Stardate 20030722.0324

(Captain's log): Mats writes from Finland:

Just a quick note to inform that yr article regarding the war on terrorism and particularly Iraq was without a doubt the best written, most thoughtful commentary on the rationale and reason behind the war. I have been sitting on the fence on this issue. I agreed that getting rid of Saddam was A Good Thing but the preface to the war left a sour taste in my mouth. Yr article did a lot to rinse it out.

If Bush and Blair had put it like that there would most likely not have been any substantial opposition to the war here in Europe. You should offer yr services to yr government as a speech writer :-)

Honesty and plain speaking are not virtues for politicians and diplomats. If either Bush or Blair had said what I did, it would have hit the fan big-time. It has not been harmful for me to say these things for the last year, because I'm just a guy, one among many. But no one who spoke on behalf of the government dared to clearly state this back then.

Making clear a year ago that this was our true agenda would have virtually guaranteed that it would fail. Among other things, it would have caused all of the brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs in the region to unite with Saddam against us, and would have made the invasion impossible. But now the die is cast, and said brutal dictators and corrupt monarchs no longer have the ability go stop the future.

My only concern is if you (the US) will have the stamina to take it through to the end or will you leave until the job is finished? As you wrote it will take many years to reform a nation like Iraq.

This kind of thing takes on momentum. Nixon ran for President in 1968 on a platform which essentially opposed the war in Viet Nam. (The catch phrase was "Peace with Honor".) But we fought for several more years before finally giving up.

Whenever it is that Bush leaves office, whether in 2005 or 2009, whoever follows him will face a situation where they'd take far more political heat for pulling out with the job half done than they would by continuing the process. There's another year and a half in Bush's current term, and by the end of it, the process will either be a complete shambles or else it will clearly be on the road to success, and I think it's unlikely to be a shambles.

Mistakes will get made, and there will be problems. We're going to be making a lot of this up as we go. But if there's anything you should know about Americans by now, it's that we're problem solvers.

Americans have gained a reputation elsewhere for being flighty, mercurial; there's some truth to that, but it's also true that we can stick with things for decades if we think it's worthwhile. For instance, we stuck with the occupations of Germany and Japan for 50 years. I feel confident we'll stick with this, too.

Much of the reputation we've gained in the world comes from how we act when we're not challenged. There's steel in us, too, but we don't show it much. It only really comes out in war, and when we've been at peace for several decades there's a tendency to think that we used to have that kind of steel, but that we don't any longer. That's wrong, and every generation the world learns that anew. Going into WWII, many in Europe said that Americans used to be willing to fight back in the days of Lincoln but had become decadent and soft. (You might want to read what Churchill said about that, which I quote here.) History proves otherwise, of course.

About ten years ago I got told exactly the same thing by a guy in New Zealand via email. Yeah, Americans used to be willing to fight for what they believed in, but not any longer. "Don't bet on that" I told him.

That steel is still there, it's just that we don't feel any need to show it when it isn't needed. But it's still there, and when the issues are sufficiently important to us, we'll still make major sacrifices.

The memory of 9/11 runs deep. I'm becoming convinced that few in Europe truly understand just what that really meant to us, the anger and the hatred it raised. It's not the kind of thing we get over. We're not going to forget it.

We haven't forgotten Pearl Harbor, either. That doesn't mean we consider Japan as an enemy, but it does mean that we did what we needed to in order to make sure Japan would never do anything like that to us again. When we truly decide to solve a problem, we try to solve it permanently.

And we're not going to forget 9/11. On some level or another, it's going to be a major political issue here for the next few decades, until we're convinced that the danger is gone. Arab extremism is no longer something that happens a long ways away that we can ignore, and we aren't going to. It is their problem, but 9/11 made it ours. Now we'll solve it.

In order to remove the danger to us that Japan represented, it had to be reformed. So that's what happened. Now we're going to try to do the same to the Arabs.

And we'll do whatever we need to in order to make sure nothing like 9/11 happens again. We're not fundamentally cruel, and if we can we'd like to solve this for everyone's benefit. Japan is a better place now than it was before WWII. So's Germany, in fact. I hope that the Arab and Islamic nations will be better, too.

But the one thing we're not going to do is to surrender. We'll try to solve th