Entrance strategy

After all, apathy is not necessarily respect for inaction, but capacity for it. And an issue that many have found plenty of capacity to disregard and discount is Iraq. \nEven as Iraqi Democrats are targeted for assassination at the hand of "al-Qaeda organization for Jihad in the Land of the Two Rivers," American Democrats like Gen. Wesley Clark call for an exit strategy. But allow me to suggest that in Iraq, America has forged a long-delayed entrance strategy, if I may so name it, into the Arab-Muslim world. \nEven before its implementation, critics moaned that this strategy would bankrupt pressing domestic initiatives. But the arithmetic of the Iraq operation isn't the zero-sum game that appears to such critics, who insist a la John Kerry, that every dollar spent "building firehouses in Baghdad" is a dollar less for building them at home. Washington is spending more than $5 billion in Iraq -- which America's $11 trillion economy can well withstand. And if success in the Middle East is vital to the nation's security, then such costs are, at any rate, worth incurring. In reality, these venomous isolationists aren't troubled by fiscal indiscipline so much as by an assertive American role in the world. \nWhy have hard-hit New Orleans and Baghdad not been paired as sister cities, desperately in need of our aid? It is not that Americans are unwilling to participate in relief projects abroad. To wit: Americans have made sacrifices for Asian tsunamis and African famines. So what about Iraq, I modestly ask, makes it a less creditable cause? \nIt is a curious morality and a silly logic that places culpability for wicked jihadists, the bombs they explode, the civilians they murder, the resentments they stir and the wars they provoke squarely on the shoulders of American action in Iraq. Those who make this assertion should know that American internationalism existed long before and far beyond Iraq. Still, in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, voices in favor of bolstering America's own hand by flopping on Iraq have\nmultiplied.\nThese narrowly myopic views beg the 64 million dinar question: Will Iraq sink or swim? My hunch is that the answer will depend ultimately on Iraqis. They still might well sink with so many of us standing by, on comparatively dry land, berating their heroic efforts. The critics in this case, so far as their feeble powers avail, are a help and not a hindrance to those enemies who seek to swim in the land of the two rivers. The American people have taken a noble stand in Iraq in order that the country doesn't sink, and we should uphold it.