Posted on 11/12/2006 2:42:23 AM PST by goldstategop
On the radio a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt suggested to me the terrorists might try to pull a Spain on the U.S. elections. You'll recall (though evidently many Americans don't) that in 2004 hundreds of commuters were slaughtered in multiple train bombings in Madrid. The Spaniards responded with a huge street demonstration of supposed solidarity with the dead, all teary passivity and signs saying "Basta!" -- "Enough!" By which they meant not "enough!" of these murderers but "enough!" of the government of Prime Minister Aznar, and of Bush and Blair, and troops in Iraq. A couple of days later, they voted in a socialist government, which immediately withdrew Spanish forces from the Middle East. A profitable couple of hours' work for the jihad. I said to Hugh I didn't think that would happen this time round. The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.
The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.
Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.
Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.
What does it mean when the world's hyperpower, responsible for 40 percent of the planet's military spending, decides that it cannot withstand a guerrilla war with historically low casualties against a ragbag of local insurgents and imported terrorists? You can call it "redeployment" or "exit strategy" or "peace with honor" but, by the time it's announced on al-Jazeera, you can pretty much bet that whatever official euphemism was agreed on back in Washington will have been lost in translation. Likewise, when it's announced on "Good Morning Pyongyang" and the Khartoum Network and, come to that, the BBC.
For the rest of the world, the Iraq war isn't about Iraq; it's about America, and American will. I'm told that deep in the bowels of the Pentagon there are strategists wargaming for the big showdown with China circa 2030/2040. Well, it's steady work, I guess. But, as things stand, by the time China's powerful enough to challenge the United States it won't need to. Meanwhile, the guys who are challenging us right now -- in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere -- are regarded by the American electorate like a reality show we're bored with. Sorry, we don't want to stick around to see if we win; we'd rather vote ourselves off the island.
Two weeks ago, you may remember, I reported on a meeting with the president, in which I'd asked him the following: "You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense. Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offense in this?"
On Tuesday, the national security vote evaporated, and, without it, what's left for the GOP? Congressional Republicans wound up running on the worst of all worlds -- big bloated porked-up entitlements-a-go-go government at home and a fainthearted tentative policing operation abroad. As it happens, my new book argues for the opposite: small lean efficient government at home and muscular assertiveness abroad. It does a superb job, if I do say so myself, of connecting war and foreign policy with the domestic issues. Of course, it doesn't have to be that superb if the GOP's incoherent inversion is the only alternative on offer.
As it is, we're in a very dark place right now. It has been a long time since America unambiguously won a war, and to choose to lose Iraq would be an act of such parochial self-indulgence that the American moment would not endure, and would not deserve to. Europe is becoming semi-Muslim, Third World basket-case states are going nuclear, and, for all that 40 percent of planetary military spending, America can't muster the will to take on pipsqueak enemies. We think we can just call off the game early, and go back home and watch TV.
It doesn't work like that. Whatever it started out as, Iraq is a test of American seriousness. And, if the Great Satan can't win in Vietnam or Iraq, where can it win? That's how China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela and a whole lot of others look at it. "These Colors Don't Run" is a fine T-shirt slogan, but in reality these colors have spent 40 years running from the jungles of Southeast Asia, the helicopters in the Persian desert, the streets of Mogadishu. ... To add the sands of Mesopotamia to the list will be an act of weakness from which America will never recover.
Ok let me clarify how my post related to what you said.
We'll stop being gutless after we stop letting the libs shame us for our desire to find and kill the enemy wherever they are. They are always trying to make us feel bad for that which is why we are pussyfooting around too much.
"both enhance our national security and help to free a violence-prone region of the world run by murderous despots"
I think it would help immensely if we stopped giving speeches using exactly those kinds of words. They are buzz words and quite boring. When Bush speaks in that language for 1/2 hour there is nothing moving or inspirational about it. It's also better to call terrorists the 'enemy'. Enemy is a better word or we need one even better than that. Islamicfacists was a good one but then Bush back tracked on it cause he let the libs shame us on saying it how it was.
We need to have different types of things we want to accomplish on a consistent basis put into a short list. Then anytime we accomplish one of those (which should be on a weekly basis stuff like rebuilding and killing IslamicFacists) we should trumpet them about! ^_^
This is an excellent post.
I agree in some instances, but overall it will get better because if the DBM/dems actually try to have investigations for two years and try to void what Bush has put in place to protect America, they're gonners!
This election was a repudiation of moderate, rino repubs and their spineless attitude toward fighting and winning a spiritual war.
bttt
Ya ya Thanks. I've been on FR way too much lately and I'm learning how to stop making my posts 5 ft long and get out what I want to say more efficiently.
I've been thinking. Another good way to promote the war effort would be to have cameras around when units are coming home. Those things should be a much more public affair. I've seen pictures here on FR of mini parades. I've always enjoyed it and I think the American people would too. It's a shame that Freepers are the only ones getting to see all the good stuff.
I don't think it has so much to do with pride, as to what purpose would it serve the nation. They were gunning for him and through him the war on terror.
We vote a straight Republican ticket, we are Conservative Republicans. We had such high hopes of another Ronald Reagan in office with a Conservative Republican led Congress. Yea, right.
We held our noses and voted a straight Republican ticket 11/6/06. What a waste.
Steyn is as usual right on the mark.
Maybe Armageddon in closer than we realize.
I have to disagree completely with this...
Again from Steyn:
"Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless."
The timing of the Rumsfeld exit is disasterous, both politically and globally. Globally, it shows an ineffectual President, who claims he has a plan, but obviously really does not. How many years have we been in Iraq now? If he doesn't know what he is doing at this point, he never will.
Politically it screws his party and destroys his effectiveness as a leader. If Rumsfeld's job is hinged on a Dem victory, then he should have left late Spring 06, allowing Bush's party to put a new face on the war and diffuse the strongest arguements of the Left - a need for 'change'.
Bush ends up looking like a stuck-in-the-mud indecisive leader, a rigid man unable to think, react and adjust to the changing circumstances and stakes of the war - which is exactly what his opponents painted him as. It gives an appearance of confirming what they were saying all along. There is even the possibility it is even true.
This move is demorallizing those that invested so much in his ability to prosecute the war. I think it is one of the worst choices the President and administration has ever made.
I agree with every word of your post, except one. Surely the "late" in your tagline should be "early"?
Bump for later.
Perhaps Rumsfeld had had more than enough. Spending the next two years being held hostage before various demonrat controlled committees ws not what he signed on for.
You make good points. I was just thinking in terms of politics. His (I believe his) decision to leave while the votes were being counted gives him at least some news cycle cover.
"Where you and I disagree is whether the President has gotten across why the Bush doctrine is important."
He has done a good enough job explaining it to you and me. However, in the face of a hostile media and a soft culture, he has not done a good ENOUGH job. The elections are proof of that. Too few people understood the consequences of dem control. I respect the president and I will keep doing what I can. However, it is hard to be optimistic.
I didn't need the President to articulate what we are doing in Iraq. I was here on 9/11, even tho the media would prefer us to forget that date.
Couple the MSM with our own pastime of Bush bashing, and we have a climate of discontent that resulted in a tantrum. Just my opinion.
If indeed it was the so called independents who voted D, we were unable to bring them to the republican side this time. In my experience, people registering I are usually dems in disguise.
Be assured my heart is VERY troubled.
"fainthearted tentative policing operation" . . well, that's the picture the lamestream media painted so perfectly of Iraq at any rate . . there was more to it than that, but PEA SEA and the 20-second sound byte rules in America today.
I'm sure Nancy and Company won't disappoint Al Qaeda in Iraq or anywhere else; although, the most current suicide bomber in Baghdad would indicate they aren't moving fast enough to suit AQ leaders. Nance better get a move on or one of them (AQ) just might show up on her doorstep for a bit of "brotherly" love. CHANGE . . the mantra "buzzword" of the Democrat party this election . . but, it's just the same old donkey wearing an Armani pantsuit sans that horrible, gauche American flag pin.
There were many, many reasons why the elections turned out the way they did. There are historical reasons (they can't be discounted), there are political reasons, and there are cultural reasons.
We are doing a lot of scape goating on these threads. Blaming everyone and everybody we can think of - most of the time unjustly.
The America hating left and their cohorts in the MSM had a victory in Viet Nam and wanted to replicate that loss to make sure that America is denigrated the world over.
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