Within the span of the past few weeks, the parliament of Kuwait has at long last granted women the right to vote (see here, here and here); the Ethiopian opposition has gained a significant number of new seats in elections to that nation’s parliament that were significantly more fair (though yet flawed) than any previous vote (see
here and here); for the first time in more than forty years Syrian oppositionists have been allowed to publish comments in Syria’s government-run newspaper in advance of reforms to be announced in early June; and yesterday the Lebanese people began electing a new parliament, the first in a quarter century not a mere puppet of the Syrian occupation. These salutary events are all the fruits of our intervention in Iraq, an extraordinarily successful strategic operation which has altered the political dynamics across the Middle East and beyond. (For more, see Epiphany below). Millions of lives are being transformed for the better, against difficult odds and to our ultimate benefit. The one crucial catalyst for all these amazing reactions is the war to liberate Iraq.
Yet in a bizarre commentary two weeks ago in USA Today, leftist congressmen Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) and Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) declared that it is “time for US to withdraw” from Iraq, and declared their intention of introducing legislation forcing withdrawal in the near future. Indeed, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and 29 co-sponsors (all predictable, all Democrats) have already introduced Congressional Resolution 35, which declares it the sense of Congress that “the President should develop and implement a plan to begin the immediate withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq.” The “analysis” Abercrombie and Kusinich propound for their doctrine of immediate and unconditional surrender to FascIslam is of some interest.
Abercrombie and Kusinich begin by drawing an analogy and posing a rhetorical question: “Forty-one months after the United States entered World War II, we had achieved victory in Europe. We’ve been in Iraq for over half that period. What reasonable person would say we have reached the halfway point in Iraq?”
Of course, almost any reasonable person with an objective mind would have to conclude that we are well past the halfway point in Iraq. There is a sovereign, democratically elected government in an independent, liberated Iraq which still requires our help to survive the mass onslaught of FascIslamists of several variant strains. But it grows increasingly strong, its opposition grows increasingly divided, and the emerging new democracy will ultimately destroy those terrorist forces. Even Abu Musab al Zarqawi confessed this candidly in his letter to Osama bin Laden.
We must take Zarqawi, wounded or not, at his words, and understand that he really does love death, not life. He shall have it, and we will give it to him.
But as for their analogy, Abercrombie and Kusinich rather predictably miss the point. Our war against FascIslam, of which the intervention in Iraq is an integral and vital strategic element, is far more comparable to the long struggle of the Cold War, with its 44-year duration, than it is to the relatively brief period of intense fighting that characterized World War II. Even at that, it is disingenuous to date the war, as Abercrombie and Kusinich do, only from the point of America’s belated involvement. It began in Europe in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland, not in December 1941, and in Asia arguably a decade earlier with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.
Abercrombie and Kusinich then rapidly prop up and instantly tear down a straw man argument that “the military occupation of Iraq will not turn Iraq into a democratic nation.” But Iraq is not under “military occupation,” having a sovereign elected government which has repeatedly indicated that it wishes us to remain until they are able to assure their own security. And while no one believes that armed intervention is a sufficient means for creating democracy in Iraq or anywhere else, there can be no doubt that in Iraq it was a necessary means: a sine qua non.
Abercrombie and Kusinich further argue that there is “no clear way to measure success,” that “Iraq is a quagmire,” and that “it has become a recruiting poster for Osama bin Laden.”
It would be more accurate to describe Iraq as the killing ground of the FascIslamic jihad., a magnet drawing the most virulent elements from surrounding states and expunging them. Iraq is a quagmire, not for us, but for FascIslam. In Zarqawi’s memorable word, democracy is “suffocating” them. The clear measure of success can be discerned from Libya to Lebanon, in Kuwait and Syria and Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Palestine and beyond.
Abercrombie and Kusinich don’t think, they “feel this course, with its echoes of Vietnam, is unsustainable,” and that it “jeopardizes the strategic interests of the United States.”
But the only echo of Vietnam is in the empty fevered minds of obsessive boomer congressmen. In Vietnam, after 58,000 American lives were sacrificed to achieve victory, the American Congress demanded an ignominious unilateral surrender – an act of caprice which condemned millions to death, exile or enslavement across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. We must not surrender in Iraq.
Abercrombie and Kusinich also “feel” that our engagement in Iraq “alienates allies in the Muslim world and elsewhere.” Assuredly, millions in UN administered oil-for-“food” bribes separated a few of our “allies” from us. Many others remain paralyzed by fear of confronting FascIslam, too obsequious or complacent to act with fortitude. Still others have yet to comprehend the threat to our very existence as free nations.
But the most important reason that the United States is hated and despised throughout much of the Muslim world has nothing to do with our present policies, and everything to do with the policies to which Abercrombie and Kusinich would have us return. The US is despised for hypocrisy, and for perceived weakness – the heritage of decades during which we professed belief in freedom and democracy, while our ‘realists’ leadership sought accommodation with dictators in pursuit of an illusory ‘stability.’ It is precisely that policy, and not the revolutionary Bush doctrine of consonant words and deeds, advocacy and action, which failed to secure our interests or stability or peace. It is that policy which led to a 444-day hostage crisis in Iran, to a precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon and Somalia, to a premature ending of the first Gulf War, and to our tolerance for human rights abuse in dictatorships from Iraq and Syria to Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
We cannot afford a return to the failed policies of the past to satisfy the limited awareness of the likes of Abercrombie and Kusinich.
These are just not serious people.