The Wages of Victory

Gloat: This is the Dick Cheney posture. It mostly involves pointing out that all of your critics have been full of beans for the past four months while you bravely foresaw the true course of the war. The vice president told a Chamber of Commerce audience: “When you read the Washington press and see what all of the pundits have to offer and some of the talking heads in Washington have to offer, it’s nice, at a moment like this, to be able to remind them that a lot of what they put out over the course of the last few weeks was just dead wrong.”

This approach has obvious benefits. It feels wonderful to gloat. It’s good for your self-esteem. On the other hand, it’s bad for your popularity. People hate gloaters, thinking them petty and small-minded. The other big challenge is that you have to rewrite history to keep up the pretense that you were smarter than everybody else. For example, in making his gloat, the vice president had to overlook a few inconvenient facts that indicate that perhaps the administration wasn’t exactly omniscient during the course of the war. A few days ago, the administration told us that this would not be a war of instant gratification, though this part of the war certainly has been. A few days ago, the administration took the extraordinary step of hiring an outside advertising team, so convinced were they that the United States was not doing well in the court of public opinion. At the end of October, the administration shifted its bombing strategy after critics rightly pointed out that the bombing campaign up to that point had been tepid.

It’s no fun to gloat if you admit you were just as surprised by the sudden collapse of the Taliban as everyone else. And it’s hard to keep up the pretense that you saw it all coming if you don’t have a large staff to ceaselessly remind you how smart you are.

Worry: This is the responsible approach. Instead of rejoicing over the sudden gains, you strike a posture of furrowed concern. What about the Northern Alliance? Aren’t they just as dictatorial as the Taliban? What about the possibility of anarchy? What about the starving millions during the long, cold winter? What happens if the Taliban fighters retreat to the caves and launch nuclear weapons?

This posture works well if you are asked to sit on a lot of panels sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s also the posture that the opponents of the war seem to be adopting. I notice the Guardian, which essentially saw the bombing operation as the beginning of the Fourth Reich, has run an editorial called “No Time to Celebrate.”

This posture also works well if you have bad teeth, and hence look more attractive when you are gravely concerned about something.

Rejoice: On the supposition that one should always do just what the Guardian tells you not to do, another possibility is to just pump your first in the air and rejoice. We’re winning! The people of Afghanistan are free! The Taliban martyrs are trying to sneak back into Pakistan like a bunch of 4-year-old cowards! The London Daily Telegraph offers the best example of this approach with an editorial entitled “Rejoice, rejoice.” First honors go to the Northern Alliance, the editorial writers point out. Everybody has been pissing all over them for weeks, but in fact they did our dirty work for us, and they did it well. Second honors go to Bush, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, Rice, et al. They’ve risen to the occasion. Third honors go to Tony Blair, for recognizing the crisis for what it was and bravely sticking by the cause of justice. Fourth honors, they say, go to President Musharraf and the other leaders in the region, who made real risks on behalf of the effort.

This posture is the most generous. It also makes you happiest. The only problem is that I live in Washington. If I really cared about being generous and happy, I never would have come here.

Get Shallow: This is what the Afghan people themselves seem to be doing. They’re enjoying all the crass commercial pleasures that have been denied them for the past few years. They’re watching television. They’re listening to pop music. They’re playing soccer. They’re showing off their movie star baseball cards. They are going shopping. Come to think of it, this is what President Bush wants America to do.

Ignore the Whole War: I’ve been looking through the leading Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, and they have relatively little war coverage, and almost no opinion pieces on the war. They are busy with their own issues. Similarly, if you go to the Moscow Times, you see relatively little concern with the fight in Afghanistan. Parochialism rules.

My first impulse is to rejoice. But I’m thinking of getting shallow and turning on the TV. But soon I’d be watching a political show and that would get me worrying. Any ideas?

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.