Lou Dobbs must be looking for link love, so here it is, Lou.
Once again Mr. Dobbs has gone off into LalaLand, informing the American people that President Bush is under some moral obligation to explain exactly how we’re going to end the conflict in Iraq. Everyone set your watches now, because if Mr. Bush doesn’t deliver, Armchair-commander-in-chief Dobbs undoubtedly has the plan that the generals have all been waiting for.
Clearly, the oft-stated goal of building up the Iraqi security forces to a point where they can sustain themselves before we pull out has made no impression on the indelible Mr. Dobbs. How does one make a game plan more clear than that? “We’ll leave when the Iraqi security forces can fight the war without us,” is a pretty definitive plan.
We know that new Iraqi battalions are entering the fight every month.
We know that Iraqi security forces are taking control of more and more provinces.
We know that we are consolidating our forces in the most unstable areas of Iraq because they are no longer needed in other regions.
And though most people don’t say it, quite a few of us expect a large part of the Iraqi insurgency to die down as soon we start seriously dropping troop levels. The idiot insurgents will take to the streets, dance and proclaim a victory against the Americans, and every literate person on Earth will know they are bald-faced liars who just want to look good on Arabic television for the illiterate masses.
But that isn’t good enough for Mr. Dobbs. He wants an accountability we never demanded of Franklin Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower. Presidents are supposed to fight wars on crisp timetables, with clearly predictable body counts, and we have to have a specific day on which we can declare victory.
It didn’t take the news media long to rework President Bush’s “end of major hostilities but not end of war” speech into a declaration of peace and victory. But after a couple of years of misconstruing that speech, Mr. Dobbs and his professional peers are now intent upon rewriting the history of “We don’t know when we’ll be able to pull our troops out of Iraq, but we intend to leave just as soon as the Iraqis can defend themselves”.
Truth be told, if the Iraqi insurgents had sense enough to shut up and stop killing other Iraqis, we probably couldn’t leave any sooner because it still takes time to train and equip soldiers and police battalions. But they’re not doing anything to make us leave faster when they go out slaughtering every Iraqi man, woman, and child they can shoot.
We Americans only have to care about the Iraqi situation because we morally indebted ourselves to the Iraqi people. Bad as it was, evil as it was, we toppled and disassembled the former Iraqi government and we have to stay in Iraq until the current Iraqi government is strong enough to man the streets.
The real question Mr. Dobbs and his fellow armchair warriors should be asking is, what are we going to do when Al-Qaeda In Iraq is left to face only Iraqi soldiers and police? How long does anyone really expect the foreign terrorists who have flocked to Iraq to hang around there? They have to realize that they’ll start losing allies as soon as the American troops leave. And they aren’t very popular now.
Those terrorists are going to find a new land to terrorize. What’s the gameplan for that next step in the war, Mr. Dobbs?
Or are you not prepared to give us a clearly defined time table with delivery dates and accurate body counts?
