Protecting the Left Flank

front page magazine ^ | 13 april 2006 | FrontPage Magazine

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You can get a sense of the full extent of the Left’s desperation in who it is beginning to adopt as heroes: military men.

The latest effort to co-opt the Armed Services for the Left is Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who wrote an editorial for Time on Sunday entitled, “Why Iraq Was a Mistake.” Although the media latched onto Newbold as the one thing in limited supply on the antiwar Left – a straight-shooting, patriotic war critic – he testified before Congress that Iraqi terrorism could be blamed on our “occupation” and supposedly “one-sided” policy of favoring Israel, demanded we “address the root causes of terrorism,” and, despite his protests to the contrary, has favored announcing a public timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

In his article, which the magazine calls “a full-throated critique,” he declares, “a fundamentally flawed plan was executed for an invented war, while pursuing the real enemy, al-Qaeda, became a secondary effort.” As director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Newbold writes, “I made no secret of my view that the zealots' rationale for war made no sense.” Worse, these zealots “had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy.”

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The new and improved Wesley Clark.