See the Superpower Run!

[xiinfaniin]

See the Superpower Run

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan

 

No sooner had Sens. Hagel and Biden announced their resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that the Bush surge of 21,500 troops to Iraq was not in the national interest than the stampede was on. By day's end, Sens. Dodd, Clinton, Bayh, Levin and Obama and ex-Sen. John Edwards had all made or issued statements calling for reversing course or getting out.

 

You can't run a war by committee, said Vice President Cheney.

 

True. George Washington did not request a vote of confidence from the Continental Congress before crossing the Delaware, and Douglas MacArthur did not consult Capitol Hill before landing at Inchon.

 

But Congress is not trying to run a war. Congress is trying to get out of Iraq and get on record opposing the "surge." Congress is running after popular opinion.

 

And if the surge does not succeed in six months in quelling the sectarian violence in Baghdad, there will be no more troops, and the Americans will start down the road to Kuwait. And, unlike 2003, there will be no embedded and exhilarated journalists riding with them.

 

To the older generation, the American way of abandonment is familiar. JFK's New Frontiersmen marched us, flags flying, into Vietnam. But, as the body count rose to 200 a week, the "Best and Brightest" suddenly discovered this was a "civil war," "Nixon's war" and the Saigon regime was "corrupt and dictatorial." So, with a clean conscience, they cut off funds and averted their gaze as Pol Pot's holocaust ensued.

 

Our Vietnamese friends who did not make it out on the choppers, or survive the hellish crossing of the South China Sea by raft, wound up shot in the street or sent to "re-education camps."

 

Nouri al-Maliki can see what is coming.

 

As Condi flies about the Middle East in a security bubble, telling the press he is living on "borrowed time," and Bush tells PBS of his revulsion at the botched hanging of Saddam Hussein, Maliki is showing the same signs of independence he demonstrated when he refused Bush's invitation to dine with him and the King of Jordan. Give me the guns and equipment and go home, he seems to be saying to the White House.

 

Put me down on Maliki's side. It is he who is taking the real risk here – with his life. It is he who is likely to learn what Kissinger meant when he observed that in this world, while it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, to be a friend is fatal.

 

Will the surge work? Can it work? Certainly, adding thousands of the toughest cops in America to the LAPD would reduce gang violence in South Central. So, it may work for a time.

 

Yet in the long run it is hard to see how the surge succeeds. We are four years into this war, and the bloodletting in Baghdad is rising. Our presence has never been more resented. In America, the war has already been lost. Even Bush admits that staying the course means "slow failure." And a rapid withdrawal, as urged by the Baker-Hamilton commission, means "expedited failure."

 

Even should the surge succeed for a time, it may only push the inevitable into another year.

 

And consider what it is we are asking Maliki to do.

 

We want him to use Sunni and Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi Army, in concert with the US Army, to smash the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the most popular Shi'ite leader in the country and the principal political support of Maliki. We are asking Maliki to turn on his ruthless Shi'ite patron and bet his future on an America whose people want all US troops home, the earlier the better.

 

For Maliki to implement fully the US conditions would make him a mortal enemy of Moqtada and millions of Shi'ites, and possibly result in his assassination. Whatever legacy Bush faces, he is not staring down a gun barrel at that.

 

It is over. What we need to face now are the consequence of the folly of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice in launching this unnecessary and unprovoked war, the folly of the neocon snake oil salesmen who bamboozled the media into believing in this insane crusade to bring democracy to Baghdad in the belly of Bradley fighting vehicles and the folly of the Democratic establishment in handing Bush a blank check for war out of political fear of being called unpatriotic.

[Castro]

A little too fond of Buchanan lately, are we Xiinow? I can't blame you though. The man has been talking nothing but sense the past few years. It's hard to imagine this is the same man who, shortly before he announced he was running for president in 1995, said : "You just wait until 1996, then you'll see a real right-wing tyrant."

[xiinfaniin]

^^I doubt Buchanan repented from his previous stances on Immigration and Jews !

 

I once watched him debate intensely with an immigrant from Haiti! Still, the man talks and makes a lot of sense! He is a realist in his foreign policy outlook. He doesn’t like Muslims per se but he thinks our difference is substantive and real and he doesn’t buy Bush’s hallow talk about spreading democracy.

 

His keen observation of Israeli influence on American foreign policy turned out to be quite correct too.

 

Sadaqa wahuwa kaathib, I say !

[xiinfaniin]

The X Factor in 2008 – Iran.

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan.

 

After a weekend in which 29 Americans died and the 82nd Airborne deployed in Baghdad, what the Iraq war will mean to the politics of 2008 becomes clear.

 

Hillary Clinton's early Saturday announcement of her exploratory committee was brilliantly executed and captured front page, cable, and network coverage all weekend. But it was a decision forced upon her.

 

Barack Obama, the "rock star," has been poaching on Hillary's donor lists and offering Democrats, in the style of New York mayoral candidate John V. Lindsay in 1965 ("He is fresh, and they are all tired"), a post-Bush-Clinton-Bush politics that says, "Good-bye to all that."

 

John Edwards has pitched his tent in the Cindy Sheehan camp. The Sunday preceding Dr. King's birthday, he rose in New York City's Riverside Church, where King had denounced the Vietnam War, to decry President Bush's surge as "the McCain Doctrine," called for immediate withdrawal of 40,000-50,000 U.S. troops, and threw down the gauntlet to Hillary, declaring, "Silence is betrayal."

 

By midweek, Hillary was out with her own plan for redeployment.

 

The Democratic nominee will likely be one of these three. In every national or Iowa-New Hampshire poll, they are first, second, or third. But there is a wild card.

 

On Feb. 25, America will watch the Academy Awards, where the Oscar for best documentary will likely go to An Inconvenient Truth. If Al Gore wins the Oscar, addresses the nation for two minutes on global warming and the war, then appears on Oprah, Leno, Letterman, Stewart, and Colbert, a subsequent declaration of candidacy would put him in the top tier. And unlike Edwards and Hillary, Gore opposed the war in Iraq.

 

In the Democratic Party, the Iraq war is a lost cause that ought never to have been begun and any candidate who has not come to that position by February 2007 will not be in the hunt.

 

In the Republican Party, the war is less likely to bring about the unity Democrats will have achieved by year's end. For by summer's end, the surge will be over. While there may have been a temporary reduction in massacres by then, no one believes an additional 21,500 troops in a Texas-sized nation of 26 million can turn around a war Gen. Colin Powell says we "are losing" and Bush concedes "we are not winning."

 

Already, near a fifth of the Republicans in the Senate, including Chuck Hagel and presidential candidate Sam Brownback, have come out against the surge. The front-runners, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, however, still back the president.

 

But while McCain is far out in front in raising money and lining up support, he is also the single national figure, beyond Bush and Dick Cheney, most identified with the least popular war in U.S. history. If McCain wishes to be president, it would be best for him for this war to be in its final act, one way or the other, by 2008.

 

If the war has been lost by then, as many believe it is already, McCain can say: Rumsfeld lost it because he fought it the wrong way, and we shall never do that again. But if the war is still going on, it will be the issue of 2008, and it is hard to see America voting to continue or embrace the "McCain Doctrine" and escalate by sending in 100,000 more troops.

 

The GOP is thus looking at a situation in 2008 where the party will be as divided as Democrats were with Eugene McCarthy, Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy, and LBJ in 1968, while Democrats will be as united as the GOP was under Nixon. Had George Wallace, who got 13 percent, been out of the '68 race, Nixon would have won in a landslide.

 

Is there anything that might alter the course of events and affect the war picture by 2008? Indeed: a preemptive strike on Iran.

 

Should it occur, writes Wayne White, an intelligence officer at the State Department until 2005, "such action would likely involve not only taking out widely dispersed nuclear-related targets and nearby anti-aircraft defenses, but also portions of the Iranian air force assigned to defend these targets. And that's just for starters."

 

"In order to reduce Iran's ability to retaliate in the Persian Gulf, such a plan probably would also include taking out Iran's array of anti-ship missiles along the northern coast of the Gulf, its Kilo-class submarines, other naval assets, and even some targets related to Iran's long-range missile capacity."

 

Is such an attack being considered? Nick Burns, No. 3 at State, was at the Herzileah Conference this weekend. "Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon – there's no doubt about it," Burns told the Israelis. "The policy of the U.S. government is that we cannot allow Iran to become a nuclear weapons state."

 

Burns was cheered and echoed by ex-Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz: "The year of 2007 is the year of decisiveness. … The free world doesn't have the privilege to drag its feet on Iran and hope for best."

 

Democrats failed to stop this war. Can they stop the next one? Or do they suspect and support what they think is coming?

[xiinfaniin]

The Ideologue

 

by Patrick J. Buchanan.

Churchillian it was not. Yet the State of the Union seemed a success if Bush's purpose was to buy time from Congress to wait and see if his surge of US forces into Iraq might yet succeed.

 

But when Bush started to describe the ideological war we are in, one began to understand why we are in the mess we are in.

 

"This war," said Bush, "is an ideological struggle. ... To prevail, we must remove the conditions that inspire blind hatred and drove 19 men to get onto airplanes and to come to kill us."

 

But the "conditions" that drove those 19 men "to come to kill us" is our dominance of their world, our authoritarian allies, and Israel.

 

They were over here because we are over there.

 

If Bush is going to remove those "conditions," he is going to have to get us out of the Middle East. Is he prepared to do that? Of course not. Because Bush, believing the problem is not our pervasive presence but the lack of freedom in the Middle East, is waging his own ideological war to bring freedom in by force of arms, if necessary.

 

"What every terrorist fears most is human freedom – societies where men and women make their own choices."

 

Very American. But the truth is terrorists do not fear free societies, they flourish in them. The suicide bombers of 9/11, Madrid, and London all plotted their atrocities in free societies. From the Red Brigades, who murdered Italy's Aldo Mori, to the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, who tried to kill Al Haig, to the Basque ETA, the IRA and the Puerto Rican terrorists who tried to assassinate Harry Truman, free societies are where they do their most effective work.

 

Stalin's Russia and Nazi Germany had no trouble with terrorists.

 

"Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies," declared Bush. Oh? Explain, then, why 70 million Germans, under the most democratic government in their history, gave more than half their votes to Nazis and Communists in 1933? In every plebiscite he held, Hitler won a landslide. In the year of Anschluss and Munich, 1938, Hitler was Time's Man of the Year and far more popular than FDR, who lost 71 seats in the House.

 

During 2006, free Latin peoples brought to power anti-American Leftists Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and came close to electing their comrades Ollanta Humala in Peru and Andrés Manuel López-Obrador in Mexico.

 

In the free elections Bush demanded in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, the winners were the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas and Shi'ite militants with ties to Iran.

 

If a referendum were held in the Middle East on the proposition of the US military out and Israel gone, how does Bush think it would come out?

 

"So we advance our security interests by helping moderates, reformers and brave voices for democracy," said Bush. But how many of those "moderates" – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, Kuwait, the Gulf States – are ruled "by brave voices for democracy"?

 

Our Islamist enemies would likely endorse unanimously a Bush call for free elections in all those countries, as elections could not but help advance to greater power, at the expense of our friends, those same Islamist enemies.

 

What is Bush doing? The America that won the Cold War said ideology be damned, we stand by our friends.

 

"The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies," said Bush.

 

But if we bleed our country to give the men and women of the Middle East the freedom to choose the society they wish to live in, are we sure they will not choose a society where Sharia is law? In liberated Afghanistan, popular sentiment was behind beheading a Muslim who converted to Christianity.

 

What leads Bush to believe everyone wants to be like us? Is it not ideology?

 

To characterize "the totalitarian ideology" we confront, Bush quoted Osama bin Laden: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

 

This is the true mark of the true believer. But did not the Spain of Isabella want the "unbelievers" removed from "among us"? Did not Elizabeth I feel the same about Catholics?

 

"Give me liberty or give me death!" said Patrick Henry of the Brits remaining in this country that Brits had founded. "Live free or die!" is the motto of the great state of New Hampshire.

 

This is the heart of the war we are in. Americans believe in freedom first. Millions of Muslims believe in Islam first – submission to Allah. We decide for us. Do we also decide for them?

 

Perhaps the best advice we can give our Muslim friends in the Middle East is the hard advice Lord Byron gave the Greeks under the Islamic rule of Ottoman Turks:

 

Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not,

 

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?