Speaking of Shallow
01 March 2006 11:00 am by Taylor Marsh
Speaking of Shallow
Exhibit A: this headline from the Wall Street Journal's “featured article,”
by Hoover Institute fellow Victor Davis Hanson.
At
War With Ourselves
We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.
Mr. Hanson talks about “the second-guessing of 2003 still
daily obsesses us.”
The only one around here obsessing seems to be Karl Rove over
Hillary Clinton. As for me, I'm not worried about 2003. I'm more concerned about
2006 and a plan to draw down in Iraq. Evidently, that's just too much for Mr.
Hanson.
So since the Wall Street Journal and Mr. Hanson are too shallow
to admit reality, not to mention write about it, I've got a good old fashioned,
all American news flash: President Bush has already lost at home. You'd think
they be paying closer attention to this fact.
It's not the president's poll numbers.
It's not the out of touch insult of Bush's Dubai port deal.
It's not even that Bush's incompetence lost a whole city in the
Mississippi Delta.
It's the abject incompetence of President Bush that is playing
out in newspapers, cable and across the Internets. In other words, who are the American people going to believe, the Wall Street Journal and Mr. Hanson, or their lying eyes?
Not even Republicans want any part of the president today, with
everyone from Peter King to Susan Collins to Trent Lott miffed at Bush's veto
threat, because the president's too arrogant to ask for advice or consent on something as critical
as handing over port management to a country tied to 9/11.
But seriously, “we're winning in Iraq”?
How shallow can you get? Let me tell you. The Wall Street Journal
and Mr. Hanson believe that Secretary Rumsfeld didn't welcome the war and that
our soldiers are still gung ho for this war.
If many are determined to see the Iraqi
war as lost without a plan, it hardly seems so to 130,000 U.S. soldiers still
over there. They explain to visitors that they have always had a design: defeat
the Islamic terrorists; train a competent Iraqi military; and provide requisite
time for a democratic Iraqi government to garner public support away from
the Islamists.(snip)
The secretary of defense, like officers in Iraq, did
not welcome the war, but felt that it needed to be fought and will be won.
Soldiers and civilian planners express confidence in eventual success, but
with awareness of often having only difficult and more difficult choices after
Sept. 11. Put too many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we earn the wages
of imperialism, or create a costly footprint that is hard to erase, or engender
a dependency among the very ones in whom we wish to ensure self-reliance.
Yet deploy too few troops, and instability arises in Kabul and Baghdad, as
the Islamists lose their fear of American power and turn on the vulnerable
we seek to protect.In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our
planners in Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over
the war–not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning
in the field, the more we are losing it at home.
Evidently, the Wall Street Journal and Mr. Hanson have joined Bush and Bill
Kristol's political Disneyland. They're totally out of touch, but really, we're “winning in Iraq”? Talk about shallow. They're not even reading Fukuyama anymore!
