
 |
|
March 19, 2010
JWisdom.com Stewards of sacrifice
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Why Obama is waging war on Israel
March 18, 2010
JWisdom.com Love me not?
with Rabbi David Aaron (5 minutes)
Jonathan Rosenblum: Washington Throws a Tantrum
March 17, 2010
JWisdom.com How to perform a miracle
with Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair (4 minutes)
Anne Bayefsky: Behind Obama's Dangerous Overreaction on Israel
March 15, 2010
JWisdom.com Moody, Grumpy, Irritable Children
with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
JWisdom.com Manufacturing mediums
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (4 minutes)
Glenn Garvin: Conspiracy theories, why people believe them and how they spread
JWisdom.com For Yourself, Not By Yourself
with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Paul Richter: Biden promises 'viable Palestine' is in the offing
March 10, 2010
JWisdom.com How To Get A (Real) Life
with Rabbi Warren Goldstein ( EXTENDED EPISODE)
Paul Richter: Israel exerts soverign right to its capital as Biden looks on astounded
March 9, 2010
JWisdom.com Free To Be (Responsibly) You and Me!
with Rabbi Naftali Brawer ( 8 MINUTES)
David G. Savage: Supreme Court to rule on free speech in case of soldier's funeral
March 8, 2010
JWisdom.com Finding or Losing Yourself? Here's How!
with Rabbi David Aaron ( 5 MINUTES)
Steven Emerson: America must learn from the UK about the future of Islamist subversion
March 5, 2010
JWisdom.com The Limits of Eternity
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 MINUTES)
March 4, 2010
JWisdom.com Using Things, Loving People
with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff ( 7 MINUTES)
March 3, 2010
JWisdom.com Grasping The Name of Your Life Game
with Rabbi Warren Goldstein ( 8 MINUTES)
March 2, 2010
March 1, 2010
JWisdom.com Whole in One
with Rabbi David Aaron ( 5 MINUTES)
Michael Muskal: Hillary meets with Israeli official, discusses gefilte fish dispute
Feb. 26, 2010
JWisdom.com A Biblical Secret for a More Powerful You
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 MINUTES)
Feb. 25, 2010
JWisdom.com The Second Most Important Question in Your Life
with Rabbi Yehoshua Karsh ( 5 MINUTES)
Seema Mehta : U.S.-Israel relations raised in California's Senate race --- by conservatives
Feb. 24, 2010
Feb. 23, 2010
JWisdom.com The Last Laugh of Enlightenment
with Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair ( 5 MINUTES)
Feb. 22, 2010
JWisdom.com Esther and the third Truth with Rabbi David Aaron ( 9 MINUTES)
Feb. 19, 2010
JWisdom.com Olympic Faith
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 MINUTES)
Caroline B. Glick: Israel and the West are perpetrators of a myth that endangers the Jewish State
Feb. 18, 2010
JWisdom.com A Wedding Disaster to Remember
with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein ( 3 MINUTES)
Feb. 17, 2010
JWisdom.com Think your life is messed up?
with Rabbi David Aaron ( 11 MINUTES)
Greg Logan: 'Greatest Jewish sporting event of all time since David versus Goliath' may be postponed because of bar mitzvah
Feb. 16, 2010
JWisdom.com Feet On The Street Spirituality
with Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 8 MINUTES)
Marty Peretz: Let Europe Mind Its Own Business. It Brings Nothing To The Table Save For Mischief
Feb. 15, 2010
JWisdom.com Are Our Children Really Ours?
with Rabbi Mordechai Becher ( 5 MINUTES)
Susan King: 'Wolf Man' reflected writer's wartime Jewish experience
|
| |
Jewish World Review
March 21, 2007
/ 2 Nissan, 5767
Iraq war politics four years on
By
Tony Blankley
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
For anyone with a taste for often malicious and usually incompetent war politics, the last four years have been a banquet with the table now, in its fifth year, even more heavily laden.
As an early and continuing strong supporter of President Bush's war effort, I nonetheless regularly have criticized his administration's inept communications and war fighting strategies particularly in the years 2004-2006. Along with many others, I was both exasperated and puzzled by the gap between the magnitude of the president's bold enterprise and the stingy assignment of material resources (men and material), and diplomatic energy with which he provisioned it. Also historically noteworthy has been the painfully slow learning curve, non-instinct for experimentation and the stubborn inflexibility of their strategy and tactics in the face of evident shortcomings.
But what was perhaps most inexplicable (because most easily remedied) was the administration's dead-in-the-water communications effort to explain the war to the public in the face of continuing malicious and dishonest criticism from the war critic. From the spring of 2002, the president had made a persuasive geo-political argument for war of which the threat from weapons of mass destruction was only one part.
But when he decided to go to the United Nations in the fall of 2002, WMDs was the only topic the United Nations considered relevant (because it was the only subject of Iraqi-violated U.N. resolutions). By failing to loudly, publicly and remorselessly reiterate the broader purposes of the war (as President Bush ably laid out just once at his February 2003 American Enterprise Institute speech), he permitted WMDs to be seen by the public as the only reason for the war.
From the fall of 2003, once it had become clear that Saddam's WMD program had been at least temporarily put on the back burner before the war, the Bush White House passively permitted itself to be pummeled by anti-war critics and most of the national and international press literally for years with no vigorous media effort to publicly revivify the broader purposes of the war.
Although the Republican Party has a historically unprecedentedly deep bench of renowned and very credible foreign and military policy experts, no effort was made to organize and rally these experts to get into the media both here and in Europe to help re-shape the debate. The Bush White House has paid a terrible price for this failure to reach out to its friends a result, no doubt, of its astonishingly insular and unjustifiably cocky disposition on all matters both substantive and procedural.
Nonetheless, for all their mismanagement of a still vital and noble struggle, the Bush team has better served our cause than has the Democratic Party served its interests in its near unanimous opposition to the war recently. Theirs has been the most blatantly unprincipled war opposition short of treason in living memory and the Democratic Party is likely to pay a fearsome price at the polls for a generation.
Their national defense policy, "if such a farrago of myopic expedience and folly can be so described" (a phrase used by Christopher Tyerman on a different issue) amounts to neither supporting the war effort nor admitting that they prefer to live with the consequences of its failure. There is an honorable (if, I believe, foolhardy) case to be made for the proposition that the price to our national interest of defeat is less than the price of persisting in the war effort. The Democrats are too cowardly to make that case.
So they consciously try to fool the public into thinking that the war objectives (of a stable neutral or friendly Iraq that is not a continuing threat to American security) is more likely to be achieved by our promptly giving up than by our staying. They argue with a straight face that the current Iraqi politicians (I hesitate to call them a government) would succeed in gaining order if only they were not supported by 150,000 American troops. No serious person believes that.
From severe war critic Gen. Anthony Zinni to the liberal Brookings Institute the danger of defeat and withdrawal is recognized and accepted. Absent American military support, the Iraqi politicians would promptly flee not govern. And then regional (if not broader) hell would break out.
The political irony is that for the Democratic Party, their best hope for electoral triumph in 2008 is for things to stay about the same in Iraq. If things should get better if the re-enforcements (aka: surge) permit the emergence of a genuine Iraqi government that gains popular confidence that suppresses the worst of the sectarian violence the Democrats will be seen as having been needlessly defeatist and will be trounced in the next election.
And if things get much worse in Iraq and the Middle East, their evident zest for defeat and total absence of either an instinct or a policy for American national security is not likely to induce trust in an American voting public then facing a much more dangerous and unraveling world. Democratic Party cynicism may be a good starter but it will be a bad finisher.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
Archives
© 2007, Creators Syndicate
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Michael Barone
Dave Barry
Tony Blankley
Andy Borowitz
David Broder
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
John Fund
Frank J. Gaffney
Lloyd Garver
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Lewis Grossberger
Victor Davis Hanson
Froma Harrop
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Laura Ingraham
Cheri Jacobus Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Dick Morris
Bill O'Reilly
Jim Mullen
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Jonathan Rauch
Celia Rivenbark
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Culture Shlock
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
Gary Brookins
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holber
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Ranan R. Lurie
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Ed Stein
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

How 2
Lori Borgman
Elder matters
Fixit
Dr. Peter Gott
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Tech Maven
Every Monday Matters
Nutrition Myths
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
How Stuff Works
|