Excellent opinion piece on NRO that expresses pretty much the same ideas I've had about the war in Iraq for some time. The one thing we cannot allow is any further involvement by the State Department in trying to create an Iraqi government - even a State Department under Condoleeze Rice. They just screw things up!
Like many conservatives, I think President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein was a brave, right, and necessary decision, and an essential part of a much larger war we have no choice but to fight and winthe global, 21st-century war against Islamofascist supremacy and terror. And like many conservatives, I think the Bush administration handled the invasion of Iraq brilliantly, but made an awful mess of the post-invasion period.
In 2003, 2004, and 2005 (three timeshere, here, and here), I argued with increasing urgency that to win the post-invasion battle, we needed to take three big, bold steps. In 2006, as the bloodshed in Iraq persisted and the regional situation deteriorated, I stopped criticizing our policies in Iraq for the same reason many other conservatives have lately been reluctant to do so: for fear of adding weight to a Leftist alternative that is even worse. Of course we can't just cut and run in Iraq. We must make a serious effort to salvage what we can. But whatever the outcome there, we confront a greater danger in Iran now, and we must do all we can to make sure Americans don't draw the wrong conclusions about what our mistakes in Iraq were and who made themconclusions that will make us too timid to save ourselves from the Iranian menace that looms before us today.
The surest way to draw those wrong conclusions would be to accept the analysis of the rebel generals currently baying for our Defense secretary's head, because the three mistakes they harp on aren't mistakes at all, and the three big mistakes we really did make weren't made by Donald Rumsfeld. They are the mistakes of the State Department, the CIA, and the rebel generals themselves, along with two other mistake-prone groups David Frum rightly added to my April 30 list in May 2004: "the British Foreign Office," and "most of the better-known foreign policy pundits." But it was John O'Sullivan in a National Review piece later that same May who put the responsibility for all our major decisions in Iraqthe winning ones and the losing onessquarely where it belongs: on the shoulders of the man in charge, the man who tried to have it both ways, our president.
RUMSFELDS PLAN WAS RIGHT
The rebel generals and their think-alikes claim mistake number one was inadequate planning for the post-invasion period. Rumsfeld and his allies in Vice President Cheney's office didn't think we needed elaborate, bureaucratic American plans; they thought we needed to empower strong Iraqi leaders right away, and they were right. Our first big mistake was to bypass Rumsfeld and our Iraqi National Congress allies, and turn the occupation over to Paul Bremer, an arrogant, appeasement-minded State-CIA type who treated our INC allies with contempt, and courted divisive, greedy, and openly hostile Iraqi elements with a condescending and ineffectual mix of small carrots and smaller sticks.
Rumsfeld and his supporters wanted to put the leaders of the INC in full charge of a forceful Iraqi transition government with all the powers necessary to create the pre-conditions for democracy: order and hope. To that end, they needed to de-Baathify the country aggressively, tame or eliminate violent Shiite militias, repair critical infrastructure, get oil revenue flowing again, and see to it that every peaceful Iraqi citizen got a check for his share of it. That's what secular Shiites like Ahmed Chalabi, secular Sunnis like Mithal al-Alusi, and their Kurdish INC partners wanted to do, and we should have backed them, without ambivalence or apology, with our full military might.
Afterwards, we should have given them whatever additional time they needed to gradually work out and apply a new set of rules for their own Iraqi brand of democracy. Instead, we put a camera-hogging American civilian in charge and let him waste a critical year in a vain attempt to placate foreign Sunni despots as well as hostile Iraqi Sunni and Shiite groups by micromanaging a long drawn-out "process" that was supposed to lead to an all-inclusive Iraqi democracy but in fact led only to disorder, distrust, and growing sectarian violence.
STRENGTH, NOT SENSITIVITY
Our second big mistake was not, as the rebel generals insist, a lack of "sensitivity"either to their demands for a vast increase in the number of American troops deployed, or to the finer nuances of Iraqi culture. It was our failure to recognize irredeemable Iraqi enemies as such, and to take bold, decisive military action against them, and especially, against their leaders. It was a mistake to negotiate with the brutal Baathist generals behind the Sunni mob that lynched American civilians in Fallujah; we should have wiped them out. It was a mistake to let the vicious, Iranian-backed Shiite mob leader, Moqtada al Sadr, live, after he sent his thugs out to maim and kill our troops.
Quick, crushing military action against men like these would have sent the right message to all our Iraqi enemies, Sunni and Shiite alike: Violent resistance is immediately fatal and ultimately futile. A clear, consistent message like that could have saved many American, Iraqi, and Coalition lives down the road, and won us what we needed most: the respect of ordinary Iraqis, reassured to see clear limits emerge in their new and uncertain world. Hearts and minds would have followed.
Instead, Bremer and his civiliansjoined by a group of military officers who embraced the fashionably debilitating cliché that "there is no military solution"repeatedly reined in our frustrated fighting men. Time and again, these walking Rumsfeld antitheses snatched defeat from the jaws of victories our soldiers and marines were poised to win. Time and again, they forced our men to pause or retreat while they made vain, on-again, off-again attempts to win the hearts and minds of committed enemies. What they won was contempt, and a growing conviction that the price of resistance was cheap; the prospects for eventual success good.
DONT IGNORE THE NEIGHBORS
Our third big mistake was to fail to recognize and act boldly on the fact that, like it or not, we were in a regional war, because from the start, we weren't just fighting Iraqis. We were fighting Iran and its main proxies, Syria and Hezbollah, too. These external enemies didn't just provide money, training, and increasingly sophisticated weapons like shaped charges to Iraqis in both Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups. They openly recruited and trained foreign jihadis too, then smuggled them across the border into Iraq to do what few Iraqis are willing to do: turn themselves into human bombs to kill and maim large numbers of Americans and Iraqis.
The rebel generals argue that we needed many more troops to seal Iraq's borders, but even if we had been profligate enough to add the hundreds of thousands of additional men they wanted, it would still have been a Sisyphean task. There was an obvious alternative with much greater promise of success at much less cost: forcing Iran and its proxies to stop breaching Iraq's borders by striking back hard at terrorist rat-lines and training camps on their soil. Secretary Rumsfeld asked, repeatedly, for permission to do that in Syria, and we could have done it from the air, without need of any U.S. ground forces, but George W. Bush said no. His motives were goodhe wanted to save us from having to fight a wider warbut his stubbornness in refusing to recognize the fact that this was a vain hope greatly weakened us in Iraq.
EMBOLDENED MADMEN
Worse, it greatly strengthened the conviction of Iran's fanatic mullahs that despite our military might, Americans are a weak, decadent people who can be attacked with impunity. That false belief got its first big test in 1979, when the mullahs and their men overthrew the Shah and took our embassy people hostage. Jimmy Carter's impotent, bungled responses confirmed the mullahs contempt for us, but we responded by electing Ronald Reagan, and at first, he frightened the Iraniansour hostages were released the day he took office.
Reagan was a strong president he saw the evil Soviet empire clearly and worked to defeat it with great courage and skill but he did not understand the Middle East. He thought we could be neutral peacekeepers in the Islamist war against Lebanon's Christian-dominated democracy, and when Iran's mullahs used their main terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, to attack our embassy there, too, he failed to alter his view or strike back effectively. Those mistakes emboldened the mullahs to blow up 241 of our sleeping marines in their barracks on October 23, 1983, and we simply loaded up our dead and came home, leaving Lebanon to the non-existent mercies of Iran, Hezbollah, and their partners in crime, Syria and the Palestinians.
Unchecked, Iran's Shiite mullahs grew bolder and more grandiose in their ambitions. Despite the double handicap of being a non-Arab people who espouse a minority version of Islam that Sunni Arab despots despise, Iran's mullahs aspired to the leadership of the whole Islamofascist worldSunni as well as Shiiteand they have been stunningly successful. In the last two decades, they have succeeded in replacing the Soviets as Syria's main patron, and in implanting a network of Hezbollah cells throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the Middle East. Defying our "experts," Iran's Shiite fanatics forged close ties to leading Sunni terrorist groups: to al Qaeda cells in many countries, and to the increasingly popular and powerful Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan.
On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Iranians have done even better, gaining virtual control over the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, Hamas. Today, Iran's still-growing influence and prestige is not limited to active members of terrorist organizations. When Ahmadinejad trumpeted Iran's success in enriching uranium on April 12, Sunni despots responded with anxiety, but their bitter subjectsordinary Arabs, Sunni as well as Shiitecelebrated wildly. Confident, now, that tomorrow Iran will make America's nuclear superiority a relic of the past, they believe it will elevate them, too, in the only way most of them can readily imagine: by reducing us to the status of dhimmis.
These are not just the fevered dreams of impotent third-world losers. A nuclear-armed Iran would change the balance of power in the world against us, and we cannot allow it to happen. It's time to stop pretending that a corrupt U.N. or an already half-dhimmified EU will prevent it. Neither can we afford to wait in hope that the millions of ordinary Iranians who despise the mullahs will overthrow them before they have nuclear weapons in quantity, and make good on their threat to spread them throughout the Islamofascist world. Millions of Iraqis despised Saddam Hussein, too, but they lacked the power to prevail against a ruthless police state without outside military help, and brave protests notwithstanding, decent Iranians are in the same unfortunate position.
A TIME TO ACT
Only America has both the courage and the military might to save these Iranians, along with ourselves and decent people of all religions everywhere, from the new age of barbarism that threatens us all. To do that, we must ignore the Chamberlains among us and rally behind our Churchills, and we must act.
In 2003, 2004, and even 2005, I thought we could rein in the mullahs without needing to attack Iran itself. I thought we could send them a sufficiently chilling message by striking the terrorist strongholds of their smaller, weaker surrogates in Syria and Hezbollahland. Now, it is too late for that. We need to get ready as quickly as possible to mount a major air assault, not just to take out as many of Iran's nuclear sites as we can find, but to defeat the rising evil behind them by aiming our bombs and missiles at Iran's leaders, its Revolutionary Guards, and the bully boys of the Basij too.
But we cannot stop there; we also need to bomb Hezbollahland in Lebanon, and to close our own borders immediately in order to lessen the odds that Iranian proxies will succeed in carrying out the attacks on our soil that they are already planning. And of course, our Navy must be fully prepared to do what it takes to keep the Straits of Hormuz open, and to protect vital shipping lanes in the Gulf. The longer we wait, the costlier all of this will be to accomplish. Even now, Putins Russia is busily upgrading Iran's air defenses. A coalition of the willing can help a bit, but striking suddenly, before our enemies expect it and are fully prepared, will help more.
Conventional wisdom tells us that history will judge George W. Bush by what happens in Iraq. It's not true. He will be judged by what he does about Iran, and so will we, for centuries to come. It is past time for him to focus the nation on the severity of the Iranian threat, and to mobilize and unify us to confront and defeat it
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
05/11/2006 14:20 ||
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WASHINGTON - How is academic freedom like Catholicism? Well, if you are a left-wing academic, the answer is obvious: both can be used like a club on people you dont like. Consider the current contretemps over Boston Colleges invitation to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be this years commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree.
Rice, the first black woman to be secretary of state, was a distinguished professor of political science at Stanford University, where she received the top awards for teaching. Later, she was Stanfords provost. Her CV is precisely the sort of thing that makes her a no-brainer to receive an honorary degree and be a commencement speaker.
But in a letter distributed by the heads of the Catholic schools theology department and signed by about 200 faculty members, we are informed that, On the levels of both moral principle and practical moral judgment, Secretary Rices approach to international affairs is in fundamental conflict with Boston Colleges commitment to the values of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions and is inconsistent with the humanistic values that inspire the universitys work.
One can respect honest disagreement over the Bush administrations foreign policy. But this high-minded rhetoric is a bit hard to take, considering that B.C. is fairly selective about where it will draw such lines. For example, Mary Daly was for decades a distinguished professor at Boston College, despite the fact she exceeds even the right-wing parody of a left-wing academic. She refused to teach men. For decades.
Daly left the school in 1999, when she was told that she could no longer discriminatorily bar men from all of her classes. Rather than teach men, she chose to quit. But until then, Daly was free to call for the abolition of the Catholic Church and other patriarchal religions in favor of her own post-Christian feminist religion. Apparently, teaching students to reject Catholicism entirely is tolerable in a Catholic school, but Catholicism is useful in a pinch when it can be used to shun villains like Rice. This is the only time these people have cited Pope John Paul II on anything, the Rev. Paul McNellis, an adjunct professor in the B.C. philosophy department, told The Boston Globe.
And thats how Catholicism and academic freedom are alike. The Rice controversy is notable because of her stature, but the attitude behind it is ubiquitous. Instead of Catholicism, however, most faculties invoke the hoary doctrine of academic freedom to defend speech they like but only speech they like. Every week there are stories of left-wing professors clamping down on free speech and inquiry when its from a nonleftist perspective. Last year, a student at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., was kicked out of the schools education program for arguing that corporal punishment i.e. spanking and the like could be useful in classrooms. Subsequently, a professor who supported the students academic freedom was fired from his position as a faculty advisor to the school paper. A professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania was vilified for parodying The Vagina Monologues, and feminist faculty tore down his playbill parodying the left-wing gospel.
When a professor at Columbia University proclaimed that he hoped America would suffer from a million Mogadishus referring to the battle made famous by Black Hawk Down and declared that the only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military, he was immediately defended by the left on grounds of academic freedom. When Ward Churchill, that hate-filled hack who looks like a loiterer at a bus station but is actually a professor at the University of Colorado, called victims of Sept. 11 little Eichmanns and sputtered other moral idiocies and intellectual absurdities, he became a poster boy for academic freedom overnight. Whatever happend to Ward?
We'll find out next week, when the university panel releases its report...
But when former Harvard President Lawrence Summers suggested in a faculty-only seminar that men and women might have, at the statistical margins, cognitive differences, he was flayed alive and forced to apologize over and over again as he wrote ever-bigger checks to placate the mob denouncing him. Whether the cudgel is racism, sexism, academic freedom or even Catholicism, the intent is the same: Voices the left likes are privileged on Americas campuses. Voices the left dislikes are to be smashed, with whatever tool is available.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/11/2006 07:35 ||
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#1
This is the only time these people have cited Pope John Paul II on anything, the Rev. Paul McNellis, an adjunct professor in the B.C. philosophy department, told The Boston Globe.
-Now that is funny.
In the case of Summers where he made a statement based off of empirical studies, people were quick to accuse him of propagating that men were somehow superior to women in a congnitive sense. I never got that impression from him. I felt he was just bringing forth information that could be looked further into. If he thought the study was wrong or something I could see apologizing. However, from what I remember of it I would have never apologized for hurting someone's feelings based purely off of scientific research. It reminded me of when Copernicus was trying to talk astronomy w/the church without really talking astronomy w/the church. Welcome to America in the 21st century - where thin skinned weaklings look to be offended.
#2
This is hilarious - a bitch bigot femnist who REFUSED to allow men in her classes and refused to teach them is trying to use Church doctrine (far out of context - and in a heterdoxical, syncretists and heretical way I might add) to beat up political people she doesnt like.
#3
A May 8 statement by Jesuit Father William Leahy, Boston College president, reconfirmed that Rice would be honored at commencement ceremonies.
"I recognize that some are not in favor of Dr. Rice's selection, but I and many others judge that she is an appropriate honorary degree recipient and graduation speaker for Boston College," said Father Leahy.
Leahy's a major mover and shaker up here.
The lefties can save their breath. If he wants it to happen, it's a done deal.
#4
Many of the great Catholic Colleges of the 50's like B.C., Villanova, Georgetown and Notre Dame are becoming,if not already, Catholic in name only. They resent John Paul II's "Ex Corde Ecclesia" which reminded them of the Catholic University's special place in the life of the Church. I have a couple of "academic" friends who teach at a very expensive Catholic high school here in Southern Califrnia. One is Catholic the other is Protestant. They were both enraged by our Bishop putting pressure on the school to have a Catholic as head of the religion and theology department. They had an Evangelical Protestant as department head. The nerve of that bishop! They seem to think that the further they stray from Catholicism the more acceptable they will be to the academic community in general.
#5
Princess Ida: Women of Adamant, fair Neophytes
Who thirst for such instruction as we give,
Attend, while I unfold a parable.
The elephant is mightier than Man,
Yet Man subdues him. Why? The elephant
Is elephantine everywhere but here, (tapping her forehead)
And Man, whose brain is to the elephants
As Womans brain to Mans - (thats rule of three),
Conquers the foolish giant of the woods,
As Woman, in her turn, shall conquer Man.
The narrow-minded pedant still believes
That two and two make four! Why, we can prove,
We women household drudges as we are
That two and two make five or three or seven;
Or five-and-twenty, if the case demands!
Diplomacy? The wiliest diplomat
Is absolutely helpless in our hands.
He wheedles monarchs Woman wheedles him!
Logic? Why, tyrant Man himself admits
Its a waste of time to argue with a woman!
Then we excel in social qualities:
Though man professes that he holds our sex
In utter scorn, I venture to believe
Hed rather pass the day with one of you,
Than with five hundred of his fellow-men!
In all things we excel. Believing this,
A hundred maidens here have sworn to place
Their feet upon his neck. If we succeed,
Well treat him better than he treated us
Posted by: bruce ||
05/11/2006 19:59 Comments ||
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No matter how Bush administration officials spin Porter Goss sudden resignation as head of the Central Intelligence Agency after just 18 months or the subsequent nomination of Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden to replace him, it is clear that the agency has deep institutional problems that wont be solved merely by replacing the guy at the top.
It was the CIA that failed to infiltrate Osama bin Ladens terror network, failed to recognize early enough the dangers posed by al-Qaida and failed to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks. There is also the still-open question of the agencys prewar intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the most embarrassing and damaging intelligence foul-up since the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Thats a lot of failure for an agency whose sole raison detat I think they meant raison d'etre - reason to be is to provide critical intelligence on which to base complicated policy decisions.
Hayden is currently the principal deputy director of national intelligence and is by all accounts extraordinarily qualified by experience, temperament and strategic acumen for the top CIA spot. Unfortunately, the coming congressional debate on his nomination will likely focus on issues like the warrantless wiretaps he initiated at the National Security Agency on telephone calls by known al-Qaida operatives to and from people in this country. He will also be quizzed about corruption in military intelligence contracting, whether a military officer should run the nations 60-year-old civilian spy service and (despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelds recent denial) the obvious turf battle between the CIA and the Pentagon. Important questions all, but not the most important questions. What about the Kennedy's driving record, eh?
The CIAs problems run much deeper. What needs to be faced and fixed is the fact that the once-storied spy shop appears to have become just another government wasteland whose career inhabitants are more adept at waging bureaucratic war than fighting the war on terror abroad. This was nowhere better illustrated than in the firing of one of the agencys top executives who was accused of leaking classified information to the media. That executive had extensive ties to Sen. John Kerrys presidential campaign and was a contributor to Democratic candidates. These folks should be devoting themselves entirely to fixing current problems like the lack of Arabic-language experts in the agency and determining why the agency failed to recognize how truly serious a threat the jihadists of militant Islam were becoming during the Clinton years. And the Carter years.
National Intelligence Director John Negroponte reportedly wants to strip the CIA of some of its analytical functions and return it to its core mission of gathering raw and human intelligence. It will be Haydens job to reform and rejuvenate the dispirited remnants of a storied agency by reminding its people that doing so and doing it well is the key to their helping ensure this nations future well-being.
Posted by: Bobby ||
05/11/2006 07:27 ||
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#1
National Intelligence Director John Negroponte reportedly wants to strip the CIA of some of its analytical functions and return it to its core mission of gathering raw and human intelligence.
WTF !!!! "Analysis" is a very key component of the intelligence cycle. How in the phuech can your determine who, what, where, and how much to collect if you can't conduct analysis? Let me guess, the US State Department and beltway politicians will handle the analysis. This is a clear illustration of how out-to-lunch diplodink Ponte is. This is more disturbing than the continuum of Klingon scandals. I cannot believe General Hayden will buy into this.
#2
Analysis should go to the DNI who receives info from and tasks all the other agencies. The questions is can the office of the DNI keep out politics any better than the CIA?
Posted by: ed ||
05/11/2006 14:09 Comments ||
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The gaffes we made in handling postwar Iraq cannot weaken our resolve to face the greater danger posed by Iran.
By Barbara Lerner
Like many conservatives, I think President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein was a brave, right, and necessary decision, and an essential part of a much larger war we have no choice but to fight and winthe global, 21st-century war against Islamofascist supremacy and terror. And like many conservatives, I think the Bush administration handled the invasion of Iraq brilliantly, but made an awful mess of the post-invasion period.
In 2003, 2004, and 2005 (three timeshere, here, and here), I argued with increasing urgency that to win the post-invasion battle, we needed to take three big, bold steps. In 2006, as the bloodshed in Iraq persisted and the regional situation deteriorated, I stopped criticizing our policies in Iraq for the same reason many other conservatives have lately been reluctant to do so: for fear of adding weight to a Leftist alternative that is even worse. Of course we can't just cut and run in Iraq. We must make a serious effort to salvage what we can. But whatever the outcome there, we confront a greater danger in Iran now, and we must do all we can to make sure Americans don't draw the wrong conclusions about what our mistakes in Iraq were and who made themconclusions that will make us too timid to save ourselves from the Iranian menace that looms before us today.
The surest way to draw those wrong conclusions would be to accept the analysis of the rebel generals currently baying for our Defense secretary's head, because the three mistakes they harp on aren't mistakes at all, and the three big mistakes we really did make weren't made by Donald Rumsfeld. They are the mistakes of the State Department, the CIA, and the rebel generals themselves, along with two other mistake-prone groups David Frum rightly added to my April 30 list in May 2004: "the British Foreign Office," and "most of the better-known foreign policy pundits." But it was John O'Sullivan in a National Review piece later that same May who put the responsibility for all our major decisions in Iraqthe winning ones and the losing onessquarely where it belongs: on the shoulders of the man in charge, the man who tried to have it both ways, our president.
RUMSFELDS PLAN WAS RIGHT
The rebel generals and their think-alikes claim mistake number one was inadequate planning for the post-invasion period. Rumsfeld and his allies in Vice President Cheney's office didn't think we needed elaborate, bureaucratic American plans; they thought we needed to empower strong Iraqi leaders right away, and they were right. Our first big mistake was to bypass Rumsfeld and our Iraqi National Congress allies, and turn the occupation over to Paul Bremer, an arrogant, appeasement-minded State-CIA type who treated our INC allies with contempt, and courted divisive, greedy, and openly hostile Iraqi elements with a condescending and ineffectual mix of small carrots and smaller sticks.
Rumsfeld and his supporters wanted to put the leaders of the INC in full charge of a forceful Iraqi transition government with all the powers necessary to create the pre-conditions for democracy: order and hope. To that end, they needed to de-Baathify the country aggressively, tame or eliminate violent Shiite militias, repair critical infrastructure, get oil revenue flowing again, and see to it that every peaceful Iraqi citizen got a check for his share of it. That's what secular Shiites like Ahmed Chalabi, secular Sunnis like Mithal al-Alusi, and their Kurdish INC partners wanted to do, and we should have backed them, without ambivalence or apology, with our full military might.
Afterwards, we should have given them whatever additional time they needed to gradually work out and apply a new set of rules for their own Iraqi brand of democracy. Instead, we put a camera-hogging American civilian in charge and let him waste a critical year in a vain attempt to placate foreign Sunni despots as well as hostile Iraqi Sunni and Shiite groups by micromanaging a long drawn-out "process" that was supposed to lead to an all-inclusive Iraqi democracy but in fact led only to disorder, distrust, and growing sectarian violence.
STRENGTH, NOT SENSITIVITY
Our second big mistake was not, as the rebel generals insist, a lack of "sensitivity"either to their demands for a vast increase in the number of American troops deployed, or to the finer nuances of Iraqi culture. It was our failure to recognize irredeemable Iraqi enemies as such, and to take bold, decisive military action against them, and especially, against their leaders. It was a mistake to negotiate with the brutal Baathist generals behind the Sunni mob that lynched American civilians in Fallujah; we should have wiped them out. It was a mistake to let the vicious, Iranian-backed Shiite mob leader, Moqtada al Sadr, live, after he sent his thugs out to maim and kill our troops.
Quick, crushing military action against men like these would have sent the right message to all our Iraqi enemies, Sunni and Shiite alike: Violent resistance is immediately fatal and ultimately futile. A clear, consistent message like that could have saved many American, Iraqi, and Coalition lives down the road, and won us what we needed most: the respect of ordinary Iraqis, reassured to see clear limits emerge in their new and uncertain world. Hearts and minds would have followed.
Instead, Bremer and his civiliansjoined by a group of military officers who embraced the fashionably debilitating cliché that "there is no military solution"repeatedly reined in our frustrated fighting men. Time and again, these walking Rumsfeld antitheses snatched defeat from the jaws of victories our soldiers and marines were poised to win. Time and again, they forced our men to pause or retreat while they made vain, on-again, off-again attempts to win the hearts and minds of committed enemies. What they won was contempt, and a growing conviction that the price of resistance was cheap; the prospects for eventual success good.
DONT IGNORE THE NEIGHBORS
Our third big mistake was to fail to recognize and act boldly on the fact that, like it or not, we were in a regional war, because from the start, we weren't just fighting Iraqis. We were fighting Iran and its main proxies, Syria and Hezbollah, too. These external enemies didn't just provide money, training, and increasingly sophisticated weapons like shaped charges to Iraqis in both Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups. They openly recruited and trained foreign jihadis too, then smuggled them across the border into Iraq to do what few Iraqis are willing to do: turn themselves into human bombs to kill and maim large numbers of Americans and Iraqis.
The rebel generals argue that we needed many more troops to seal Iraq's borders, but even if we had been profligate enough to add the hundreds of thousands of additional men they wanted, it would still have been a Sisyphean task. There was an obvious alternative with much greater promise of success at much less cost: forcing Iran and its proxies to stop breaching Iraq's borders by striking back hard at terrorist rat-lines and training camps on their soil. Secretary Rumsfeld asked, repeatedly, for permission to do that in Syria, and we could have done it from the air, without need of any U.S. ground forces, but George W. Bush said no. His motives were goodhe wanted to save us from having to fight a wider warbut his stubbornness in refusing to recognize the fact that this was a vain hope greatly weakened us in Iraq.
EMBOLDENED MADMEN
Worse, it greatly strengthened the conviction of Iran's fanatic mullahs that despite our military might, Americans are a weak, decadent people who can be attacked with impunity. That false belief got its first big test in 1979, when the mullahs and their men overthrew the Shah and took our embassy people hostage. Jimmy Carter's impotent, bungled responses confirmed the mullahs contempt for us, but we responded by electing Ronald Reagan, and at first, he frightened the Iraniansour hostages were released the day he took office.
Reagan was a strong president he saw the evil Soviet empire clearly and worked to defeat it with great courage and skill but he did not understand the Middle East. He thought we could be neutral peacekeepers in the Islamist war against Lebanon's Christian-dominated democracy, and when Iran's mullahs used their main terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, to attack our embassy there, too, he failed to alter his view or strike back effectively. Those mistakes emboldened the mullahs to blow up 241 of our sleeping marines in their barracks on October 23, 1983, and we simply loaded up our dead and came home, leaving Lebanon to the non-existent mercies of Iran, Hezbollah, and their partners in crime, Syria and the Palestinians.
Unchecked, Iran's Shiite mullahs grew bolder and more grandiose in their ambitions. Despite the double handicap of being a non-Arab people who espouse a minority version of Islam that Sunni Arab despots despise, Iran's mullahs aspired to the leadership of the whole Islamofascist worldSunni as well as Shiiteand they have been stunningly successful. In the last two decades, they have succeeded in replacing the Soviets as Syria's main patron, and in implanting a network of Hezbollah cells throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the Middle East. Defying our "experts," Iran's Shiite fanatics forged close ties to leading Sunni terrorist groups: to al Qaeda cells in many countries, and to the increasingly popular and powerful Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan.
On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Iranians have done even better, gaining virtual control over the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, Hamas. Today, Iran's still-growing influence and prestige is not limited to active members of terrorist organizations. When Ahmadinejad trumpeted Iran's success in enriching uranium on April 12, Sunni despots responded with anxiety, but their bitter subjectsordinary Arabs, Sunni as well as Shiitecelebrated wildly. Confident, now, that tomorrow Iran will make America's nuclear superiority a relic of the past, they believe it will elevate them, too, in the only way most of them can readily imagine: by reducing us to the status of dhimmis.
These are not just the fevered dreams of impotent third-world losers. A nuclear-armed Iran would change the balance of power in the world against us, and we cannot allow it to happen. It's time to stop pretending that a corrupt U.N. or an already half-dhimmified EU will prevent it. Neither can we afford to wait in hope that the millions of ordinary Iranians who despise the mullahs will overthrow them before they have nuclear weapons in quantity, and make good on their threat to spread them throughout the Islamofascist world. Millions of Iraqis despised Saddam Hussein, too, but they lacked the power to prevail against a ruthless police state without outside military help, and brave protests notwithstanding, decent Iranians are in the same unfortunate position.
A TIME TO ACT
Only America has both the courage and the military might to save these Iranians, along with ourselves and decent people of all religions everywhere, from the new age of barbarism that threatens us all. To do that, we must ignore the Chamberlains among us and rally behind our Churchills, and we must act.
In 2003, 2004, and even 2005, I thought we could rein in the mullahs without needing to attack Iran itself. I thought we could send them a sufficiently chilling message by striking the terrorist strongholds of their smaller, weaker surrogates in Syria and Hezbollahland. Now, it is too late for that. We need to get ready as quickly as possible to mount a major air assault, not just to take out as many of Iran's nuclear sites as we can find, but to defeat the rising evil behind them by aiming our bombs and missiles at Iran's leaders, its Revolutionary Guards, and the bully boys of the Basij too.
But we cannot stop there; we also need to bomb Hezbollahland in Lebanon, and to close our own borders immediately in order to lessen the odds that Iranian proxies will succeed in carrying out the attacks on our soil that they are already planning. And of course, our Navy must be fully prepared to do what it takes to keep the Straits of Hormuz open, and to protect vital shipping lanes in the Gulf. The longer we wait, the costlier all of this will be to accomplish. Even now, Putins Russia is busily upgrading Iran's air defenses. A coalition of the willing can help a bit, but striking suddenly, before our enemies expect it and are fully prepared, will help more.
Conventional wisdom tells us that history will judge George W. Bush by what happens in Iraq. It's not true. He will be judged by what he does about Iran, and so will we, for centuries to come. It is past time for him to focus the nation on the severity of the Iranian threat, and to mobilize and unify us to confront and defeat it
#1
I largely agree with her analysis. I'll add a bunch of mysterious fires at Iranian oil refineries would be a good place to start and be a far more criplling blow than most seem to appreciate.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
WASHINGTON - How is academic freedom like Catholicism? Well, if you are a left-wing academic, the answer is obvious: both can be used like a club on people you dont like. Consider the current contretemps over Boston Colleges invitation to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be this years commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree. 
And thats how Catholicism and academic freedom are alike. The Rice controversy is notable because of her stature, but the attitude behind it is ubiquitous. Instead of Catholicism, however, most faculties invoke the hoary doctrine of academic freedom to defend speech they like but only speech they like. Every week there are stories of left-wing professors clamping down on free speech and inquiry when its from a nonleftist perspective. Last year, a student at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., was kicked out of the schools education program for arguing that corporal punishment i.e. spanking and the like could be useful in classrooms. Subsequently, a professor who supported the students academic freedom was fired from his position as a faculty advisor to the school paper. A professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania was vilified for parodying The Vagina Monologues, and feminist faculty tore down his playbill parodying the left-wing gospel.
