Jan 12 2008
Newsweek Declares Iraq A Lost Cause For Surrendercrats
It seems that not only has al-Qaeda’s efforts to takeover Iraq failed (see post below), but now even the liberal rag Newsweek is declaring Iraq a lost cause to the Democrats (a.k.a. Surrendercrats):
But as Bush rallied U.S. troops at the base here on Saturday with a “Hoo-ah” and conferred with his Iraq dream team, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, he indicated that he was setting in motion policies that could dramatically affect the presidential race–and any decisions the next president makes in 2009.
In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: “We’re putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington,” he told reporters. “The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process.” The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush’s Iraq coordinator in the White House–in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Most significant of all, the new partnership deal with Iraq, including a status of forces agreement that would then replace the existing Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq, will become a sworn obligation for the next president.
The fact is Bush is going to pull a hat out of a rabbit (a favorite quote of LJStrata’s that means a surprise trick ending to a plot line from TV or a Movie) on Iraq before he leaves office. We will have victory and a path to a great future before November. This is also going to nail the Surrendericans like Huckabee and Ron Paul. Only fools would still propose surrendering to those you just defeated – and there are a lot of fools running around politics these days. We need a Giuliani in the WH to leverage this great position Bush will leave the country in (McCain is too liberal on all issues outside the war).
Seriously folks – why is anyone in the GOP considering an ObaCain or a Hillabee in 2008 when you can vote for the real thing on the Dem tickets? If Bush takes the Iraq war off the table McCain’s strengths are gone, but Rudy’s generally more conservative stands (and electability over any Dem in FL, and ability to fight for NY and CA) makes him (or Thompson) the only viable GOP candidates right now.
We need a new Contest — Top ten excuses offered by Democratic surrender-monkeys for why the surge hasn’t really worked or it doesn’t matter if it did.
My suggestions:
1. It doesn’t matter becasue everyon in the arab world hates us now (they loved us before?) and if only we had been more respectful of the rights of genocidal dictators, we would be universally loved.
2. Freedom cannot possibly be worth the cost paid by the Iraqi people — and the American military — over the last four years. (If only America had learned from its mistakes in fighting wars to obtain our freedom from England and the end of slavery)
3. The sunnis and shites are only biding their time to re-start the civil war after we leave. (Which kind of undercuts their arguments for pulling out US troops.)
4. We have to “suspend disbelief” to accept the success that everyone reports and since we know that the governmetn lies all the time — Iraq must be worse than ever.
5. Bush is directly responsible for the rising unemployment rate among Iraqi gravediggers.
I believe he went there for the stated purpose. To honestly broker peace in the region and to do that he is approaching it differently than Carter and Clinton. In this case rather than having a few of the people from the region come here and make promises, he is going there and including regional leaders who have influence and a legitimate opinion on what is going on. And rather than flying the leadership of all of those countries to Camp David, he is going there to speak with them face to face on their turf. He is showing them great respect and showing humility by going to them rather than summoning them as if he were some kind of a superior.
kathie …….knowing this President, I’m quite sure he is not on a sight seeing tour.
Agreed and also what colin said above. I never thought it was a ‘secure my legancy’ trip. Iran.
CROSSPATCH, I’m thinking you are right. And maybe to shore up more support for an Iranian policy.
CROSSPATCH, I’m thinking you are right. And maybe to shore up more support for an Iranian policy.
Vince:
IF we had a leader??? Bush could have set back, kicked the can down the road and let the next guy handle a lot of this. He could have done only what was absolutely necessary to get by. No war, no showdown no nothing. And his life would probably have been easier.
But he didn’t. He is the one taking the risks, not Bolton. He is the one who has to take the hits, not Bolton.
Like I said, if any of these guys think they can do a better job, let them try.
I just don’t see that happening. It is easier to sit back and find fault and make impossible demands.
>IF we had a leader???
Damn right. When Mexico phones in a complaint, he’s Johnny on the spot.. When Democrats wage total PR war against him with the public.. you hear nada.
The Marines are at war.. the American people are at the mall , misdirected there by the President while being told that Islam is a religion of peace.
>Bush could have set back, kicked the can down the road and let the next guy handle a lot of this. He could have done only what was absolutely necessary to get by. No war, no showdown no nothing. And his life would probably have been easier.
Um, that’s what he is doing. Did he end the treason at the CIA, DOS? Nope.. Did he seal the border? Nope.
Did he confront Saudi Arabia on their poisoning of every institution they pollute with their money (ie: American universites, mosques in America)? Nooope
Oh he is letting in as many Muslims that Saudi Arabia and the UN wants to send here… wrecking every community that made the mistake of agreeing to resettle the Muslims.
Did he end the threat from Iran? Noooooope.
We’re at war and we have no one leading the public… no one to explain what our global policy is. No national framework that will outlast his term of office.. Nothing nothing nothing.
It’s not good enough to make the right decisions in Iraq but then not anywhere else… we’re in the most complicated war ever and there is absolutely no evidence that our leaders have any clue how to cope with it.
Bush is the President. An inadequite one.
Bush could have set back, kicked the can down the road and let the next guy handle a lot of this. He could have done only what was absolutely necessary to get by. No war, no showdown no nothing. And his life would probably have been easier.
Vince, I am afraid I find your rhetoric rather simple-minded. The Iran problems have taken longer than eight years to come about and it might take longer than eight years to solve. People in America seem to have no concept of a problem that might take decades to solve. It took forty years to finally beat the Soviet Union.
Because Bush didn’t “solve” the Iranian issue he is a failure? Well none of the other world leaders “solved” it either so I suppose he is in good company. This very rhetoric exposes something about how we think. We expect a President to be able to do anything on the planet to include changing the government in countries halfway around the world and if that doesn’t happen during one President’s term, he is a “failure”.
We are in a much different era now. The US military is the smallest it has been since the end of World War II. China is catching up to us as the world’s largest economic power. In the todays world we are not as significant as we used to be. The threats that caused countries to ally close to us have been vanquished and so those countries go their own way now and we are left alone. We are alone and with less armament than we were in the past. That wasn’t done by Bush but he is the first President to have to deal with that world reality. Clinton dismantled the military and then handed the country to Bush. The people don’t seem to have caught up yet to the notion that we aren’t the same country we used to be in the George HW Bush years.
George W. Bush is the best president we have had, maybe ever.
I don’t go shopping at the malls, I give my extra money and support to our guys fighting this war and millions of other Americans and businesses do the same. I don’t need a President of this country to tell me what to do.
W. is one of the best ever! He knows as any thinking person does our military could take on the whole of the mideast and win even if we had to use the really bad stuff. However in order to truely win we need the hearts and minds for a lasting peace.
1.) we have muslim moderates fighting fanatics in Iraq and Afgahnistan
2) we have shown the Arab countries the fanatics are as bad for them as for us.
3)We have the mad mullahs of Iran surrounded and as the people see peace and freedom on their borders how long before they demand the same?
4) We have not been attacked internally since 9/11 a miracle? in anyones estimation after 8 years of the Clintoons.
5)Ronald Regeans belief in freedom is being brought to bear in the M.E. and is too powerful for even the 19th century style rule to squash.
6) “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Arabs will demand these if they are shown they are available.
7) Pursuit of above is stronger than even the AlQeada enablers in the mainstream media and the Democrat party!
>Vince, I am afraid I find your rhetoric rather simple-minded.
Nothing is more simple minded than thinking your enemy is going to put his long-term plan to destroy you on hold.
Yes.. Bush is ultimately a failure… we have more enemies than before.. the enemies we had are more powerful then they were.. and due to his inablity to lead the people of the country in unity , our enemies know that as a people we’re divided and thus no mandate to Bush to take action.
What I find with a lot of people, and you seem like one of them, is that you can spot a problem here and a problem there and yet when talking about policy you show no evidence of taking the lessons learned about the problems to heart so that they inform the policy.
For instance, you believe that the Iranian regime is serious when it talks about the return of the Mahdi. I assume you accept that Iran is s developing nuclear weapons and is very close to being able to do it.
If a person accepts both of those ideas then you have to know its very likely they may use the nuclear weapons against us unprovoked.
But you dont show that you accept that.. you seem to think we have as long as we want to enlargen the military and wrap things up in other countries and then if we’re not too busy we can start to neutralize the Iranian regime.
You accept thier belief in the coming of the Mahdi and yet this morning you expressed confusion about why i think nuclear war is inevitble.
You’re the simple minded one. not me.
Vince…please be more specific.
We have more enemies then before, please enumerate.
Iran has wanted to destroy us since 1970 something, when do you think it will happen?
People in this country don’t want to be united, they would rather destroy a President. Haven’t you noticed how concerned they were with 3,000 Americans dying on 911………about as long as it took to take a breath and not one second longer. Most were more interested in the money they could wangle out of the Federal government for their hometown special projects.
Actually I’m getting tired of this discussion…..it is way to depressing focusing on how selfish, arrogant and power hungry so many people are.
>Actually I’m getting tired of this discussion…..it is way to depressing focusing on how selfish, arrogant and power hungry so many people are.
Yeah I get tired too. The mocking condescension from folks like you. You don’t know the year of the Iranian revolution? Please… I hope you’re a young person because someone would actually have to try very hard to forget the year. I’m power hungry?? Where the hell did you pull that out from?
I’ve aspired to no power , heck I dont even back a candidate yet.
New enemies include Russia, Turkey, Nicaruaga.
>”Iran has wanted to destroy us since 1970 something, when do you think it will happen?”
Piss off. Hows that?
That’s good Vince. Like I said arrogant…and 1970 something, do you disagree?
I absolutely disagree with that statement. More enemies? In what way? Where? Who? Bush was in office a total of 8 months when 9/11 hit. He hadn’t had time to do a thing. He was still operating with Clinton’s CIA.
Your “More enemies” rhetoric sounds suspiciously like DNC talking points to me. It is something that is not borne out in fact. More enemies?
Sure, that’s a possibility. Pakistan could attack us unprovoked too or so can any other country with nukes. The thing is I don’t have a crystal ball that says Iran is DEFINITELY going to attack us unprovoked and so if we don’t know if they are going to attack us, we aren’t going to attack them unless there is better evidence that they have nukes … such as by testing one … which they have never done to date.
I don’t see what point you are trying to make. It almost sounds as if you are making the argument that we should just go in there and start blowing stuff up. What if that PRECIPITATES what we are trying to avoid?
You seem to assume that we know what to hit. What if we don’t. What I think I am hearing sounds to me like you seem to think that we know exactly what to take out and that you are 100% certain that we would hit 100% of the targets.
You seem to say that the only way for Bush to redeem his “failure” is to attack Iran. But isn’t that likely to win us a huge number of enemies? And weren’t you complaining that Bush has made more enemies or something?
See what I mean? I can’t really make any sense out of what you are saying.
I didn’t say Bush created more enemies.. What I’m saying is the world is getting even more difficult and complex and by not advancing on the Iranian and NORK tracks Bush is indeed pushing it off onto the next guy. Our enemies are creating more enemies for us. Our weakness is not helping with those on the fence.
“You seem to say that the only way for Bush to redeem his “failure†is to attack Iran. But isn’t that likely to win us a huge number of enemies? And weren’t you complaining that Bush has made more enemies or something?”
Well since I never said Bush was creating the enemies and since i stated the primary threat is nuclear attack, I think it’s obvious that a strike on iran to prevent them from attacking us is worth earning a few new enemies.
But I guess that makes no sense .. ok.. fine.
I’m done with this. Sit back and watch Iran build a nuclear weapon.. and keep thinking they won’t use it. And you tell me I’m the one who makes no sense..
It’s so comforting to know that you’re willing to risk the destruction of American cities on a bet that Iran won’t do it… and this is from someone who understands their messianism.
Wow.
There’s a great article which articulates the reason for my pessimism.
My view is that everything Bush is doing in his foreign policy now is underming our Iraq effort and is ultimately dangerous for the US. That by his engagement of these policies it shows that the US has no clue about true nature of the war with Islam… and that this ensures nuclear war.
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?ID=1481
Hamas and Islamic Millenarianism: What the West Doesn’t Recognize
Some excepts:
This forgotten dimension of the Islamist phenomenon is key to understanding the current resurgence of a triumphalist Islam, since it cuts across all the divisions within the Muslim world: between Sunnism and Shiism, between traditional Islam and contemporary Islamism. As the French historian Pierre Lory explained in a recent lecture at the Sorbonne, “Eschatology represents one of the fundamental traits of the Muslim religion. The imminence of the end of time and of the final judgment is one of the oldest and most constant Quranic themes and is found throughout the sacred text of Islam.” Inasmuch as Muhammad is the last prophet (bearing the “seal of prophecy”), his advent inaugurates the last period of universal history: i.e. the eschatological period.
In his collection of Hadith titled “The Major Signs of the End of the World from the Prophet to the Return of Jesus,” Abdallah al-Hajjaj cites a saying of the prophet, who, raising his hand, is supposed to have affirmed that his mission and the final hour were as close as his middle and index fingers. This belief in the imminence of the end of time is a fundamental aspect of the contemporary Islamic reawakening, in both its peaceful and belligerent forms.
It is sometimes suggested that only the Shia version of Islam assigns importance to eschatological considerations, and it is true that the motif of the return of the hidden Imam, the central element of Shia belief, lends itself especially easily to millenarian interpretations. Since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, millenarian aspirations have been at the center of developments in the Shia Muslim world. The belief in the imminence of the Final Judgment helps to explain both the suicidal forms of behavior that proliferated during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the current attitude of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
All the various components of contemporary Islamism — from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas to the nebulous al-Qaida network — share the hope of seeing the Islamic caliphate reestablished and consider the “renewal of Islam” to be the manifest sign of the truth of the prophecies concerning the final victory of Islam and its propagation throughout the world.
As an example, we can cite here the following fatwa of Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the most important ideologues of the Islamist movement and the head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research:
“. . . The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?” He answered: “The city of Hirqil will be conquered first’ — that is, Constantinople. . . . Romiyya is the city called today “Rome,” the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice — once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens. (Cited from MEMRI Special Dispatch, no. 447.)”
A Millenarian and Redemptive Anti-Semitism
Hamas is a radical Islamic movement whose worldview is marked by an Islamic eschatology in which the Jews occupy a central place. Its apocalyptic vision of a final confrontation with Israel excludes every possibility of coexistence or “moderation.” This vision is identical with that of the most radical Jihadist movements.
Far from being merely an epiphenomenon, the anti-Semitism of Hamas constitutes the very core of its political-religious doctrine. The hatred of Jews expressed in the Hamas Charter and conveyed in the discourse of its officials is not simply a religious anti-Judaism or an imported anti-Semitism of European origins. It is, as the French scholar of anti-Semitism Pierre-André Taguieff has put it in his book “La nouvelle judéophobie,” a “millenarian and redemptive anti-Semitism.” Taguieff compares radical Islamic Judeophobia — in terms of which “the Muslim world can only be saved by the extermination of the Jews” — to the racist anti-Semitism of Hitler.
It is troubling to note, as Richard Landes has recently pointed out, that the West, far from condemning the apocalyptic discourse of Hamas, actually encourages it. Such an attitude is undoubtedly to be explained by the fact that certain European leaders and diplomats share the convictions of Hamas officials concerning the imminent disappearance of Israel.
Here are some folks in the press who are also recongnizing that 2nd Term Bush is making strategetic disasters and undoing all that 1st Term Bush has done
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/01/16/death_of_the_bush_doctrine/
THE Bush Doctrine – born on Sept. 20, 2001, when President Bush bluntly warned the sponsors of violent jihad: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists” – is dead. Its demise was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Friday.
Home / Globe / Opinion / Op-ed Jeff Jacoby
Death of the Bush Doctrine
Email|Print| Text size – + By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist / January 16, 2008
THE Bush Doctrine – born on Sept. 20, 2001, when President Bush bluntly warned the sponsors of violent jihad: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists” – is dead. Its demise was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Friday.
more stories like this
18 Palestinians killed in Israeli clashes; Hamas leader’s son dies in fight
Rice presses Arabs to reach out to Israel
Israel, Palestinians start tough talks
Rice downplays expectations for quick Mideast peace pact
Bush seeks Arab support for peace
The secretary of state was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route with the president to Kuwait from Israel. She was explaining why the administration had abandoned the most fundamental condition of its support for Palestinian statehood – an end to Palestinian terror. Rice’s explanation, recounted here by The Washington Times, was as striking for its candor as for its moral blindness:
“The ‘road map’ for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the ‘core issues’: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel’s border, and the future of Jerusalem.
“The reason that we haven’t really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,” Rice said. . . . What the US-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was “break that tight sequentiality. . . You don’t want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven’t fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure. . .”
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Go to the link to read the rest of it. It’s really f’ing astounding how dumb these people are.
The ‘Road Map’ is a HINDERANCE to peace because it required that the Palestinians actually do some bare minimum as a show of good faith to reassure israel that israel isn’t surrendering itself to a terrorist state.
And indeed, have not the Palestinians shown themselves to be absolutely determined to continue on in hositily towards it goal of a one-state solution?
Here is the close of the article:
“When George W. Bush succeeded Bill Clinton, he was determined not to replicate his predecessor’s blunders in the Middle East, a determination that intensified after 9/11. Yet now he too has succumbed to the messianism that leads US presidents to imagine they can resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Clinton’s legacy in this arena was the second intifada, which drenched the region in blood. To what fresh hell will Bush’s diplomacy lead?”
Exactly what I have asked as well… the consequences of this appeasement is going to lead to nuclear war and the undoing of all our hard work in Iraq