Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a stern warning Saturday about the continuing U.S. role in Iraq, saying "there are no good options at this point and the worst days may be ahead of us." Albright, secretary of state under President Clinton, said the March 2003 invasion of Iraq has led to a series of misfortunes that should have been anticipated. "Instead of winning friends for America, it has poisoned our relations with many countries in the Mideast and the Muslim world," Albright told a conference on the role of citizens in shaping the nation's image abroad. Damn! And I thought "winning friends" is what it's all about.
"I think that if it were put to a vote, the Iraqi people might want the U.S. to stay for some period of time," Albright said. "What they don't want is a sense that we might be there forever." Many Iraqis are suspicious that the United States is occupying the country to assure itself access to Mideastern oil, she said.
| The Mad Hatter is just picking up the major talking point of the liberal Dems these days -- that our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan inspires terrorism, rather than freedom. She's right in one sense: al-Q and the other islamofascist groups have been sending their snuffies and stoops to Iraq, rather than to Europe and the USA. But the Dems are under the delusion, and a powerful delusion it is, that if we reduced our presence in Iraq this minute that the Iraqi people would settle down and run their country. We know differently: it would be the single event that would precipitate a civil war. The Sunnis would lose badly, the Shi'a would be bloodied badly, and the Kurds would try to break away, causing the Turks to try and whomp them. Lots of bloodshed and instability would result. This would suit the ANSWER and UPJ types just fine, because it would poison the message we've brought to the Middle East. No one would ever trust us again, and that's exactly what the left-liberals want, since they (like the Egyptians in the other article Fred is citing today) see us as the biggest danger to world peace. They want the US brought down a few pegs, and if it takes a few hundred thousand good people who used to trust, fine -- they did it in 1975 to the Vietnamese, and they can do it to the Iraqis. Make no mistake: the Mad Hatter and the people on the hard left who think like her want our country brought down. They can't say that so they resort to these sorts of sallies and coded phrases. They know what it means, and we have to make sure that we do too. |