Dissecting The Defense

ABC News has run an article by a left-wing blogger defending Harry Reid’s comments on Iraq. It displays all the usual hallmarks of a left-wing blog screed, including the typically overheated and juvenile rhetoric, glaring flaws in logic, and crude partisanship. As is the custom, a thorough Fisking is in order:

Last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., caused a ruckus in Washington by saying that there is no military solution to the Iraq War. That it’s over and it’s time to get out.

“I believe myself that the secretary of state, the secretary of defense — and you have to make your own decision as to what the president knows — that this war is lost, and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,” Reid said…

What Reid said is 100 percent true, and he is not alone. For example, conservative columnist William F. Buckley is also on record saying that the war “has failed.” It’s no secret that Iraq has been torn apart and gutted as a result of the Unites States’ March 2003 invasion. The country is mired in civil war, and the violence worsens with each passing day. Let’s face it, Bush is not sending in an additional 20,000 troops because things are going well. Our soldiers are getting killed daily, the troops are forced to do longer tours of duty and our National Guardsmen are being sent back into battle before they even have a chance to unpack here at home. It’s a disgrace.

It’s war. Our soldiers are being asked to sacrifice a great deal, it is true. However, that’s what being a soldier is ultimately about. The way we honor those sacrifices is not to render them moot, but to give our troops what they need to win this conflict. That means more support, and the funds they need. The Democrats not only deny them those things, but denigrate their mission at the same time. That is the disgrace.

Bush and his war-mongering cronies took it upon themselves to invade a sovereign nation under the guise of (a) retaliating against Sept. 11; (b) protecting America and Britain from WMD “mushroom clouds;” and then (c) building a stable democracy in the Middle East. As we now all know, there were no WMD in Iraq, there was no connection to bin Laden and al Qaeda and true, sustainable democracy is but a fantasy. Failure, failure, failure. And the insurgents have been empowered and emboldened by this failure, not weakened. And Bush’s desperate “troop surge” is not going to make one bit of difference in changing Iraq’s military and political landscape.

We start out with the typical schoolyard rhetoric of the left-wing ranter. Grow up.

Nor are the facts right. We didn’t invade Iraq to “retaliate” against the September 11 attacks, we attacked to ensure that another would not follow. The world’s intelligence agencies were unanimous in their belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and the means to produce them. We had already been attacked with anthrax and the perpetrator of that attack remains unknown to this day. The idea that a nation like Iraq could attack the US with something similar and maintain plausible deniability was not an idea to be tossed aside lightly.

And once again, we get the less-than-subtle racism of the left. Apparently brown people just can’t have democracy — and it’s a fantasy to think it possible. Never mind the fact that Iraq has already had multiple democratic elections. It takes time to build a civil society, but the racist and bigoted assumption that the Iraqis are pathologically incapable of doing so is reprehensible.

The idea that somehow the “failures” of the past have emboldened the insurgency is also a non sequitor. One can make the argument that there have been plenty of US failures that emboldened terrorist in Iraq, but those aren’t any of them. This statement is more evidence of an individual whose mouth is on “rant” and whose brain is switched off.

The Republicans don’t like Reid and his assessment of the war. But too bad. This is not Reid’s mess. This military disaster belongs 100 percent to Bush and the Republican party. This is their war. If they don’t like it being called a failure, or that it is “lost,” then they should demonstrate its successes and spare us the incessant partisan rhetoric. Stop regurgitating all this BS about progress and success and show it to us.

Senator Reid voted for this war. It’s insulting that those who joined with the majority in approving this war now want to run away from it and pass the buck to others. The idea that the Democrats have no responsibility for this war is absolutely ridiculous. They voted for it. They supported it when it was politically popular, and now that the winds have shifted they’re trying to pin it on others. That kind of cowardice is unacceptable, and this argument is another piece of evidence showing why the left wing is pathological incapable of dealing with this war on a rational basis.

Bush and the Republicans, in their supreme arrogance, are choosing to ignore the will of the electorate, choosing to forget that a majority of Americans voted for a change in leadership last November and that the administration’s failed Iraq policy was the primary reason for this changing of the guard. Reid is doing what the American people asked him to do: exercising greater congressional oversight than when the GOP foxes were the ones guarding the henhouse. Bush and his Iraq War mob don’t get to run amok in Iraq, causing tens of thousands of deaths, and then expect a free pass here at home on the PR front.

A majority of Americans voted against an incompetent Republican Party. That much is true. But construing that as a vote for nothing short of abject surrender in Iraq is absolute hubris. The American people did want a change, but not a change that would see American interests subjugated to the Democrats petty politics. If withdrawal was so politically popular, why did the Democratic Party have to pass out billions in pork-barrel bribes to get it passed? The disconnect here is staggering.

What’s worse, saying those who are against the Bushies’ failed Iraq War are therefore against the troops, is a shameful, despicable political calculation. Sorry George, Reid and the Democrats just don’t believe that the way to support the troops is to send more of them to die in an unjust, miserable failure of a war that you and you alone created. Kudos to Reid for having the courage to stand up and say what needs to be said.

Instead we’ll hand over Iraq to al-Qaeda in Iran, piss on everything that our troops have died for, and ignore the bloodbath that results. Such cowardice is unpatriotic, and there’s no point in dancing around the point. When Harry Reid sounds virtually indistinguishable from Ayman al-Zawahiri or some other al-Qaeda propagandist, that should be a warning sign for the Democratic Party. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.

This is not President Bush’s war. This is our war, and our losing it won’t just hurt the President, it will hurt the country. I see little sign that the Democrats either understand that point or care. In any event, it is shameful and unpatriotic. The fact that very few Democrats really seem to have any realistic plan for Iraq other than bugging out is an absolute shame. We can’t leave Iraq and pray all goes well — we know quite well that it will not. The question then becomes whether it’s better to do what good we can and hope that we can make enough progress for things to stabilize or whether we turn Iraq into a cesspool of violence and a petri dish for terrorism. Even though the risk is high, we cannot turn our backs on Iraq.

The Democratic Party wants to cut and run, not only from Iraq, but from their own responsibility for it. They should not be allowed to do so. We have a moral obligation to the people of Iraq to give them a fighting chance. We’ve changed strategies, and we’re getting some evidence that it has having an effect. The enemy knows our weaknesses, and they’re doing their utmost to exploit them. The fact that so many people are playing along just shows how little we know ourselves compared to how much al-Qaeda knows us.