Friday, April 20, 2007

The War is Not Lost   [Victor Davis Hanson]

Sen. Reid, who once voted to authorize the war in Iraq on grounds other than worry over WMD—his 2002 pro-war speech showcased Saddam's violation of the 1991 armistice agreement—assures that the war is lost, and the surge failed before the change of tactics has
fully had time to evolve.

This is just the latest update of Howard Dean's assurance in 2005 that we couldn't win in Iraq and should go home. What is lost in all these Olympian pronouncements like Reid's,and others like them
repudiating the war from its erstwhile supporters like Sen. Clinton, is precisely when and why they changed their minds. Or was it simply the old, "My perfect three-week war was ruined by your (plural) 4-year occupation."

Not only is no alternative course offered, but there is no analysis or explanation why they once wanted to remove Saddam in the first place, and then lost heart at the costs of fostering a replacement consensual government.

All this is about the worst message to send Gen. Petraeus and the thousands still arriving to secure the country—that they must worry not only about their guns and supplies being rationed as funding is
stalled, but also expect soon a motion to send them all home in acknowledged defeat, as Iraq becomes the (petrol-fed) replacement for the Taliban's Afghanistan as the new sanctuary for those now bombing and killing innocents from Algeria to Somalia.

Why does the enemy's reaction to all this defeatism go unmentioned here at home? "Al Qaeda" in Iraq announces its demands to have its own terrorists in the government as it now names a "shadow cabinet", even as it releases grisly tapes of mass executions, following recent
attempts to kill hundreds with chlorine gas. These are the evil forces that Gen. Petraeus is trying to protect millions of Iraqis from, and which will win if Sen. Reid's defeatism spreads further.

04/20 09:28 AMShare