Posted on 02/19/2003 6:43:12 AM PST by Dog Gone
It doesn't matter what the polls say right now about the war in Iraq. When we invade, we either will or will not find what Secretary of State Colin Powell says is there. If we do not find it, President Bush will be in serious trouble. If we do, all of his critics will be.
Unlike so many issues in public policy, this one will be determined shortly one way or another. One may have to wait years before we can determine if a legislative course succeeds or fails. Usually, by the time the verdict is in, the voters have shifted their attention far away.
But Iraq either will be found to have the chemical and biological weapons we fear it has and the incipient nuclear capacity or these nightmares will prove to have been paranoid. The fact that the denouement will take place in a few weeks, while the whole world is watching, makes this outcome a seminal one for our politics and the new world order.
My money’s on President Bush. He wouldn't be pushing us toward this war unless he felt he had the goods on Saddam.
If Bush is right, the left in the United States will be discredited for many decades to come. In the opposite of the Vietnam syndrome, where the left proved to be correct — it didn't make a bit of difference in the cold war whether we won or lost in Vietnam — it will now be proven massively, totally wrong.
With each weapons lab and bomb factory our troops find, the credibility of the left wing of the Democratic Party will go down the drain, not to rise again for many years. In retrospect, they will seem as misguided as the appeasers of Munich were and their political fortunes will be just as doomed.
Politically, in the United States, Iraq will become a term like “Munich” to debunk the appeasers. Like “Vietnam” it will be a place that becomes a lesson. It will stand as the prime example of how reflexive opposition to violence undermines the long term cause of world peace. Those who are now marching for peace are on their last march.
Soon, the reality of the world around them will force its way into their consciousness and the shame of the inaction they urged will keep them indoors in the future when the peace trumpet summons them again.
The United Nations Security Council will go the way of the General Assembly. The takeover of the larger body by a myriad of tiny nations with no power and less credibility doomed it to the role of a by-stander when U.N. action was called for.
Now, the subservience of the U.N. Security Council to the veto and voice of nations like France will make it irrelevant as well, just as the Soviet vetoed marginalized it during the Cold War.
Nor will NATO survive the ravaging of the French and German intransigence. No longer will the alliance be the forum for joint decision making about Western military action.
The lesson of the Iraq War will be that the world is unipolar and that anyone who wants a voice needs to be heard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The European Union headquarters in Brussels won't do and the U.N. headquarters in New York will be marginalized. The only forum at which to speak will be at the forum of American foreign policy decision-making.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair understands the new reality. By flying to Texas and Washington, Blair shows that he realizes that it is only by injecting himself into the U.S. decision-making context that he can influence the outcome of events. It will be a very long time before France or Germany recover their voices after we find the weapons caches in Iraq.
President Bush’s poll ratings going into the war are slipping. His job approval appears to have dipped below 60 percent, less than Bill Clinton had during his entire second term. But they will be very high coming out of Iraq. And that’s what will matter.
Two words that don't go together, total oxymoron.
Two million dead victims of Pol Pot would take issue with that statement.
Not likely. They have a tremendous capacity for self-delusion. Just look at how they have convinced themselves that an unborn baby is not a human being.
I thought it was 5 million in Cambodia, and 1.5 million in Vietnam.
The left NEVER gets it right. And when they get it wrong, as they always do, they deny it. Just as they deny this Vietnamese holocaust...
1) Don't fight a war unless you plan to win
2) Do everything you can to ensure than you will win
3) Fight as an absolute last measure
4) Fight only in the national interest or for national security.
People will disagree over whether #s 3 & 4 were applicable in Vietnam, but I don't think many will disagree that we did not do either #1 or #2.
First, among those who think, there is no such thing as a credible liberal position.
Second, among those who don't think, they wouldn't even believe their lyin' eyes if they saw incontrovertible evidence that Bush were correct.
Just my hunch.
You don't understand. When Toe Sucker predicts the future, you can bet money the exact opposite will occur! :-)
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