Iran and Syria the ability to walk insurgents and terrorists over the border was the outcome of an incompetant, naive strategy which has backfired, cost us huge amounts of money and good will in the world and now threatens to increase the taste of Islamic supremism for more.

Oh no! It's cost us "the goodwill of the world"! Well hell, let's just make the world love us by walking out of the war, now that it's become a complicated bummer instead of an easy win. I mean, don't you love people more when they run out on you when things get messy? I know I do! Cowards are sexy.

Obviously, the honest path to world-wide respectability is to stay at home and practice being the victim - because that works so well for everyone else. Sheesh!

Or via John Edwards:

"Marshall Corps to the rescue!"

His renamed Peace Corps - haha - he's living on another planet.

Standing up to the neighborhood bullies is a dirty job -- somebody has to do it.

If the statements, Peter Hitchens, are relating are true; then they deserve to go to Evin prison;
(Ahmadinejad was an administrator there in the mid to late 80s)So the hope, is that a more mellow
secret policeman like Choribaf replaces Ahmadinejad; are those the choices.

Mr. Hermit:

I don't think that anyone believes that Islamic fundamentalists, or Iranian ones in particular, are stupid. Any more than the members of the Inquisition, or Genghis Khan, or Attila the Hun, or Napoleon, or Stalin, or Mao, or Hitler, were stupid.

There is a much better word. They are evil. EVIL. Evil people following an evil prophet whom, if you have any other faith than his, you will be convinced is burning in the eighth circle of Hell right now.

As stated I was talking of the iranian people in general. My post intended to show that Peter Hitchens' point of view is far too simplistic and does not survive even brief scrutiny.

In a way it's even worse than that. The concerns with the iranian regime are far too large for them to be decided or overly influenced by some sort of "ghost poll" of what the average iranian supports or not.