Agents of Change

Since Howard Dean and the Democrats have been talking about winning back Congress, I thought we should take a look at what changes would happen as a result. Let's start with prosecuting the war in Iraq.

John Murtha wants us out of Iraq immediately. John Kerry wants our troops out by year's end. Ted Kennedy thinks that Iraq is Vietnam. President Bush and the Republican Congress want us to finish the job of standing up an Iraqi military capable of defeating the terrorists and putting down the insurgency. It seems to me that that's a stark contrast.

Kennedy should be forgiven since he hasn't had an original thought since the 60's. His bluster and his zeal have gotten him to where he is today. He's revered as "The great liberal lion" by the Agenda Media. He's reviled as a doddering old fool in the Heartland.

To those who've heard of him, Murtha is an anti-war nut who'd put America at risk because he's a cut-and-run 'hawk'. He's the guy that told Bill Clinton that we couldn't win militarily in Somalia. Sound familiar? He's the guy who's been lying almost as often as Joe Wilson, claiming that troop morale is low because they're "living hand to mouth" in Iraq and telling everyone that we're "the main targets" in a civil war. Let's examine those claims.

First, we could've won in Somalia had we had a president and Congress with a spine. It's insulting to think that the United States military couldn't have wiped out the tyrants in Mogadishu off the face of the earth.

Secondly, I wrote earlier about Mark Seavey lowered the boom on Murtha's "low morale claim in this speech:
“Yes sir my name is Mark Seavey and I just want to thank you for coming up here. Until about a month ago I was Sgt. Mark Seavey infantry squad leader. I returned from Afghanistan.

"Like yourself I dropped out of college two years ago to volunteer to go to Afghanistan, and I went and I came back. If I didn't have a herniated disk now I would volunteer to go to Iraq in a second with my troops, three of which have already volunteered to go to Iraq. I keep hearing you say how you talk to the troops and the troops are demoralized, and I really resent that characterization. (applause) The morale of the troops that I talk to is phenomenal, which is why my troops are volunteering to go back, despite the hardships they had to endure in Afghanistan.

"And Congressman Moran, 200 of your constituents just returned from Afghanistan. We never got a letter from you; we never got a visit from you. You didn't come to our homecoming. The only thing we got from any of our elected officials was one letter from the governor of this state thanking us for our service in Iraq, when we were in Afghanistan. That's reprehensible. I don't know who you two are talking to but the morale of the troops is very high."
John Kerry's foreign policy is to wish for the French and various Middle Eastern countries to help train the Iraqi military and to get our troops out of Iraq by year's end. Implicit in his 'policy' is that he doesn't think of an Iraqi democracy as a big deal, which is actually consistent. He's from the realist school all along. He's prioritized stability over liberty his entire career.

By expediting the extraction of our troops from Iraq, Kerry is abandoning the training of the Iraqi military, something that's vital to the establishment of a self-sufficient Iraqi democracy. That seems of little consequence to Kerry, who values popularity over doing the right thing.

Does this sound like the type of foreign policy that will protect us from terrorists? It sounds like showing them that we're spineless, the very impression they got when Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski touted a "let's all get along" foreign policy towards Iran, the same message that Bill Clinton sent by pulling out of Somalia and by not declaring war on al Qaida.

Furthermore, that type of cut-and-run attitude is the best way to tell our allies that we can't be relied on, that we aren't worth taking chances to help us. That's the failed foreign policy that we had with the last Democratic presidents. NO THANKS.

Carter and Clinton were miserable failures in foreign policy. Carter's military crashed in the desert because he shrunk the military so drastically that they didn't have the spare parts to even maintain a squad of helicopters. Clinton acted tough, by liberal standards anyway, by sending cruise missiles into Iraq in the dead of night and by leveling an aspirin factory in Sudan. He was impotent, however, in the aftermath of the Khobar Towers terrorist attack, the bombing of the African embassies and in not killing bin Laden when he had the chance.

Another foreign policy trait of a Democratic Congress would be to view the GWOT as mostly a police matter. It's worth noting that Democrats tried that in the 90's. That passivity was seen as spinelessness by bin Laden. Look what that bought us.

Contrast that with President Bush's aggressive prosecution of the GWOT on all fronts, using our intelligence assets, putting financial pressure on terrorist networks, bringing our vast military assets into the game while establishing democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which of those plans sounds like the more comprehensive plan? That answer is so obvious even a child could answer that.

And that's before we take into account their hostility towards the Patriot Act and the NSA intercept program. Remember that the Patriot Act is what tore down the wall between the CIA and law enforcement. Had we had the Patriot Act in 1998, we likely would've pinpointed the hijackers. We might've even prevented 9/11.

It's time that Republicans stopped acting like immigration and spending are the only important considerations to whether they'll vote this November. As I've just shown, those issues aren't the most important issues we must confront in this era of terrorism.

Cross-posted at California Conservative

Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006 11:35 AM

No comments.

Popular posts from this blog

March 21-24, 2016

October 31, 2007

January 19-20, 2012