I’m glad others are noticing the same thing I do:
Obama is following George W. Bush in making war, not love. Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan. Bush dropped bombs on those places, and all we heard about was gut-wrenching wailing and screaming from the Left for eight years because of all the innocent people who died. Now O is doing the same thing … and all we hear are the sounds of silence.
via American Thinker Blog: Liberals and O’s Afghanistan policy.
Victor Davis Hanson pretty much sums things up:
Rather than blaming Donald Rumsfeld or George Tenet, the principled position of the “my three-week perfect war was loused-up by your five-year occupation” critic would have been an honest admission that they underestimated the potential of Iraqi insurgency, and that even its defeat was simply not worth the commensurate American costs….
Instead, what we have now are dozens of loud, pick-and-choose opportunists who were for the war, then soured on it, then came back some during the purple-finger elections, then got angrier during the February 2006 insurgency, then damned the surge, then grew quiet during the Petraeus success — always, in retrospect, citing a particular past phase of their ongoing metamorphoses when it now seems to best amen the current status in Iraq.
Sadly, most have no ethical bearings, and wrongly judged our presence in Iraq in terms of wishing to identify with a winner and to distance themselves from a perceived loser. The irony, of course, is that in the months to come many abroad will begin to respect our support for Iraqi democracy only for the self-interested reasons that it proved successful rather than principled.
Slate.com has been running a number of articles by intellectuals once supportive of the Iraq war… who now admit (or were gently coerced by Slate) to admit they were wrong. In response, I thought I’d join Christopher Hitchens and come out with a post on why I got Iraq right… and why I still support it. “Why waste your time?“, you ask? Well, I was having dinner with a couple from Europe a few weeks (well, now months) back. Late in the evening, the conversation turned to international politics; U.S. military policy in Iraq came to the forefront of the conversation. I’m not out to make enemies, so after various prevarications, I concluded that although I thought the arguments for war were compelling, I couldn’t stand how expensive the war had become–taking a clearly indifferent middle ground. As I reflected on the conversation, it became clear that as time has passed and circumstances on the ground in Iraq have changed, so my need for more articulable set of policy positions.
In beginning this process, a broad view of the middle east is necessary. The Middle East, specifically Iraq (but by no means limited to Iraq) was (and would still be) in the process of implosion had we done nothing. It was inevitable that Iraq would have collapsed eventually. There was certainly ample indica of this, whether you looked at the chaos Saddam’s sons would have brought after their father’s death, the religious tensions we have unearthed in the absence of a repressive ruler, or simply the deterioration of the country’s infrastructure caused by years of sanctions and Saddam’s indifference toward his own people.
Democrats Then:
Democrats NOW:
I don’t need to add any commentary to this… I am vindicated.
Oh, and this in the New York TImes:
Interestingly, I was browsing the times.co.uk website and behold… I was surprised how many really good articles there were. Here’s one I wanted to bring your attention to:
Al-Qaeda leaders admit: ‘We are in crisis. There is panic and fear’
Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.
The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” – Americans – had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces. Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar“, the unnamed emir admitted.
In an apparent reference to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics, he said of the Americans and their Sunni allies: “We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.“