Orson Scott Card, of Ender's Game note, has written a column that discusses the war on Islamists. It's definitely worth a read, even if you haven't read his books or don't know who he is.

Several extracts:

To think that the war is "over" and we should be working on an "exit strategy" is as stupid as saying, after Allied troops drove the Germans out of North Africa, that it was time for our boys to come home -- with France and Eastern and Northern Europe still in chains.

. . . .

As for Saudi Arabia, well, it's not so much that we can't trust the government there, it's that they're barely holding on to power, and their most likely successors, if they fall, will be a group of fanatics who think Osama's a wimp.

If they ever get control of the Muslim holy places, then any action we took against such a government would serve to unite all the Muslim world against us. It would be a disaster of the worst order ... and yet it's hard to see how we can prevent it.

Our only hope is to have finished our job before the Saudi government falls. If fanatics take over Saudi Arabia, but they find themselves surrounded by powerful democratic Muslim nations that are firm enemies of terrorism, then America will not have to be involved in the struggle over control of Muslim holy places.

If we're very, very lucky, that's how it will play out.

. . . .

President Bush's consolation can be this: When Abraham Lincoln was conducting the Union side of the Civil War, he faced exactly the same kind of vicious stupidity -- and he had to do it without the benefit of competent generals to lead the troops. It took him years of trying incompetents like McLellan, Pope, Burnside, Hooker, and, yes, even Meade, before he got his winning team.

Mr. Card's entire essay is well worth reading. Part of it is triumphant, part of it is chilling, and part of it is ire-inspiring. Mr. Card also notes his belief that,

It is possible to be critical of real problems and raise real questions, while remaining loyal to our soldiers and to the mission of defending the United States (and the rest of the world) from Islamicist terrorism.

This I agree with. Now, my quasi-Nixonian mind clicks and spins for hours (not really) on How to Win, and my whole preference for "watch what we do, not what we say" so I tend to wind up deciding that the people in the current administration have the best operable plan at any given time. This is partly because I defer to those who have classified intelligence (since I do not and do not want it) and also because I have perhaps the naive belief that men and women find much of their ideology set aside when dealing with threats of this order to the Republic, and will act more or less in the interests of America. Our government is large, and it has good people serving in it---at some level, good people will, to steal a phrase from George C. Scott's George Patton, "know what to do".

That's not just some cockamanie theory I concocted to defend George W. Bush; I'm quite willing to extend it to any Administration until I'm convinced that they're not acting in our interests. Thus, I'm somewhat divided on Clinton---I thought DESERT FOX was a good idea, but I also wondered about the timing---but I'll commit to a measure of honesty and reserve judgment to some time in the future when the third-rate tell-alls are through and objective historians can assess his record.¹

Anyways. I haven't delved into the host site of Mr. Card's essay, so I can't vouch for its ideological position. To be honest with you, I'm sort of unconcerned about it.

Please allow me a personal note: When I first started thinking about getting in on "the blog thing" (apologies to Eugene W. Roddenberry), it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, this could be the forerunner of the very things a man named Orson Scott Card described in his book, Ender's Game. Peter and Valentine Wiggin, both children and siblings to Andrew (who's off learning to be a child strategic genius) begin posting their political opinions (kind of like a future Federalist Papers) to various global networks, and eventually they, using the names of Demonsthenes and Locke, get to the point where they are able to influence government policy and public opinion.

Maybe I, and every other pundit-type who hammers away on keyboards, from the fringes of the far left to the fringes of the far right, are perhaps laying the groundwork for that. Or perhaps we'll be the shoulders of giants upon which those two children stand. I'm not entirely sure where this blog thing will lead, but it'll be an interesting trip.

¹ My position on this comes from an old, old copy of the American Heritage magazine, in its "Brushes With History" (approximately) section. The following is a vague memory of something that was read in the early 1990s, so if anyone can find this and correct me, please do.

A man observed a student in the 1960s, all full of vim and vigor, come up to an old man and harangue him about the failures of Alexander Kerensky's government in Russia and how they should have done this, and that, and so on. This continued for several minutes, while the old man (apparently a lecturer at the university) listened without comment.

He turned to the student and said, "We did the best that we could", and Alexander Kerensky shuffled away, hanging his head.

For some reason, that story has colored my views of outsider critiques of governments ever since.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Kevin Patrick at Blogs for Bush.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 11:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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