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Home Front
Pro-American Citizen’s Group Criticizes Bush’s War as Feeble, Morally Compromised
2003-09-10
Patriots for the Defense of America today issued "America’s Failing War Effort: A Report Card," a scathing critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Unlike left-leaning voices critical of the war, Patriots criticizes the Bush administration from a pro-American, pro-defense perspective. It maintains that Bush has failed to uphold the moral obligation of his government to defend American lives and interests. Patriots assigned the Administration an average grade of "D+" for its failure to execute a war against the most pressing foreign threats. The categories graded are as follows:
The "Hot War" (Iraq and Afghanistan): Iraq posed a real threat to the U.S., but not as great as that posed by nations like Iran and North Korea. Each of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were fought in a shameful manner, sacrificing American troops to unjustifiably restrictive "rules of engagement."
Grade: C
We're nit-picking here. A war with Iran, no particular causus belli, with a frothing at the mouth, probably WMD-equipped Iraq on one flank? Or North Korea, where the leader's a nutbag but the subject matter's got nothing to do with the overall objective — defeating the Islamists who've declared war on us? Where the hell did this guy go to war school?

The "Cold War" (Iran and North Korea): Two out of three members of the "axis of evil" have gone unpunished, despite the overwhelming terrorist and/or nuclear threats they pose. Even worse, the U.S. has appeased them, encouraging further aggression.
Grade: D-
The U.S. has remained diplomatically engaged with them, which isn't appeasement. "War is diplomacy by other means," remember? We certainly haven't "encouraged further aggression" by making Kimmie go into hiding. And we haven't "encouraged further aggression" by slapping the Syrians — publicly. Nor have we "encouraged further aggression" by announcing that the Iranian government's going to fall eventually and expressing our support for the people who'll eventually do it.

The "Breeding Grounds" (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan): These governments claim to be allies in the war against militant Islamic terrorism, but fail to suppress terrorists in their own midst. Bush has failed to issue an ultimatum demanding their cooperation.
Grade: C-
He's also failed to dig a canal across equatorial Africa. Issuing ultimata when you've lack the capability of enforcing them is a sign of a big mouth and a low IQ. Bush actually got Pakland's cooperation in the immediate wake of 9-11 by issuing an ultimatum — a fairly hair-raising ultimatum, if I recall correctly. But its eventual dismemberment — part to Afghanistan and/or Iran, part of India — is a far piece down the road. Who knows? They may even adopt a policy of sweet reason and make such a fate unnecessary. And attacking the Soddies at this time would reinforce the "attack on the entire Muslim world" meme. I think the ultimate goal is to have them withdraw from the field of battle without admitting they'd been there, to lick their wounds for the next hundred years or so. I also think Bush has a chance of pulling this off, since AQ has managed to poop in the punchbowl with the Riyadh bombings and yesterday announced that everybody's apostate but them.

Israel and the Palestinians: The American "road map" for peace has forced Israel to negotiate with Palestinian terrorists, requiring Israel to abdicate its right to self-defense. This policy is self-defeating for America, since Israel is a natural ally in the war against militant Islam.
Grade: F
The road map represented Bush's equivalent to Clinton's Camp David offer to Yasser — that Yasser later claimed to wish he'd taken (Israel was busy flattening Ramallah at the time). It was put together in concert with all the usual suspects who would have shot down or disregarded the legitimacy of a purely American proposal — Russia, the EU, and the UN, plus with input from the Arab states. It was handed to the Paleos on a silver platter, and they tore it up, jumped up and down on it, and then pooped on it. Hamas and IJ were the perps and Israel is now in the process of trying to knock off the entire politburo of Hamas — Shanab's dead, Rantissi was a "just missed," Sheikh Yassin had his britches dusted, and today they barely missed Zahar, knocking off one of his kids in the process. Hamas only has five people in its politburo, and one's based in Lebanon, to coordinate with the Syrians and Hezbollah. White House objections to date have been either proforma or non-existent. So the road map had a result and it wasn't to cripple Israel.

Military Deployment and Readiness: Despite massive new defense spending, the Bush administration has failed to use its military power—especially the threat of its nuclear arsenal—in a way that minimizes risks to American troops, and maximizes the American ability to destroy the enemy.
Grade: C
Military action has to be proportionate. Waving nukes is Kim Jon Il's tactic. Our policy calls for use of nukes in response to the Bad Guys' use of WMD. From the Bad Guys' point of view, there's not an awful lot of difference between a nuke and a few tons of MOAB, but we're a civilized nation and we try not to take out entire counties to get a dozen turbans.

International Law and Diplomacy: While American policy is widely criticized as too "unilateral," in reality the Bush administration has demonstrated an undue, self-abasing deference to international opinion and the U.N.—resulting in pointless delays and setbacks in the war.
Grade: D+
Unlike the people who write this sort of manifesto, Bush has to worry about the U.S. and its position in the world. There is, in fact, more than one country in this world — you can check for yourself. Without a certain amount of "self-abasing deference" to other countries, the British would certainly have waved and said to have a nice time as we were engaging in operations all by our lonesome. So would the Australians, just like the Canadians for the most part did. The Spanish and Portuguese and the Italians are capable of sniffing just as disdainfully as the Frenchies and the Germans, but they didn't, because Bush and his team presented a case and they agreed with its premises.
A copy of the 19-page report is available for download as a PDF.
If you want to waste time on it...
Patriots for the Defense of America was founded in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001.
So was Rantburg...
Its mission is to promote America’s moral right to self-defense and to advocate a strong, uncompromising foreign policy.
Sounds more like its mission is posturing and making faces.
Posted by:Foster

#13   In fact, I think the idea originated in Greece...
Read the Ten Commandments, not as a Biblical ordination from God, but as a set of rules to live by. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll see where our Founding Fathers discovered the "unalienable rights" we all enjoy (when they're not being trampled underfoot by a dictatorial government or shoved into the broom closet by some athiest with his nickers in a twist).
Posted by: Old Patriot   2003-9-10 10:55:37 PM  

#12  When we were first attacked, two years ago to the day less one, Americans didn't know anything about Islamofascism. Even in the intelligence community, I don't think we had built the order of battle that's come to be apparent at its lower levels, still hazy at its upper levels. It was a many-headed hydra, not the collection of sometimes competing, sometime cooperating multi-nationals we see now. Ten or twelve years ago we had three main strains - Libya-Sudan, Syria-Lebanon-Palestine, and Iran. AQ was actually a minor player.

Our enemy today is Islamofascism - the gift to the world of the Wahhabi sect, and a relatively recent growth industry. But our enemy is also the mindset and the organizational principles that it's absorbed. We don't cover the IRA a lot in these pages, or November 17, or the Colombian killers, but the tactics and the disregard for human life, even contempt for human life, are traits they hold in common with the AQ killers. They're also traits they share with Saddam - witness the mass graves - and with North Korea, where everybody's an egg to go into the omelette. Beyond the bounds of religion and ideology, you can also throw in Zimbabwe, Liberia, and for that matter the majority of the states in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease we're fighting is the subjugation of individual liberty, regardless of the proclaimed justification. If you're dead, what do you care that you were helped from this vale of tears by a Baathist or a North Korean communist or an Iranian Revolutionary Guard or by Subcommandante Pedro and his gang of drug running leftists?

I, and most of us here, can see why Bush is doing what he's doing. We don't always agree with the methods employed. Sometimes I think he should be more ruthless, occasionally I think he should rely more on diplomacy. My personal bitch is that he should be reminding the world continuously that we're trying to protect individual liberty, to remove the totalitarian yoke from the neck of the common man, whether it's that of Wahhabi Islam, Baathism, Communism, or the worship of the Divine Elvis.

Individual liberty isn't an exclusively American ideal. In fact, I think the idea originated in Greece...
Posted by: Fred   2003-9-10 9:40:53 PM  

#11  Aris,

Any of these countries is a tough nut to crack. In many ways NK will be the toughest because it has hostages and has been allowed by the international community to progress form programs to actual possession of nukes.

50 years ago the international community made a committment to the South Korean people to protect their country from sunjigation by the North. We wrote that committment in the blood of Americans, Greeks, Turks and the blood of men from countries throughout the free world. In the last ten years we have betrayed that committment to freedom in the interest of a sunshine policy.

This sunshine policy is not a failed policy just in North Korea. It is a policy that is in the process without the likelihood of a positive result in Iran, Sudan, the PLA, Cuba, Syria, Liberia and many other places in the world.

The French initiative to lift sanctions on Iraq was just another chapter of the sunshine policy that almost drove the school bus into the ditch. Without sanctions Iraq would have necessarily resumed development of nuclear weapons if for no other reason than that Iran is currently developing nukes.

From the perspective of the US, WMD are only dangerous if they are handed/sold to terrorists.
I think we all agree Iran, Iraq and Syria are certainly capable of providing WMD to Hizbollah, Hamas or IJ. From the Greek perspective, I would think that poliferation of nukes to your Arab neighbors would be a real concern. I doubt that Turkey plans on being the only conventional-only power in the highly volatile neighborhood.

I don't bring this up to incite Murat or you. I bring up this point to emphasize that the WMD crisis will be in your neighborhood first. proliferating long range missiles and plutonium throughout the region is a big mistake no matter how much we all want to get along with Iran and Syria.

In some ways mature Americans feel that we have let the Korean people down through lack of vigilence. It baffles us that the international community doesn't feel any responsibility for Korean crisis or for preventing Iraq or Iran from becoming a simular situation.

A couple of years ago a teracher died that I knew. He was a coworker of my fahter's. With his obituary I saw a picture of him as a young man with a crewcut wearing a green uniform with a rack of medals. Evidently, he was an ace in the USMC during WWII. My dad may have mentioned it but, for me, he was the guy that let us cut a cheap Xmas tree from the farm he called Little Vermont every year.

In my opinion, the sunshine generation has squandered his legacy and the legacy of his whole generation. Not just Americans but also the brave men of Crete who stopped the Nazi advance for many long months.

Its sad.
Posted by: Super Hose   2003-9-10 9:12:08 PM  

#10  Aris, the answer to your comment is simple: any nation that actively pursues WMD (specifically nukes), and has made threats against the US or its friends, is on the shit-list. Why Iraq and not NK, for example? Because the mission in Iraq was relatively easy. Iran & NK are much harder nuts to crack.
I'm happy for you that you don't perceive WMD to be a threat to your country. But many Americans (those with their head out of the sand) rightly believe that WMD in the hands of terrorists or lunatics or Coca-Cola haters, are a threat to them. And I'm glad that Bush doesn't wish to find out if OBL has the will to use them. And yes, Saddam was a secularist (though he has recently converted), but that wouldn't stop AQ & Iraq from having a marriage of conveniance. The risk of that happening was too great.
Posted by: Rafael   2003-9-10 7:08:24 PM  

#9  "Or North Korea, where the leader's a nutbag but the subject matter's got nothing to do with the overall objective — defeating the Islamists who've declared war on us"

I think that the Iraq had about as little to do with the "overall objective" as Korea would have been. It had a secular (though tyrannical) government which itself hated the Islamists quite a bit. What the overthrow of Saddam did was not make a victory for the actual "overall war" but simply create a new battlefield where democracy and islamofascism will fight. *If* Iraq transforms into a secular democracy in 10 years time, *then* it'll be a victory for US and allies and the civilised world in general.

But it won't actually be much of a loss for the Islamofascists, since they never *had* Iraq on the first place. Poll shows 33% percent of Iraqis want an Islamist government? Ouch. What if *they* end up in charge? US will have done nothing but use its troops in the service of islamists.

Instead of declaring a "war on terrorism" (something which seems ridiculous to me as terrorism is not an ideology by itself, but rather a methodology) I think I'd have appreciated it much more if Bush had declared a war on islamofascism instead. Same way as western democracies earlier fought against nazism, and had a cold war against communism. All ideologies.

Being an islamofascist government could be casus belli enough, which seems to me atleast as a valid one as the never-can-find-them WMDs has been. Instead of portraying 9/11 as showing to the world that *terrorists* are a danger for everyone and must be fought before they reach the American shores, it could be said that these attacks proved that *islamofascism* is a global danger, which must be fought, etc, etc.

Again the same assurances could be given that this isn't directed against the peaceful Muslim nations, only those who use the precepts of their religion to impose tyranny on their populations and/or make war on other nations, etc.

Iraq didn't use the WMDs it had, even when US itself was attacking. Even in the Gulf War when we knew it had them, regardless of whether it still had them during the recent war or not. I don't see much reason why an attack on *Iran* would have motivated them to use them on US troops instead.

An attack on Iran might have been riskier and more difficult, but the overthrow of the model Islamist government (besides Afghanistan) would seem to me a much stronger blow than the war on Iraq has been on islamofascism so far.
Posted by: Aris Katsaris   2003-9-10 6:29:05 PM  

#8  Constructive criticism is one thing. Unrealistic stupid criticism helps Dean become president. I doubt that the interests groups that prepared the report are smarter than that.
Posted by: Super Hose   2003-9-10 2:51:49 PM  

#7  It's always easy to sit back and throw stones when your action doesn't put your own neck at risk. I wonder how many of the members of this "organization" are also members of the military. I'd bet darned few!

I find Bush a constant surprise. First he does something so incredibily right it's refreshing, then he does something so incredibly stupid it'd disgusting. I do hope there are some major shakeups in his cabinet after the next election, and there are enough bodies in Congress to back him up, rather than weasels in Democratic clothing that have only one policy - block anything not the policy of the Democratic Party.

I'd give this group's report card a "D-", and it's prestentation an "F". Arguably, Bush knows things they cannot, but there's more than enough information available to make a more detailed analysis than this. These bubbleheads are all Pat Buchanan righties. Buchanan has proven to me that he's nothing but a self-styled ass.
Posted by: Old Patriot   2003-9-10 2:22:12 PM  

#6  These people critisize Bush, but I don't see them out there fighting, or trying to help Isreal kill Hamas. We can't fight the entire planet at once ( despite popular belief ). So we have to APPEASE people sometimes.

Appease terrorists? Seems to me that their kind would be the last ones that you'd want to appease.

It's just as stomach-churning for the Administration as it is for us, but these things take time. We can't take down the Paleo resistance and all the 'Axis of Evil' members in just two years!

The obvious solution is to let the IDF perform the task of cleaning out the West Bank and Gaza of Palestiniant terrorists, instead of pressuring Israel to exercise restraint. They are more than capable of doing it.
Posted by: Bomb-a-rama   2003-9-10 12:53:31 PM  

#5  The grade isn't very relaistic. What grade would Clinton get for handling the dead sailors of the Cole? I would assign that as an F and maybe put the FDR response to Japanese attack as an A.
Posted by: Super Hose   2003-9-10 11:40:30 AM  

#4  Dudes! So many places so few soldiers.
Posted by: Hiryu   2003-9-10 11:18:20 AM  

#3  Nice perspective! Cut through all the B.S. and tells it like it is. Of course this is way to Right-Wing to be a viable policy. We can’t just attack NK and Iran at this time. Maybe after we finish up in Iraq we can/should address these problems. But then again we may not have to since Kimmie and the Mullahs are taking notice of what we have done in Iraq. A ‘C’ grade is a pretty good mark from this group. Where do I join?
Posted by: Cyber Sarge (VRWC CA Chapter)   2003-9-10 11:12:45 AM  

#2  Israel and the Palestinians: The American "road map" for peace has forced Israel to negotiate with Palestinian terrorists, requiring Israel to abdicate its right to self-defense. This policy is self-defeating for America, since Israel is a natural ally in the war against militant Islam.
Grade: F


Actually, I agree with this. However, what these idiots fail to realize is that not everyone is free of 'playing by the book'.

These people critisize Bush, but I don't see them out there fighting, or trying to help Isreal kill Hamas. We can't fight the entire planet at once ( despite popular belief ). So we have to APPEASE people sometimes.

It's just as stomach-churning for the Administration as it is for us, but these things take time. We can't take down the Paleo resistance and all the 'Axis of Evil' members in just two years! It took us, Britain, Canada, Australia, India, and others more than 5 years too take out just three countries. Give him another at least that long.

Why at least 5 years? Because the UN and Humanitarian groups for terrorists didn't exist back then.
Posted by: Charles   2003-9-10 4:14:33 AM  

#1  Gee, why were they so generous, must be government employees. Why aren't airline pilots armed? Why are our borders still open? Why does Saudi Arabia still exist? How come Colin Powell is sec of state? Why don't we get a really tough, no nonsense, take no prisoners type, like Janet Reno? She'll fry women and children to get her way!
Posted by: TJ Jackson   2003-9-10 4:07:24 AM  

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