Jihadi Du Jour: Amateur Experts or Professional Fools?

Thomas Sowell writes at Townhall.com:

Sometimes I feel as if I must be one of the few people left in America who is not a military expert.

For example, all sorts of politicians have been talking about all sorts of ways we ought to “redeploy” our troops. The closest I ever came to deploying troops was marching a company of Marines to the mess hall for chow.

But people who have never even put on a uniform are confident that they know how our troops should be redeployed. Maybe this is one of the fruits of the “self-esteem” that is taught in our schools instead of education.

The biggest flurry of amateur military pronouncements occurred just before General David Petraeus testified before Congress on the situation in Iraq. Many Democrats publicly dismissed what he said before he said it, and some implied that he was a liar before he opened his mouth.

The real problem is that many Democrats have bet the rent money on an American defeat in Iraq, and without that defeat they could find themselves in big trouble in the 2008 elections.

Politically, the Democrats are caught between Iraq and a hard place. Their left-wing base has been angrily pressing them to cut off financial support for the war in Iraq but Congressional Democrats dare not outrage the rest of the country by doing that.

Leaders of the Democrats in Congress have already tried various ways of sabotaging the war effort, with arbitrary timetables for withdrawal and financing the war for only short periods, so that President Bush would be forced to pull out American troops and could then be blamed for the defeat.

But that hasn’t worked either because not enough Democrats in Congress are willing to risk political suicide by obstructing the military in ways too blatant to pass muster with the public.

Regardless of one’s feelings about the righteousness or ilegality of the current Iraq War, the fact remains that once we are already fighting it we must succeed for the sake of the Iraqis themselves, for the sake of the Middle East as a whole, for the sake of world peace and for America’s sake. Any idiot, who even attempts to use whatever grey matter resides in his/her cranium, knows that you do not announce to the enemy the date when you plan to stop fighting regardless of consequences. War, like any fight, depends on the element of surprise if the enemy is to be vanquished. What then does the current debate suggest that the Democrats want? It is certainly obvious by now, their greatest dread is a for the US to succeed in propping up the Iraqi national forces to allow them to take over. Were such success visible, it would be the death knell of the Democrat Party, their hopes would be dashed for 2008 and far beyond.

The next best thing politically for the Democrats is to say that the situation is hopeless. The last thing they need to hear is that there is now some progress in Iraq.

Not only is General Petraeus reporting progress, so have a couple of Brookings Institution scholars who have studied the situation in Iraq — and who are liberal Democrats who had worked for Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

Progress does not mean inevitable victory, much less quick victory. Nor is it easy to define what “victory” would mean in the messy circumstances of Iraq.

One of most realistic of all the insightful statements by General Petraeus was that “We are not going to kill our way” out of the problems in Iraq.

There has never been a moment when anyone in Congress, the White House, or the military has ever advocated anything other than getting out when the time is right.

All the arguments, the rhetoric, and the shouting is about when is the time right.

Nobody thinks American troops have to stay in Iraq until the last terrorist is killed or driven out of the country. It is a question of reaching the point where the Iraqis themselves can deal with the terrorist and other problems of their country without American troops.

That is the direction in which the Iraqis seem to be moving already. It is not that we have “won the hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people.

The foreign terrorists — whom our media still insist on calling “insurgents” — have turned both Sunnis and Shi’ites against them with their barbaric attacks on innocent civilians.

You cannot be an “insurgent” in somebody else’s country by killing the people of that country.

Those who warn that Iraq could be “another Vietnam” need to get their history straight about Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government continued to defend itself against military invasion from the north after American troops withdrew.

Only after congressional politicians pulled the rug out from under them by cutting off financial aid, while their enemies were still receiving financial aid from other countries, did South Vietnam fall to the invaders.

Only similar congressional sabotage, in response to similar left-wing supporters, can make Iraq another Vietnam.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy

The MSM and the interests who pull its leash should have the courage of their convictions and stop the inane platitudes to disguise their real intentions. There was a time when I proudly proclaimed my membership in the Democrat Party, instead today it was taken over by a new breed, a breed who cares little for America, a breed who cares little for the free world, but expends all its effort in trying to perpetuate themselves in power. The personal attacks on General Petraeus are, thus, political in nature. When you can not destroy the other guy’s arguments, you destroy that other guy instead through lies, innuendos and all types of of insinuations which no bearing or relation to the facts.

These politicians are realizing they embraced the wrong cause or, at least, they attacked the war the wrong way, they went too far. They let their fantasies take over their intellect. Now they must choose between keeping their place in Congress or betraying the country. Alas, they chose betrayal!

These politicians are not “amateur experts.” Even an “amateur expert” knows when he/she is pursuing a failing policy. They are opportunists of the worst kind, who just got trapped by their own game. The sheep who blindly support them without the slightest understanding of the circumstances, without looking at the long term consequences of these policies are merely fools, yet brilliantly professional in their idiocy!

Chaim

Crossposted at Freedom's Cost