Santorum's Churchill moment

Here's Rick Santorum's speech warning of the Islamofascist "Gathering Storm". You know, I agree with much of this. We do face a daunting array of challenges, first from the Islamic world. But here, in one line, is what's wrong with the speech:

"If we really understood the threat at hand, we would not be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs."

I am not quite as exercised over the speech as Daniel Larison (see his impressive series of "Gathering Stupidity" posts here, here, here, here, and here), but my frustration with Santorum's tack is, a la Ross Douthat's, more in sorrow than in anger, over the depths to which an otherwise good senator will stoop to avoid responsibility for, or even the fact of, the colossal American failure in Iraq, and Republican responsibility for same. Here's Ross:

But it seems more likely that his "gathering storm" speeches will ensure that he's remembered not as a principled social conservative who lost his swing-state seat in a bad year for Republicans, but as exhibit A (well, okay, more like P or W) in the depressing tendency of conservatives, faced with the Bush Administration's manifest failure in Iraq, to duck that issue by pretending that the way to solve it is to start some variant on World War III, or IV, or whatever numeral the "faster, please" folks think we're on these days.

Anyway, why do I think that one line offers the key to why these Santorum speeches are so off the mark? Because it indicates that he thinks the only thing we're doing wrong is not fighting hard enough. If the past three years have made anything clear, it's that we're not fighting smart enough. We thought we could knock off Saddam with little problem, because we believed that the Iraqi people wanted "freedom," and would reveal themselves to be well-behaved small-d democrats. Here comes Santorum, having learned nothing, saying in his speech that we need to aid and abet the Iranian and Syrian people in overthrowing their government (if you get rid of Assad, loathsome as he is, look for a Sunni fundamentalist takeover -- what will Santorum say then?). That, ultimately, is what's so dispiriting about the Santorum speech: that the entire traumatic experience of Iraq has taught him nothing. That his idea of how to fight America's very real enemies is just to keep doing what we're doing now, only a lot more of it.

Because we are all going to see the US substantially withdraw from Iraq in the next two or three years, and the world will indeed be a much more dangerous place because of it (but we will have to go that route because there will be no choice left), we need to have at the summit of the American political leadership men and women who have good judgment about foreign affairs. That is paramount. I think Santorum is probably the best senator on social issues. But I don't believe we can afford this kind of fantasyland crusade any longer.

That's not because I don't believe we have enemies. To the contrary, it's because I think we have powerful enemies, but unconventional ones that cannot be defeated or contained by force of arms alone. What a tragedy -- really -- that one of the best US senators will have shipwrecked his career on Iraq.