Hagel says no timetable for pull-out of foot from mouth
by JohnHuang2
In his big speech Monday before a gathering of veterans in Utah, the President minced no words regarding the enemy. "They have a strategy, and part of that strategy is they're trying to shake our will," Bush told the convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars. The enemy would love nothing more than to see America and her allies intimidated. The goal of the enemy is achieving absolute power. Theirs is "a dark vision that rejects freedom and tolerance and dissent." Theirs is "a hateful ideology that despises everything America stands for."
But enough about the Democrats. Over on the other side of the aisle, GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel, long-time critic of the Iraq war, in a stunning shift Sunday, criticized the Iraq war. "I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East," he said. Leave it to the neocon/AEI/PNAC/BFEE crowd to screw things up. Gone is that wellspring of peace and stability in the region, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who only invaded two countries and killed no more than a million people.
Now Libya's out of the WMD bidness, Syria's out of Lebanon, Egypt is having contested elections, Palestinians are having contested elections and pressure mounts to plunge the whole region into freedom. So many dominoes falling. If only Saddam were still president.
Hagel, co-host every Sunday of CNN's Late Edition, NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face the Nation and ABC's This Week, told ABC's This Week that he thinks Iraq is looking more and more like the Vietnam war. Obviously a clever ploy to lift morale. We're "locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam," he said. Everything about this is just like Vietnam. Especially here at home. The similarities are glaring -- from the Smithsonian Institute dinosaur display outside Bush's ranch (featuring the long-necked, plant-eating folk singer, Joan Baez!), right down to those Vietcong flying planes into buildings in New York and Washington four years ago. And those annoying Ho Chi Minh Islamic terror cells are back on U.S. soil.
Today there's no draft, we've got a volunteer army, tens of thousands of soldiers haven't died in the "jungles" of Baghdad, "insurgent" attacks are focused in one area (near CNN cameras in Baghdad), Saddam's in prison awaiting trial, Zarqawi doesn't have "Soviet" support, U.S. forces in Iraq aren't besieged, U.S. forces in Iraq can move freely from "rice paddy" to "rice paddy" -- other than that, just like Vietnam!
In the idiotic Hagelian formulation, a war becomes Vietnam if the enemy strikes back. And if there are mounting casualties. The Allied invasion of Normandy was instantly Vietnam. The Battle of Iwo Jima was instantly Vietnam. Panama was Vietnam. Gulf War I was Vietnam. The Afghan campaign was Vietnam. Even Grenada was Vietnam -- for at least several days. Over a hundred U.S. soldiers killed or wounded in Grenada. Or, I should say, "murdered" by Ronald Reagan's 'neocon cabal' (See Cindy Sheehan). Busy week for the necon cabal. Even back then.
Hagel offers America a constructive alternative. It consists of "figuring out how we get out of there," then run for our lives. Then we'll be safe, and terrorists will love us again.
It won't work, but that's not the point. The point for Hagel is to get the media to love him. Even more than Vietnam. If grief gives Sheehan the moral authority to urinate on Casey's grave and dishonor his sacrifice (it doesn't), then Hagel's service in Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, the Spanish-American War, the Civil War, the War of 1812, etc., gives Hagel every right to sound like a talking anus on TV every Sunday. If trafficking in agitprop media droppings is your bag, have at it.
What combat experience does not automatically confer is military wisdom. Kerry's proof of that. Hagel's proof of that.
Again I give you Hagel, the grieving Senator: "We should start figuring out how we get out of there, but with this understanding, we cannot leave a vacuum that further destabilizes the Middle East." So let's stay the course and get out now, but we can't give up or get out now and "the longer we stay in Iraq, the more similarities" between Iraq and Vietnam. Hagel was on a roll.
He's against timetables, but the clown says we've already lost the war. We must keep losing until we win! As a big critic of the war, he voted for the war. This war is just like Vietnam, and I voted for it. Wonderful. It all makes sense now.
A year before 9/11, an explosion ripped a massive hole in the hull of a Navy Destroyer, the USS Cole, killing 17 U.S. sailors, wounding 39 others. An al-Qaeda suicide attack. In 2000. Before Bush rejected Kyoto, so it couldn't have been that "root cause."
Four years after 9/11, in what the lib media calls a "new phase" by a more dangerous al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda launches a rocket attack against a U.S. warship docked in Aqaba, and misses. The "Katyusha rocket whizzed over the deck" of the USS Ashland, but ended up hitting "a nearby Jordanian military warehouse" (AP, 8/20). Not a single American casualty. Wow, some "new phase." Great Master Plan there, al-Qaeda! Working out real well.
The Cole bombing and the Aqaba rocket attack are bookends, in between are the Great Satan's Afghan and Iraq campaigns, landing Saddam in the pokey and binny in a burka hopping from mud hut to mud hut, cave to cave. Now, if you're a ratmedia liberal, and all you've got to work from is a steaming cowpie crammed in the tiny space between your ears, the Hagelian notion that al-Qaeda is winning makes sense. That's why you're not in charge. So, whatever you do, stay the course, liberals. Stay the course -- to ensure victory for Republicans in Nov. '06.
Anyway that's...
My two cents
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