Posted on 04/05/2007 6:46:28 PM PDT by Vinny
Setting a “timetable” to abandon Iraq is an invitation to disaster. Illogical, beyond obtuse, it’s plainly stupid. Barbarians at Baghdad’s gates are asked by Congressional Democrats to play a waiting game.
Run out the clock and win. Simple.
Embolden terrorists? Sure. New hope for anarchists to succeed, then to set up a tyrannical Islamic state to export terrorism? Why not?
Would a pullout dishearten our allies? Certainly. Whom do YOU trust? Not a wobbly America.
Wartime logic is lost on most liberal Democrats much of the time, with the exception of that unlikely realist, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and a few scattered voices crying in Foggy Bottom.
For the rest, logic might be their worst enemy. Consider:
– “Surge” is working? Forget about it.
– Fledgling democracy finding its legs? Pull the plug. Bring the “troops” home at any cost.
– Erasing a base for terrorism? Let it be. Let it be a new base for terror, another Afghanistan, only with oil this time to barter the world’s security.
Success in Iraq seems anathema to most liberal Democrats and their fringe, that anti-war mob now taking to the streets again. Does a shred of common sense dent their defeatist souls?
Such naiveté in face of evil is difficult to fathom, except to consider it “political.” Perhaps the ’08 elections are paramount, to win even at the nation’s peril. Party first?
Some Bush-haters suppose the war in Iraq is somehow a political shell game, a sham; that cockeyed view, in spite of 3,000 Americans massacred on 9/11/01 by an enemy the very embodiment of evil.
The pullout proposal is Munich-style appeasement. If only the United States and its allies abandon the struggle against terrorism in Iraq, the Bad Guys will leave us all alone.
Like hell they will. Think World Trade Center, twice. USS Cole. Aborted crashes of trans-Atlantic airliners out of Great Britain. Kohbar Towers. The bang-bang list goes on.
With her narrow (218-212) vote for a date-certain to leave, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) dared call it “victory.” That’s what Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said in September 1938 upon his return from Munich.
“Peace in our time,” he famously said, waving a piece of paper. Only it didn’t happen, and millions died. Will appeasers never learn? What twisted logic says it’s okay to kowtow to “macho” killers of innocents?
Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) said the Democrats’ proposals set a ". . . date-certain declaration of defeat." White flags, anyone?
Mere words are not possible to describe the stupidity of the proposals, strings and all. (Sorry. I tried.) Fleeing from enemies sworn to kill you in horrible ways, such as crashing fuel-laden aircraft missiles into skyscrapers, begs the question: What have these woosie congressional Democrats been smoking?
Whatever happened to the call expressed by JFK in his 1960 inauguration speech:
Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are — but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation" . . .
Some Americans, typically of the far Left, loathe this country. “Death to Amerika” is not a problem to them. Privately, they might hope for just that, as for Iraq itself. Call them nihilists. Paint them traitorous.
For left-liberals who love their country, wishing its very defeat is illogical. A mystery, as Churchill said of the Soviet Union, wrapped in an enigma. Is there, at last, no patriotism here? No respect for "troops" in harm's way?
Contempt for our country is rooted, I submit, in the Sixties counterculture. Students protesting another war, dodging the dreaded draft, raged on. Some even waved the enemy’s flag, the Viet Cong’s gold-star, and occupied terrified campus deans’ offices. Oh, those were heady days for the anti-war crowd. On the verge of it, again, are we? (No draft now says it’s unlikely.)
“Hell No, We Won’t Go” protesters yelled, sometimes menacingly. I know. I was there, at times in my USAF uniform. (Note: I went.) Unruly, they chanted juvenile slogans, often Marxist. Some accused us of vile things, while holding up the evil-doers, murderers of South Vietnamese hamlet chiefs and schoolteachers, somehow as heroes. Young John F. Kerry called us GIs war criminals. (And we never forgot that lie of lies. Thanks forever to the Swift Boat Vets and POWS for Truth.)
Then, in the 70s, the mobs graduated. Some returned from Canada, later to be pardoned by President Carter. Many joined hierarchies of higher education, occupying deans’ offices again, but legitimately. New Criterion’s remarkable cultural critic Roger Kimball calls them “tenured radicals.” No longer raucous students, these hangers-on (as Ayn Rand might brand them) went on to occupy the seats of power in academe.
Columnist Michael Barone thinks the new professorate brings latent anti-Americanism to the table. Such prejudice against America, he says, lies in their automatic “default assumption.”
Simply put, “default” is the collectivist, leftist view that the United States, no matter what, is wrong. Mainstream media hew closely to this line, too; it’s as if a series of unchallenged New Left shibboleths control the news flow.
Barone speculates on why the “default assumption:”
. . . students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.
Not all of this takes, of course. Most students have enough good sense to see that the campus radicals' description of the world is wildly at odds with reality . . .
Very many of our university graduates emerge with the default assumption thoroughly wired into their mental software. And so, it seems, they carry it with them for most of their adult lives.
The default assumption predisposes them to believe that if there is slaughter in Darfur, it is our fault; if there are IEDs in Iraq, it is our fault . . .
Senator Lieberman, rejected by his party for opposing its defeatist views, sums up the issue of oddly misplaced passions:
There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamic extremism.
Something un-American, if not anti-American, tells our blood-thirsty enemy when we will “cut and run.” Leaving the battle is not only inglorious, it goes against the natural law of self-preservation.
In his little-known book, The Abolition of Man (1947), my hero C.S. Lewis mocks the logic of a nation in self-defeat mode:
Think of a country where people are admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might as well try to imagine a country where two-and-two made five . . .
To some liberal Democrats, two and two equal five. Bad logic reigns. What’s their hidden goal? Prominent Minneapolis blogger John Hinderaker (at www.powelineblog.com) tags the 800-pound gorilla, one of MSM’s Most Unsaid Things:
. . . it’s clear to pretty much everyone that the Democrats want defeat in Iraq in order to advance their political agenda.
Pretty much everyone, yes, except the Democrats’ erstwhile allies, most of mainstream media (MSM). The John Murtha-Dick Durbin wing of hangdogs, immune to reality, press for their nation’s defeat, and media remain curiously silent. Again, silence of the liberals is deafening.
Speaker Pelosi calls her 218-212 cliffhanger a “victory.” This recalls George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” “Political language,” he wrote in 1938, “. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder acceptable.”
Consider finally, these words as timely, now more than ever before, from William Butler Yeats’ renowned “The Second Coming:”
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The Ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Stemming the “blood-dimmed tide” of terrorism might not be easy in the darkest of times, sans a presidential veto, if putting politics first prevails over our national security, when “the worst . . . are full of passionate intensity.” Sleep tight.
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Here’s the smart way to pull out of Iraq. Add one more front to the scenario below, which would be a beach landing from the south in Iran, and it becomes a “strategic withdrawal” from Iraq.
How to Stand Up to Iran
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1808220/posts?page=36#36
Posted by Kevmo to TomasUSMC
On News/Activism 03/28/2007 7:11:08 PM PDT · 36 of 36
Split Iraq up and get out
***The bold military move would be to mobilize FROM Iraq into Iran through Kurdistan and then sweep downward, meeting up with the forces that we pull FROM Afghanistan in a 2-pronged offensive. We would be destroying nuke facilities and building concrete fences along geo-political lines, separating warring tribes physically. At the end, we take our boys into Kurdistan, set up a couple of big military bases and stay awhile. We could invite the French, Swiss, Italians, Mozambiqans, Argentinians, Koreans, whoever is willing to be the police forces for the regions that we move through, and if the area gets too hot for these peacekeeper weenies we send in military units. Basically, it would be learning the lesson of Iraq and applying it.
15 rules for understanding the Middle East
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1774248/posts
Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas — like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.
Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.
Let’s say my scenario above is what happens. Would that military mobilization qualify as a “withdrawal” from Iraq as well as Afghanistan? Then, when we’re all done and we set up bases in Kurdistan, it wouldn’t really be Iraq, would it? It would be Kurdistan.
What happens if I refuse to be governed by the Rats?
IRS
One of Larson’s all time greatest!!!!!
Right. Why do you think Dimmycraps are for it?
bttt
Which is why I continue to support offering the insurgents a reacharound instead.
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