President George W. Bush: Kicking jihadi butt until January 20th, 2009!
Posted on 12/19/2008 5:07:23 AM PST by rellimpank
In his great Civil War history, "Decision in the West," Albert Castel describes the last Confederate hope of victory. If in 1864 the Confederate armies continue to exact a steep cost from the North, "the majority of Northerners will decide that going on with the war is not worth the financial and human cost and so will replace Lincoln and the Republicans with a Democratic president and Congress committed to stopping hostilities and instituting peace negotiations." He cites the resolution of the Confederate Congress that: "Brave and learned men in the North have spoken out against the usurpations and cruelties daily practiced. The success of these men over the radical and despotic faction which now rules the North may open the way to . . . a cessation of this bloody and unnecessary war." Plus ça change .
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Its true, Helprin is a idiot.
That said, Bush refused to fight back politically. some of us recall how he handled the DUI story the week before the 2000 election, and in hindsight the way he just let it ‘go’ with only one statement about it was a indicator of things to come.
To paraphrase W ‘He had his chance (after the 04 election) and he did not lead’.
I concluded three years ago W played ‘not to lose’ both on domestic policy AND in Iraq after his second Inaugural. He sat on a lead, much as a baseball team will do, and it cost both him and this nation dearly.
We got the most liberal House since LBJ, and lost the Senate. We got a Moderate RINO as the 08 nominee, and its GOING to cost us dearly over the next four years, maybe longer if the Moderates keep the GOP on this losing path.
Had W prosecuted the war in Iraq AFTER Saddam, its my view the GOP wouldn’t have lost the House, nor would it have lost the Senate.
And McCain wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on in the primaries with his ‘I was for the surge first’ nonsense (Guiliani, like him or not, was ‘first’ on that score, and no I wasn’t a Rudy supporter). Had W played to WIN in Iraq between January of 05 and the debacle of the 06 election cycle, we wouldn’t be in the position of praying Obama doesn’t repeat the worst of LBJ and Carter’s many mistakes in short.
You can’t find another President that gave up the PR battle to the liberal MSM as completely as W has done, folks.
I voted for him twice. Given the same opposing nominees, I would do so again, no choice.
But his second term has been one political disaster after another.
And thats what happens when you sit on a lead in American politics.
“To be fair. Bush didn’t do much to counter that propaganda.”
Exactly. But it goes much deeper than that. In the midst of this government economic insanity, Bush and other Republicans tell us that it is not their fault, and that they tried to fix it before it could happen, and that we should blame the Dems. Well, that may be true, but they also made no effort to impress upon the public the true nature of the problem, and keep pounding at it until it sank in. It is the responsibility of those in power to deal with these things openly and honestly, and Bush didn’t. He and others gave their token tries and then just let it happen, all the while spending like drunken sailors.
--exactly--
Excellent analysis.
I’ve been thinking those thoughts for a while, but you said it concisely, and you’re spot on.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
No.
But it is a step in the right direction. Whether Iraq will continue to be an Ally of the United States in the Long Term is yet to be seen, however that does not automatically mean they will revert to authoritarianism or some other extreme. Hell, Germany is not what I would call an Ally these days, but last I checked they have not reverted to Nazism.
But in the long run, yes I do believe we can win the battle of ideas and ideology in the Islamic World. In many ways we have, with a few exceptions, most countries with large Islamic Populations have seen dramatic drops in public approval for terrorism, Osama Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda.
Our Victory is far from certain, and though we have made great strides in the GWOT, we have seen many, many set backs.
The future is not certain, but we do have it in us the capacity to defeat this enemy just like we did Nazism and Global Communism.
President George W. Bush: Kicking jihadi butt until January 20th, 2009!
A few short years later the Clintonites and MSM had convinced the world he was an inadequate leader because he hadn't toppled Saddam.
They are all set to do the same for Bush Jr. They are about to revise history and convince the world that the President has left the world LESS safe when the opposite is true. Disgusting.
It is also true that the blame for our present confusion rests largely upon the shoulders of the same man.
George Bush never clearly or consistently explained to the nation who were were at war with, what was at stake, and why we needed to act.
It is often said that Success has many fathers but Failure is an orphan. I believe in the case of the "War on Terror", failure may claim a host of potential parents: the potent influence of foreign affairs bureaucrats in the State Department, poor advice from careerist officers in the Pentagon, flawed and sometimes intentionally politicized intelligence from CIA, a misbegotten strategic decision to create a new Homeland Security bureaucracy rather than improve the abilities and quality of the existing intelligence services, and finally, Mr. Bush's unfortunate and untimely lack of communications ability.
Due in varying amounts to all of the above, Americans who desperately needed clarity and light were instead given nothing but fog and muck. What they needed to hear was a message unencumbered by shading or dissimulation or politically-correct word-parsing, but that is what they too often received.
George Bush ought to have gone before the American people and told them that we are at war and that we are likely going to be at war for a long time. We are at war with a dominant branch of radical Islam that seeks nothing less than world domination, the destruction of Western society, and its replacement with Sharia law, forced conversions to Islam, and death to those who resist.
We are at war with an enemy for whom negotiation is not a prelude to peaceful coexistence but a tactic with which to buy time and plan for more effective and devastating attacks. We are in a long struggle the only outcome of which will be the defeat of one side or the other, as the enemy's own ideology makes necessary, our wishes and hopes to the contrary notwithstanding. This is not a War on "Terror", which is itself but a tactic, but a war between the forces of liberty and civilization on one side, and slavery and submission on the other.
Had George Bush made this argument clearly, consistently, and publicly, I believe we would be in a far better place today. Instead, we are about to inaugurate as his successor a man far more gifted with words, but far less likely to act decisively in defense of our nation and our civilization; a man elected on insubstantial promises; a man with a Muslim middle name.
Thanks. The main problem on our side is our love of blaming the Dems for everything. When things are put into the realm of right and wrong, rather than right and left, clarity occurs. And Republicans have a whole heck of a lot to be blamed for in this mess.
It is difficult to control the narrative when the MSM is as treasonous as it is. That is all the more reason why the bully pulpit should have been used to project the correct version of events, and establish a more accurate perception of reality.
The incoming Marxist administration knows how to do that, and will also use fascist tactics to accomplish that, much to our detriment.
I think Helprin’s right about Bush fighting this war on the cheap, despite the availability of political capital (for a fleeting moment) right after 9/11 to double the military budget and buy all the weaponry we need to both fight this war and keep our conventional rivals on their toes. I think that additional money spent on defense would have been preferable to the pork barrel deals made in Congress. But you know what they say about Humpty Dumpty.
I never doubted that we would prevail in Iraq. We had to, so I knew we would find a way. We would have invaded Iraq and defeated all comers there even if President Gore were just finishing his second term or President Kerry his first. We'll be there still securing our victory when former President Obama lies in state after dying of extreme old age. Of course it is worthwhile to set up the institutions of democracy in Iraq now that we can. It is a necessary condition of our ultimate victory. Necessary but not sufficient.
George W. Bush never understood that we had unfinished business with Arabia and Persia that can not be addressed entirely within Iraq. Turning Iraq into a demonstration project was never going to cow our enemies in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia et al. Bush had a lot of killing to do that he wasn’t willing to get on with. His naivete leaves us in a strategic predicament which we will soon, I fear, regret bitterly.
True, the libs control the public mediums of discourse, generally, and they defend their causes against any criticism however valid with hatred and bile. But even on this forum we find that defense of the Bush administration against any and all criticism is fairly common, and highly charged. This forum allows the debate to be taken further, though, without the words of hatred one sees so much in the MSM and on leftist blogs, which is to its great credit.
The NY bathhouse boys run our country.
No, "the American people" were NOT "war weary". It took that much time for the anti-war left and their allies in the media to get their propaganda machine cranked up to sell the idea that the American people were "war weary".
“Put this guy’s picture next to the Monday morning quarterback definition.”
I hope terrorists abduct Halperin and cut his head off. I’m sure that they will be impressed with his pleas that it is all W’s fault.
The NY, DC, Miami, Chicago, LA and Gay Frisco bathhouse boys run our country.
Which is why the MSM is so dangerous to America.
Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan along with an alliance with Turkey effectively cuts the land bridge between Muslim counties in half. It especially cuts apart Syria and Iran. Forget all the talk about establishing democracy in the Mideast. This is purely a western alliance (the corporate wealth gangsters) asserting force to protect huge oil infrastructure from falling into the hands of uncontrollable Islamic gangsters. Our children are not dying to protect America. They are dying to protect the New World Order globalists.
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