I quibble with the leftwingnuts’ characterization of President Bush as “pro-war” anymore than FDR or Lincoln or Washington were “pro-war”. No one likes war, but sometimes its the lesser of two evils. Yeah, the war costs money.
But it is worth any amount of money to finally bring peace to the middle east. I applaud the president for breaking with the “realpolitik” of Kissinger, James K. Baker, Warren Christopher, Brezinski, Donald Rumsfeld during the Ford/Reagan years etc. and others who tolerated and even propped up brutal dictators to keep “order”.
Its racist and stupid to assert that Arabs and Muslims can’t handle democracy. The Iraqi people have proven, at great cost to themselves that they WANT democracy, we’re not forcing it on them at the point of a gun. No one forced the vast majority of eligible voters (at a rate that shames most democracies) to vote in several nationwide elections. It was very dangerous for them to do so, but they did it.
The country is a better place with Saddam gone, and is on its way toward being the only Arab democracy. The deaths and money spent now will save untold millions of lives and money in the future. When Iran and Syria are finally democratized, I think we will finally see peace in the region, for the first time in centuries.
IFO is an absolute good, and the Iraqi people are supporting it with their lives, daily.
Liberals sure have strayed from the days when a great Democrat said:
” Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Now I guess someone like Edwards would say:
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall not pay any price, we will not bear any burden, we will not meet any hardship, we will abandon any friend, surrender to any foe, we will in short do nothing in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Screw them.”
The Iraqis and even some liberal media types are finally admitting we’re winning. There are actually reports that we have defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq, and that they are down to under 100 men and have given up the fight in Iraq to focus on Afghanistan. We will up the ante there next, and defeat them there too.
No one is “pro-war” but I still believe we need to fight for our liberty and the liberty of others, because its in everyone’s self interest.
Plus its the right and decent thing to do. Its not American soldiers murdering children and innocent people in Iraq, like lefty protesters like to rant about, its terrorist, and we’re killing those terrorists and helping those children and innocent people make a better life. Its been almost 4 decades of tyranny there. It may take a little while for them to get this democracy thing working.
As I recall, America took almost 100 years to finally resolve the problems we started grappling with in 1776 – and hundreds of thousands of deaths and the destruction of the South later, we finally settled all those problems.
So lets be a bit more patient with people with no tradition of democracy who are struggling with issues we can only imagine in trying to forge a real country out of many different tribes, religions, ethnicities and centuries of strife separating them.
This “madness” as you call it is saner than leaving Saddam there today, where he would surely be vying with IRan to build nukes, and he would use them.
Do liberals ever weigh the big issues, or just knee jerk hate anything to do with President Bush. I don’t see you bitching about the Kosovo quagmire, and we’ve been there nearly a decade and they have settled nothing in that time. At least we’re winning in Iraq.
And btw, no Democrat that actually has a shot at winning the nomination has ruled out staying in Iraq to finish the job. So don’t get too hopeful we’ll surrender and allow Al Qaeda to regroup and start cutting off heads, hands and feet of children in Iraq again.
Meanwhile, here’s some vintage Christopher Hitchens:
I resent the taunt that is latent in the anti-war stress on supposedly uneven sacrifice. Did I send my children to rescue the victims of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center? No, I expected the police and fire departments to accept the risk of gruesome death on my behalf. All of them were volunteers (many of them needlessly thrown away, as we now know, because of poor communications), and one knew that their depleted ranks would soon be filled by equally tough and heroic citizens who would volunteer in their turn. We would certainly face a grave societal crisis if that expectation turned out to be false.
But when it comes to the confrontation in Iraq, the whole notion of grown-ups volunteering is dismissed or lampooned. Instead, it’s people’s children getting “sent.” Recall Michael Moore asking congressmen whether they would “send” one of their offspring, as if they had the power to do so, or the right? (John Ashcroft’s son was in the Gulf, but I doubt that his father dispatched him there, and in any case it would take a lot more than this to reconcile me to Ashcroft, as Moore implies that it should.) Nobody has to join the armed forces, and those who do are old enough to vote, get married, and do almost everything legal except buy themselves a drink. Why infantilize young people who are entitled to every presumption of adulthood?
….Further on in the same portentous article, we encounter one Andrew Bacevich, a “professor of international relations at Boston University and a retired Army officer.” What could be more impressive? This expert delivers himself of the opinion that, “If this is such a great cause, let us see one of the Bush daughters in uniform.” Let me do a brief thought experiment here. Do I know a single anti-war person who would be more persuaded if one of the Bush girls joined up? Do you? Can you imagine what would be said about such a cheap emotional stunt? Stalin’s son was taken prisoner by the Nazi invaders (and never exchanged), and Mao’s son was killed in the war that established the present state of North Korea. I am not sure how encouraging such precedents are supposed to be, but they have nothing at all to do with the definition of a just war.
Much more important than this, however, is the implied assault on civilian control of the military. In this republic, elected civilians give crisp orders to soldiers and expect these orders to be obeyed. No back chat can even be imagined, let alone allowed. Do liberals really want the Joint Chiefs to say: “Mr. President, I’ll respect that order when you have a son or daughter in uniform”? It was a great day when President Lincoln fired Gen. George B. McClellan.* It was a great day when President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. No presidential brat needed to be on the front line for this point to be understood.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are either worthwhile or they are not (and I see that nobody as yet requires an “exit strategy” from Afghanistan).