Tomorrow, in yet another demonstration of their deeply non-serious approach to the world we live in, the Democratic led Congress will send the emergency spending bill, laden with pork and crippled by time-lines, to the President who will veto it.
It requires a degree of myopia bordering on blindness to miscalculate so badly as the Democrats have done.
David Brookes summarizes in brief some of the inherent contradictions in the Democratic narrative about Iraq, who keep repeating we need to focus on Afghanistan apparently unaware that in Iraq we are now primarily fighting al Qaeda, who are being aided and abetted by Iran; Congress & Iraq: Declaring Defeat:
Wait a minute, you say: What about all those recent deadly bombings? The bad news is real - but those attacks are mostly the evil handiwork of al Qaeda and foreign jihadists (80 to 90 percent of suicide bombers are non-Iraqi). Osama's henchmen are still intent on fomenting a sectarian civil war - and hastening a U.S. retreat by influencing politics back here. Congress' action must leave them pumped.
Interestingly, such luminous intellects as Harry Reid, who apparently knows the war is lost because he has difficulty with the English language (note to Harry: General Petraues indeed said the war could only be won through political means, but he also said we needed to use military means as a prerequisite to provide the setting for the political victory) suggests the real fight is in Afghanistan, against al Qaeda, yet al Qaeda says the central front is in Iraq. Maybe Harry missed the memo, 7/7 ‘mastermind’ is seized in Iraq :
The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans.
Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.
Remarkable: Iraq, Iran, and al Qaeda all in the same person!
I am of the belief that psychological explanations are not required when simple stupidity is sufficient to explain the data, but there is something very troubling about the continued insistence on defeat in Iraq by the Left in this country, and I do think it begs for a psychological explanation.
While Harry Reid seems to be fairly limited, some of the Democratic Presidential aspirants appear to be capable of higher level thought. Even with the caveat that they see the future of the world depending on their ascension to the White House in 2008 as primary and recognizing that they have probably not kept themselves well informed on such matters as al-Hadi al-Iraiq's existence, it is worth wondering why they would all sign onto a plan that has already led to an increase in violence in Iraq and promises horrendous disasters down the road. I suppose the cynical explanation is that they imagine they can only get nominated by being sufficiently anti-war (pro-defeat) and that with the American people so soured on the war, it will be the vehicle by which they become elected. The most generous suggestion would be that people like Hillary Clinton nd Barak Obama believe they would then be able to do whatever is necessary to protect the country when they finally get into the White House. (I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that people like John Edwards has given much thought to the question; his behavior does not inspire anything more than awe at his prodigious hypocrisy and cynicism.)
Politically, the Democrats are probably correct that failure in Iraq would be good for them in 2008 but the risks are considerable.
Our departure from Iraq would be trumpeted daily on al Jazeera, et al, as an Allah inspired victory over the Crusaders by both Sunni (al Qaeda) and Shia (Iran) fanatics. And, they would be correct:
Surrendering the filed without first securing your objectives is a defeat whether or not your forces are ever defeated in a specific engagement.
(Please note, the Israeli War in Southern Lebanon last summer against the HISH alliance was clearly a military defeat for Hezbollah, albeit a limited one, yet it has come to be seen as a strategic defeat for Israel: 'Olmert made the decision to go to war unprepared')
Whether we were correct to go into Iraq in the first place and whether or not there were links from 9/11 and al Qaeda to Iraq, or Iran, is immaterial; such links clearly exist now and ignoring that inconvenient truth is dangerously misguided.
The idea that we will withdraw our forces and magically be better able to control the countryside is ludicrous in the extreme.
The conclusions I reach are that the Democrats either don't know that our defeat will be a disaster, which I would chalk up to ignorance and stupidity leavened with hubris and cynicism or they recognize the risks but believe the enemy one of two things:
They must believe that the enemy will not attack us at home again. It is certainly possible that we will be spared further attacks, while al Qaeda consolidates their plans for subverting Europe and various Nations in the Middle East, but that hardly bodes well for America or our friends.
The other possibility is that, again they recognize the danger, but truly believe they will be able to "handle" it. After all, many of these people are the same ones who sagely declare we simply need to have more Special Ops and fight clandestinely to win against the terrorists. This suggests a kind of naive grandiosity. The idea that a Democratic administration can solve insoluble problems that have stymied an incompetent Republican administration, after alienating our military and selling our friends out is frightening in its implications.
People who oversimplify in order to convince themselves what they are doing is right and proper run the risk, when acting on such beliefs, of turning acute crises into chronic disasters. Even if you argue, and the argument can credibly be made (though it can also be refuted), that the Bush administration has done just that in Iraq, by declaring defeat in Iraq, the Democrats are taking a bad situation and making it exponentially worse.
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