Playback Editor
As I listen daily (impossible to avoid) to the condemnation and ridicule of George W. Bush, I find myself asking the same question over and over; How different would today's public sentiment be if the Iraqi's seized the opportunity as we hoped and fought for a democracy rather than ancient tribal hatreds?
How many Monday morning quarterbacks would still be ripping Bush on a daily basis, the extent of which has not been since since Nixon's Watergate nadir? My answer is that if Iraq were a success today, George Bush would be hailed as a great president. What this means is that the biggest disappointments and ultimate losers in this debacle are the Iraqi people and the president that misread them.
At this point none but the nuttiest still claim Bush's motivation was driven by anything but noble causes. There is no way to underestimate the damage Saddam could have done with nukes and the entire world believed he was very close to getting them. In a post 9-11 world, a mass murderer who had attacked neighbors, used WMDs and utilized oil wealth to make sport of a corrupt international community was simply too dangerous to leave in power.
The Bush Administration made many mistakes over the course of the war. Most occurred because they were fighting two wars at the same time; one to liberate Iraq and the other against our far left, real time media. Bush choose not to go out and flatten our opponents Assad style, ruthless and fast, because he would have been barbecued by our media over the body count. He tried to minimize the enemies casualties and dance around political minefields. It was the wrong decision. It's sure not how Saddam held the country in check for thirty years.
The Arab world has mastered the art of manipulating the guilt intoxicated, self-hating Western media. It was first perfected by Arafat and the Palestinians. Scream bloody murder after planting soldiers among civilian population centers and make sure the bloody body count is pounded home into America's living rooms via television. It works because America , consumed by I-Pods, The Gap and Starbucks is clueless to the struggle for freedom that the rest of the planet accepts as a given. Notice how even London was not that shaken by the subway bombings a few years ago?
America is like a naturally gifted boxer with a weak psych and poor stamina. If we do not win fast and decisively, pretty much during the commercial break, we become overwhelmed with self doubt and unravel. We have the attention span of the remote control society we have become. Our opponents know this, count on this and exploit it extremely well. Instead of being admired for tackling monster problems instead of chewing his thumb, Bush has become a Rorshak test for our age and a scapegoat, slammed because Iraq and the war on terror has become the hard battle he always said it would.
I believe that most people in today's America possess the emotional maturity of spoiled, suburban teenagers. We have lived so privileged a lifestyle for so long we have lost perspective about the fragility of our freedoms and the cost it took to obtain them. Our reaction to what has transpired in Iraq and the degree to which we have turned on our president is exactly the behavior of spoiled, myopic, lazy children.
In all the time I listened to liberal announcers and newscasters blame Bush for everything under the sun, never once have I read any of them put the Iraqi people on the spot. The article published below by Charles Krauthammer helps fill in some details along the way.
Iraq’s Choice: They were given their freedom and yet many have chosen civil war.
By Charles Krauthammer
This week the internecine warfare in Iraq, already bewildering — Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, jihadist vs. infidel, with various Iranians, Syrians, and assorted freelancers thrown into the maelstrom — went bizarre. In one of the biggest battles of the war, Iraqi troops reinforced by Americans wiped out a heavily armed, well-entrenched millenarian Shiite sect preparing to take over Najaf, kill the moderate Shiite clergy (including Grand Ayatollah Sistani) and proclaim its leader the returned messiah.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTFhZGJiNWZjNzk2Zjg3N2YzODhmZDY0YWI3N2RiMmE=
