OpinionJournal - The Real Debate About Iraq

David Frum's point is simple: conservatives have conducted the only meaningful debate about Iraq, the War on Terror, and the whole Middle East. Liberals just want to cut and run, because any military that they do not control is an institution they fear. But we conservatives ask one another the really difficult questions:

• Why are we there?
• What do we hope to accomplish?
• Who benefits from our activities there?

Frum's piece is a review of the latest and best book on the subject thus far: The Right War?, by one Gary Rosen (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The list of contributors, to use an already shopworn phrase, reads like a Who's Who Among Conservatives, if Elsevier Publishers actually produced such a tome.

I do have one comment that I hope will encourage people to read this book. Patrick J. Buchanan lays it on the line, as David Frum reveals: in his mind, the Republic of Israel is the only real beneficiary of our activities. Mr. Buchanan has been anti-Israel for years, and while I can only speculate as to his reasons, I have a pretty good guess: Israel produces no goods for export, while the Arabs have oil, which we need and which, he says, they need a continued market for. I will assume that Mr. Buchanan, if he has thought about theology at all (which he might not have), would belong to the Reformed/Covenantal school of eschatology (literally, the Famous Last Words of the Bible), which holds that God is through with national Israel. But worse than that, Mr. Buchanan fails utterly to understand the roots of Islam, and its dark purpose.

Mr. Buchanan would have you believe that all America has to do is get out of the Middle East and leave it to the Arabs, and they'll let us alone. Wrong, Pat. The founding documents of Islam command its followers to wage unrelenting war and impose Islam on the entire world. Recently a number of Muslims have begun to realize their obligations, if you can call them that, under the Koran and the Hadith. Their names are Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (caught with his pants down in Pakistan with an unsecured laptop in 2003), Muhammad Atta (died in a blaze of infamy on 22 Jumada t'Tania 1422 AH--excuse me, September 11, 2001), and many others.

Sadly, Mr. Rosen's book reveals that Mr. Buchanan is not alone in his thinking. Fortunately, he is not unopposed, either. I can only hope that someone, somewhere, will start educating people on what the Koran really says, so that we may at last realize the nature of the enemy. In the meantime, Rosen's book is a good start for asking, and answering, some hard questions.