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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
As Iraq churns, O'Reilly sees Bush beating himself in November, while Steyn and Metcalf blast the media for aiding the enemy. Plus: Savage words for 9/11 widows.
Apr 14, 2004 | With at least 83 U.S. soldiers killed since April 1, with scores of foreign civilians taken hostage, and with insurgencies spreading from the Sunni Triangle to the Shiite-dominated cities in the south of the country, the last two weeks have taken an ominous turn for U.S. interests in Iraq. But as the tenuous reconstruction threatens to erupt into a full-scale war, conservatives are divided about how the darkening situation on the ground will affect President George W. Bush's reelection bid.
Most on the right have rebuked any comparison of Iraq to Vietnam -- and indeed, to date, there is no equivalent in the pace of casualties, on either side. But Fox News icon Bill O'Reilly -- a loud war backer who began to turn against the president in February over the missing Iraqi WMD -- now sees Bush facing a bona fide quagmire.
"At this point, President Bush is actually running against himself," O'Reilly declared in his weekly column on his personal Web site. "With the situation in Iraq tenuous, Mr. Bush finds himself in a race against time to straighten things out in the land of Saddam. Even though the U.S. economy is improving, chaos on an overseas battlefield is emerging as the end-game issue in the upcoming election."
O'Reilly seems a bit torn between telling Sen. John Kerry to keep his mouth shut about the war mess, and admiring Kerry's political savvy for remaining relatively quiet on the issue.
"Wisely, John Kerry has said little about the Iraq fighting. You don't criticize the Commander-in-Chief in the middle of a firefight. That could be construed as putting U.S. forces in jeopardy and undermining morale. Kerry would be smart to keep it zipped.
"Also, the Senator can read the polls. President Bush is sinking into the morass that Iraq is threatening to become. If things are this messed up over there next October, Kerry won't have to say a word. He can wave at the voters, and they'll wave him right in."
Here, O'Reilly finds the Vietnam comparison apt. And the administration's proselytizing prior to the invasion, he says, doesn't help matters now.
"So George W. Bush has to stabilize things in Iraq over the next few months, or he goes the way of Lyndon Johnson ...
"Americans are not going to go for another Vietnam. A war of attrition is not going to cut it, especially since the removal of Saddam was sold as a quick, surgical action with overjoyed Iraqis at the end of the rainbow. That obviously has not happened."
The truth about the flight suit
With some harsh obstacles now blocking the administration's plan to establish democracy in Iraq, Weekly Standard commentator Larry Miller is coming clean about Bush's declaration of "mission accomplished" aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier last May. The current situation on the ground in Iraq, bemoans Miller, underscores just how wrong Bush's stunt really was:
"I mean, please, anyone who ever reads past page two has known since President Bush landed on that aircraft carrier that Fallujah was the headquarters, the homeland, the core of everyone who ever worked and killed for Saddam Hussein ... What in the world did anyone imagine was going to sprout up there in the last 12 months? A chamber of commerce? A garden club? A band shell for Sunday programs of Sousa? ...
"I mention the president and the aircraft carrier for a reason, something else I've held in for a year. I hated it. I support what we've done the whole way; I think we've started to crack the hardest granite in history; I think we're in World War Three, Four, Five, and Six-through-Ten combined -- and I think we should be -- but I hated that landing so much.
"It made me wince like a big sip of sour milk, and I never said it then, because I didn't know why, and it didn't seem helpful, and it's surely not helpful now. But I'm saying it anyway, because I just realized what bugged me so much.
"It was an end-zone dance, and I hate end-zone dances. And because the game isn't over by a long shot ... I'm not an armchair general. I would never be flippant about the risk and loss of the lives of our soldiers (or our police and firemen, for that matter), or of any of those who put themselves in harm's way to protect and serve. But when I saw that banner saying 'Mission Accomplished,' I thought, no, no, it isn't accomplished at all, it's barely begun."
"Rattle their teacups"
For über-hawkish syndicated columnist Mark Steyn, published in the Chicago Sun-Times, the real issue with the media is the way it's undermining resolve to crush the coalition's enemies with the necessary indiscriminate force.
"The coalition approach to Iraq was summed up a year ago by a British colonel. Explaining how they were trying to secure Basra without blowing up buildings and causing a lot of death and destruction, he said, 'We don't want to go in and rattle all their teacups.'
"The avoidance of teacup-rattling remains a priority. In Fallujah, American troops had rockets fired at them from a mosque. So they fired back, but with the state-of-the-art laser-guided weaponry that kills the insurgents but leaves the mosque virtually untouched. I'd have been quite happy to see it blown up with the old-school non-laser imprecise munitions. But leveling mosques is felt to be insensitive, so on we go, avoiding the rattling of teacups, whether Sunni or Shiite."
Steyn doesn't mention the hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed during the recent fighting in Fallujah, but he does account for Iraqis' general spinelessness and underhanded lack of allegiance -- and how the hand-wringing Western media emboldens them.
"The passivity of the Arabs, the sensitivity of the coalition and the defeatism of the media is a potentially disastrous combination. Rattling teacups gets you a bad press from CNN and the BBC. But they give you a bad press anyway. And in Iraq, the non-rattling of the teacups is received by the locals not as cultural respect from Bush and Blair but as weakness ...
"The Iraqis will go with the winning side. And, though the Americans had a bad week last week, the insurgents had a worse one, losing as many men in seven days as U.S. forces did in the last year. The best way to make plain you're the winning side is to crush the other guys -- and rattle their teacups so loudly even CNN can't paint it as a setback."
