Failure Is Not An Option

'The Crucifixion (detail)' by Matthias Grünewald ca. 1515, Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar

 

"Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States. The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life." President Bush, Wednesday, January 10 2007.

Can you say it anymore clearly than that? No, of course you can't. But who is listening?

Nobody!

To those, who realize the need for us to remain in Iraq in order to push back at the Islamofascists, the President is preaching to the already converted. And according to the ostriches among us, he merely continues with his 'fear/war-mongering' and 'sable-rattling' so as to divert attention away from the no longer so secret agenda of turning the United States of America into a fascist dictatorship, or, depending on whether our ostrich got up on the wrong side of the bed, into a evangelical theocracy.

So, no mileage there. Period.

And period again. That's the problem. No matter the eloquence, no matter how persuasive the logic and arguments, the opposition has long abandoned any interest in reason. Were it not so, the safety of unconditional hatred would have to be abandoned, which is of course much too inconvenient, for it is tantamount to popping out the pacifier from a baby's mouth.

The alternative?

As always, leading by example. Back in November I quoted Thomas Barnett admonishing the entire administration for their lack of imagination and flexibility and calling for the creation of a new organization which is able to fulfil our promise most ordinary Iraqis have been hoping and waiting for: freedom from oppression and dictatorship.

Yesterday, the President took Professor Barnett's advice:

We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas – where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny.

Which makes it all the more important to properly understand Tom Barnett's vision, so don't miss part-1 and part-2 of the upcoming ten-part series of interviews specifically aimed at explaining it all to us on Hugh Hewitt's show.

We can whip traditionally echelon arrayed opponents, conventional militaries. But then we come under the gun in the insurgency. So again, we’ve got a first half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game, and our enemies are smart enough to know I’m not going to fight the first half team, that tremendous war fighting force. I’m going to wait until the Americans go into peacekeeping mode, and then I’m going to kill two or three a day, and that’s how I’m going to drive them out. [...]

We lived in kind of hedgehog times in the Cold War, you know, the hedgehog knows one big thing, the fox knows many things. Well, knowing one big thing in the Cold War was enough. You know, containment, mutual assured destruction, let the Soviets size our forces. We discovered on 9/11 we’re not living in a hedgehog world anymore. You’ve got to deal with multiple players, multiple types of players, multiple regions, you know, all sorts of dynamics involving economics and other things. It is a complex world. It requires complex explanations. But I believe it’s essential that we raise a generation of not only informed citizens, but frankly a generation in the national security community of real strategists, real grand strategists, people who think about war within the context of everything else, not just war within the context of war, but within everything else we call globalization, because we’ve outsourced the job of grand strategies to journalists, and op-ed columnists, and that’s just not doing the job.

The left has long failed to set the political course by clearly stating and subsequently adhering to conviction and instead outsourced not only 'grand strategies' to the MSM, but their entire leadership, which is why the Democrats can't make up their mind. If you define your political messages only after polling exhaustively, you'll never lead decisively. Jonah Goldberg elaborates:

Americans are torn between two irreconcilable positions on the Iraq war. Some want the war to be a success — variously defined — and some want the war to be over. Conservatives are basically, but not exclusively, in the "success" camp. Liberals (and those further to the left) are basically, but not exclusively, the "over" party. And many people are suffering profound cognitive dissonance by trying to believe these two positions can be held simultaneously. The motives driving these various positions range from the purely patriotic to the coldly realistic to the cravenly political or psychological perfervid. Parsing motives is exhausting and pointless, but one fact remains: "End it now" and "win it eventually" cannot be reconciled. [...]

With last night's speech, President Bush made it clear that he will settle for nothing less than winning it. He may be deluding himself, and his plan may not work, but he at least has done the nation the courtesy of saying what his position is, despite an antagonistic political establishment and a hostile public. What is maddening is that the Democratic leadership cannot, or will not, clearly tell the American people whether they are the party of "end it" or "win it."

Bush came up with the "surge" plan. Will it work? Nobody knows. But the one thing the American people know about George W. Bush is that he wants to win the war. What the Democrats believe is anybody's guess.

And judging by this morning's raid on the Iranian consulate in Irbil (Northern Iraq), the President is clearly sending a powerful message to both Iran and Syria, backing up his promise to lift restrictions on our troops with immediate actions on the ground; the only language the murdering thugs understand and respect.

2007 will surely be a decisive year, and my friend Michelle Malkin of all people knows that. One helluva brave lady. Stay safe my friend.

Comments

[Gang of One]

Has anyone been paying attention to the US raid on the Iranian consulate in northern Iraq? Things seem to be getting more interesting. Rick Moran has a post:

1/11/2007
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND
CATEGORY: War on Terror, Iran

In a move that is sure to cause a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth around the world – illegal though it was but OH MY GOD SO SATISFYING! – American forces raided the Iranian consulate in northern Iraq just hours after the President’s speech:

U.S. troops raided an Iranian consulate in northern Iraq late Wednesday night and detained several people, Iran’s main news agency reported today, prompting protests from Tehran just hours after President Bush pledged to crack down on the Islamic Republic’s role in Iraqi violence.

Iran released news of the raid through its Islamic Republic News Agency in a dispatch that was broadly critical of Bush’s plan to deploy about 21,500 additional troops to Iraq.

The IRNA report said that U.S. forces entered the Iranian consulate in Irbil, in Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated north, and seized computers, documents and other items. The report said five staff members were taken into custody.

Read the rest of it here:
http://www.rightwingnuthouse.com

[Ernesto Ribeiro]

Alexandra, also there's that ones who pretend never listen anything. Dissimulation and self-cheating among Dhimmicrats always works, even it's just a strategy in order to win elections and soon change the plans: such as "impeachment" turns to "it's off the table."

THAT'S THE 6 UNFORGIVABLE SINS OF GEORGE W BUSH:

1 – In 2001, he didn’t attack Islamism as the real enemy in 11 of September. Nothing did for stop the islamfascists of ACLU and CAIR destroy christianism and force the students to swallow the Islamic shit in the classrooms. And still permits islamonazists publications which prepare the war against the population disseminated by the Saudi Arabia in libraries of mosques, streets and bookstores for American muslims, preaching the destruction of America with anti-American antichristian, anti-Jewish, misogynistic, jihadist and supremacist ideology. Obvious: Bush family has oil business with the Saudi real family. Can we trust in a leader sharing interests with the enemy?

2 – In 2002, he didn’t denounce the responsibility of the government Clinton for CIA errors that enabled the 11 of September. The investigator of the Department of Defense that was following a trail that would have avoided the attack, the lieutenant-colonel Tony Shaffer, simply was prevented of pass the information to the FBI, that like this could not dismantle the Al-Qaeda cell. It stopped why? Because former president Clinton centralized the straight control of all the organs of security and blocked deliberately the communications among them. CIA, FBI and other agencies then were driving parallel inquiries about the illegal funds of given campaign to the candidate Clinton by the Chinese army one and the subsequent favors that the very grateful president lent to the service of Chinese espionage. Without exchange of information, the investigators did not be able to join the threads of the story line.

3 – In 2003, he did not announce that the weapons of destruction of Saddam Hussein were found. They are more of 500 – enough for kill for poisoning the inhabitants of some twenty American cities. Republican senator Rick Santorum, using of the privileges of the Freedom of Information Act, obtained from the military secret service the complete relation. Reporter Richard Miniter already to have revealed the existence of those weapons, in its book "Disinformation: 22 Average Myths that Undermine the War on Terror". The strange point in the episode is that senator Santorum has had of pull out by force an information that Bush government should be screaming in all the media.

4 – In 2004, he did not condemn UNO by the scandal of corruption in the Oil by Food Program, involving Saddam Hussein and Koffi Annan and his son Kojo, and the governments of countries as France, Russia, Germany, China... and others crimes of the UNO, that became the worst enemy of the U.S.A. by the simple fact that it shelters or protects all the anti-American and terrorist dictatorships in its Commissions.

5 – In 2005, he did not defend himself neither attacked the Democrats responsible by the calamity of the hurricane Katrina: the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, and the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin.

6 – AND in 2006, was discovered that he, as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) signed an agreement for dissolve the borders between the U.S.A., Canada and the Mexico, practically eliminating the American nation as an independent political unit. The idea already was old, but then a citizen appealed to the Freedom of Information Act, obliging the government it divulge the documents about the matter. Then already there was conservatives openly calling Bush "treacherous". The report can be read in the site http://cfr.org.

[Jeremayakovka]

Relying on the word "war" to describe Iraq gives opponents of our work there an easy out. The missions to kill or apprehend terrorist banditos are just one part of what's going on and what's at stake. Stabilizing society there, prodding it with carrots and sticks to bring it into the sphere of free nations, is another. Isolating (hopefully (!)) Iran and bring about a new order there. These factors require a kind of calculating common sense, one which should be at the top of media and pundit discourse on the subect, and which is not.

(See also Edward Luttwak's recent WSJ op-ed (subs. only), "Two Alliances":
http://tinyurl.com/yfe7uh )

[MinorRipper]

Not sure if everyone has seen these videos of the US military in Iraq or not, but they are pretty amazing: Hopefully our 'surge' will not include too many of these types...
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2006/12/winning-hearts-and-minds-part-three.html