Raise The Green Lantern

As you would expect, it takes Glenn Reynolds to really push the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics to sublime heights of lunacy. Does the deteriorating situation in Iraq prove, say, that state building in a context where civil society essentially didn’t exist and where sectarian divides provide the main basis of social control is enormously difficult? Oh, no. Bush certainly could be turning Iraq into Switzerland with a lot more people being blown up, but: “And my speculation that Iran has some method — nuclear or otherwise — that has deterred us from taking the kind of action that both Bill Quick and I expected in 2004 is seeming better-founded.” (This isn’t the first time, alas, he’s “speculated” about Iran’s mythical nuclear weapons.) At any rate, it’s not “better founded” in the sense that there’s a shred of evidence that Iran has nuclear weapons or some other secret form of blackmail. But it is true that Reynolds’s assumptions that military power can accomplish anything if you want it, that “more rubble less trouble” counterinsurgency can coexist with democratic state building, and that everything in Iraq is great (or at least would be great if it weren’t for those meddling reporters) are becoming more and more transparently false by the day. But Reynolds can’t be wrong, so we must turn to fantasy to explain the easily explicable.

I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on him–at least his visions of armies of Iranian unicorns equipped with death rays is distracting him from his stab-in-the-back arguments, which I’m sure he’ll return to post-haste.