[lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot and Anger
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 12:48:59 -0800
Ursula's assumptions about what I think are similar to Andreas' and Simon's
. . . , but I will touch on the matter of what it is about the Bush policy
that I support. Here is an article I responded to this morning. My
response is below:
Freedom's Successes in 2006 By Joseph Klein
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.asp?ID=3545>
FrontPageMagazine.com
<http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=26259> | January 3,
2007
In our ongoing war against the enemies of freedom, 2006 ended on a fairly
bright note. But we must remain vigilant. 2007 will be a year of challenge
and opportunity in a struggle that is of historic and global proportions.
The Islamic fascists have just suffered a humiliating defeat in Somalia.
Ethiopia demonstrated what the Left in this country needs to understand -
sometimes only a military solution will work to bring the bad guys to
account. While "it ain't over until it's over," as Yogi Berra once said, it
certainly is better to have the Islamic fascists on the run, rather than
allowing them to run Somalia as a strategically located African sanctuary
for al-Qaeda. In short, this was a swift and devastating loss for the
jihadists. As with the Taliban fundamentalists in Afghanistan, we can expect
pockets of insurgency from the Somali Islamists and their al-Qaeda allies.
However, we remain the winners as long as they remain out of power and
deprived of a safe base from which to conduct their 'holy' war.
Iraq, of course, is a far more complicated situation. There are no clear-cut
winners or losers. It has become a quagmire, with our military fatalities
reaching the symbolic 3,000 mark at the end of 2006. However, it was also a
year that captured for the history books the image of Saddam Hussein's
lifeless body swinging at the end of a rope that will be the companion piece
to the humiliating image of Saddam being pulled out of a hole by his
American captors. At least Saddam was accorded a full trial and judged by
his fellow Iraqi citizens, a modicum of justice that he never accorded to
his enemies while he and his dead sons were in power.
We are also rid of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda terrorist from Jordan
whom Saddam's regime harbored prior to the American liberation of Iraq and
who remained behind in Iraq as bin Laden's chief lieutenant. Zarqawi took
pleasure in killing innocent people of all faiths - including Muslims who
happened to be Shiites. Indeed, that is what he and Saddam had in common.
Zarqawi set in motion the chain of mosque bombings and killings that have
brought the country to the brink of civil war. While his demise has done
nothing to stem the sectarian violence in the short term, it has removed an
implacable foe of any political solution.
That said, 2007 will be a very challenging year for us in Iraq. But it can
also be a year of opportunity if we play our cards right. A temporary troop
surge would be a mistake, providing only the illusion of security even if it
were to provide a brief respite from the violence. As soon as our troop
levels revert to their prior levels, the seething sectarian hatreds will
boil over again into new violence. Embedding our military advisors with
Iraqi security forces, while pulling back our active combat troops, would
also be a recipe for disaster since our advisors will be left unprotected if
the Iraqis should decide to turn on the outnumbered American advisors with
the help of the insurgents.
The best option for the United States in 2007, among a set of bad options,
is to let the civil war in Iraq play out and let the extremists from both
sides kill each other. Saudi Arabia - whose own fundamentalists have
provided funding to al-Qaeda - cannot afford to allow militant Shiite
expansion on its border. Iran cannot afford an embarrassing loss to its
partisans, nor risk the havoc that a mass influx of Iraqi refugees may cause
to its fragile economy. So let the insurgent Sunnis and their al-Qaeda
brothers fight it out with the militant Shiites and their Iranian brothers,
while we cheer both sides' passage to martyrdom and their reward of 72
virgins. There will be a tragic loss of innocent lives, as in any civil war,
but this would occur whether we remain actively engaged or not. We might as
well avoid being a part of the inevitable carnage and putting our soldiers
in harm's way in the service of no clear, winnable objective. However, this
does not mean the kind of cut and run policy that is the Left's answer to
all messy problems. Instead we can concentrate with deadly force on
targeting the al-Qaeda leaders and Iranian revolutionary guard forces we are
able to track down in Iraq. We can also reposition some of our troops near
the Iranian and Syrian borders to stem the flow of arms and foreign
personnel into Iraq and Lebanon. When all is said and done, the civil war
will most likely end in a stalemate, with an exhausted country perhaps more
ready at that time to reach some sort of political coalition solution. The
point is for us to retain a sufficient presence in the area to influence the
ultimate outcome without becoming embroiled in the daily sectarian fighting.
Iran itself presents the most serious challenge of all because of its
regional ambitions and fanatical zeal combined with oil revenues paying for
its nuclear programs, but there are some encouraging signs there as well.
With all of his bluster, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was running
into some serious headwinds of his own as 2006 drew to a close. The U.N.
Security Council finally backed up its words against Iran's nuclear
enrichment program with some sanctions, even if the sanctions were about as
mild as they can be. At least, the Security Council did go on the record
endorsing a path toward isolation of Iran, which the United States has had
some success in accelerating through public and private pressure on foreign
banks and other firms to cease doing business with Iran or suffer the
consequences of lost business opportunities in the United States. Iran's oil
revenues are down, its infrastructure is in disrepair, and its economy is in
serious jeopardy of collapse. Ahmadinejad's loyalists lost some key local
elections and Iranian students are more boldly protesting his oppressive
regime. Facing increasing economic isolation for his foolhardy nuclear
ambitions and draining needed resources at home to diversions in Iraq and
Lebanon, Ahamadinejad's regime is on the brink of imploding without our
having to fire a shot. Our challenge, which is also an opportunity if
handled right, is to help Ahmadinejad destroy himself and bring down the
fanatical mullah theocracy that is the source of his power. To convince the
Iranian people who aspire to freedom that we support their aspirations, the
last thing we should do is to legitimize the present regime by 'negotiating'
with them.
Finally, the end of 2006 saw the end - finally - of Kofi Annan's disastrous
tenure as UN Secretary General. Right to the end, Annan blamed everyone but
himself and his UN cronies for the UN's litany of failures during his watch,
including the horrendous oil-for-food scandal that involved some of his top
deputies. This was also a man who went out of his way to placate terrorists
and their sponsoring states, while during his final days in office he
unleashed a barrage of criticisms against the United States and Israel.
Blinded to any sense of reality, one of his last pronouncements in the midst
of Ethiopia's rout of the Islamic fascists was to urge foreign forces -
presumably the Ethiopians - to leave Somalia and respect its 'sovereignty.'
What Annan never understood is that the Islamic fascists are the ones who
have no respect for the aspirations of the people whom they seek to rule.
They are cancers metastasizing in every body politic they are able to
infiltrate.
Annan's successor, South Korean Ban Ki-Moon, has to be an improvement, and
signs so far are somewhat encouraging. His immediate focus, he said, will be
to improve the internal operations and ethics of the U.N bureaucracy - a
daunting task in itself that Annan never took seriously. Coming from a
country that has prospered economically but continues to live in the shadow
of the nuclear threat from North Korea, Ban Ki-Moon knows first-hand the
value of freedom and the sacrifices required to preserve it. We may finally
have someone we can trust running things at Turtle Bay. We'll have to wait
and see.
The year ahead will have its share of tribulations, disappointments and
tragedies. But our future still remains in our hands. With courage, wisdom
and patience, we can continue to win the war against the enemies of freedom
so long as we remember who those enemies truly are.
Lawrence's comment submitted to FrontPageMag: Ignoring the subject "Freedom"
and substituting "The West," or "the U.S." we see we have never properly
identified our goal. "War against terror" is a misleading slogan. We must
ask what we are fighting against before we can determine whether we have
been successful or not. What comprises success in Iraq? If we seek a
proper definition of the enemy, we must use some term like "Militant Islam."
We must include in this term not only terrorist organizations, but the Rogue
States that threaten or war against the goals of the West. We are not the
world. Our standards are not universal.
Moving now to look at Iraq, I disagree with Mr. Klein as to what has been
accomplished there. While we would like for Iraq to become a Liberal
Democracy, it was always naive to think that could be accomplished. Since
we "broke it," we had to try and "fix it"; so why not try some form of
Democracy, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that this was not our
goal. Our goal was to remove a threat, a Rogue State led by a dictator who
embraced the Fascistic ideology called Baathism; which was loosely defined
by Saddam Hussein as a Pan-Arab conglomeration resembling the EU, headed by
Hussein and having good prospects of achieving the status of a world-power
just behind the U.S. and China and perhaps one day surpassing them. After
all, with the major reserves of the world oil under his control, how could
he be stopped? We forget that his initial invasion of Kuwait had that
ultimate goal in view.
Therefore, given this clearer objective, there is a clear-cut winner in
Iraq. We have thwarted a serious danger, a major Islamic Militant, a Rogue
State. They have been neutralized. It's too bad that we haven't been able
to accomplish something no one else has ever accomplished, i.e., get the
Sunnis and Shiites to quit fighting but that is another matter - a subset
under our war against Militant Islam. There may be no "clear-cut winners or
losers" in this subset, but let's not elevate the subset to the primary
goal. Surely we can see our goal in the Middle East more clearly than that.
Lawrence
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