It Takes a Village Idiot

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
March 2, 2007

Q. Why did the Democrat cross the road?

A. Same reason the chicken did.

It's been quite a chore to keep up with the forays and feints the Democrats have offered over the past few weeks in the ongoing war for the hearts and minds of the American electorate regarding America's strategy in the War in Iraq.

This is especially true given that the Democrats' primary goal seems to be to undermine the efforts of America's troops in Iraq while at the same time attempting to convince their constituencies and the broader American public that they're really not doing so.

It's all well and good, for instance, for Hillary Clinton to say that she'll end the War in Iraq when she becomes President. The problem with this silly assertion, and with other similar Democrat positions that have been put forward in the recent so-called "debate," is that the Islamist terrorists are probably not going to cooperate. The fact is that it takes two to sign a peace treaty, and a peace treaty usually only happens when one warring party beats the tar out of the other and forces it into submission (see World War II).

And this is not to mention the fact that legitimate treaties have historically been entered into by "nations," as opposed to rogue international terrorist groups which have a vested (not to say Qu'ran-legitimized) interest in cynically using the "peace treaty" as an instrument to buy time for reorganizing and recommitting to jihad against western Christian/capitalistic infidels.

Furthermore, Ms. Clinton's very words amount to nothing more than her trying to position herself as an ally of the Democrat left so that she can survive the Democratic primary elections, while at the same time leaving her enough wiggle room to reassert her centrist self as necessary to win a general election.

Tough tightrope, to be sure, especially when your most serious opponent is a raw and inexperienced Senator, Barack Obama, whose only claim to legitimacy is that he's caught the fancy of the Hollywood Left and that he somehow appears to fulfill the rock-star image the Left seems to demand of its politicians. Hell, even Maureen Dowd took a lethal swipe at the Baby Senator from Illinois: "Barack Obama poses for the cover of Men's Vogue and then gets huffy when people don't treat him as Hannah Arendt." (Never mind that about 97.77 percent of registered liberal voters couldn't identify Hannah Arendt on a bet.)

Further, as I've intimated, ending wars generally only works when you've got two relatively honorable nation-states on either side of the treaty table, and even then, there's no guarantee that one of the signees isn't, within 20 years or so of the signing of the peace agreement, going to elect a fascist government and start another global war all over again (see World War I).

Democrats these days seem to be tying themselves to an increasingly untenable position with regard to national security issues. FOX News's Brit Hume, for instance, in his role as a panel member on a recent Chris Wallace Sunday evening news broadcast, accurately — for my money at least — described Democrat withdrawalist John Murtha as "seriously out of touch" with what is happening on the international policy front.

Adding to Democrats' potential woes regarding buttressing their positions on the desirability of losing the War in Iraq are statistics about military deaths during the Clinton administration when compared to those under Bush. In fact, military deaths in the peacetime army overseen by Bill Clinton during the 1990s were higher than those during the first four years of Bush's presidency, in a time of war. An average of 1,460 soldiers died annually in the line of duty during the eight years of Clinton's presidency, while 1,430 soldiers have died each year on Bush's watch.

That said, it's no more than cold comfort that military deaths were marginally higher during Clinton's peacetime presidency than they have been during the first four years of Bush's wartime presidency. Given the fact that the leftist media are not about to so much as mention the statistics I've cited here, it's unlikely that these numbers will ever see the light of day, let alone get a legitimate hearing, on NBC, CBS, ABC, or MSNBC, nor in the pages of the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times.

Into the mix we should also add that things might well be moving in a positive direction in Iraq based on the U.S. troop "surge" now under way. The Mahdi Army seems to have folded its tents in Baghdad, and their leader Muktada Al-Sadr seems to have hightailed it to Islamist regions unknown in the attempt to save his own skin in the face of the incipient American troop increase in Iraq.

A February 20, 2007, poll conducted by a group called Public Opinion Strategies (which identifies itself as a "Republican" polling organization) found that 57 percent of Americans support "finishing the job in Iraq," and that by a 53-to-43 percent majority Americans believe that we can win the war against the "insurgents" in Iraq.

These results run counter to what leftist politicians and media members (not to mention liberal pollsters who are arguably not above skewing their results) are trying to sell to the American people: that defeat is inevitable and that we must turn tail as quickly as possible, withdrawing our troops and letting the chips fall where they may in what they describe as "sectarian strife" in Iraq.

The problem is that, while the internecine conflict in Iraq certainly breaks down along sectarian lines, ultimately it remains emblematic of the conflict between Islamist terrorism and western civilization. Islamists cannot afford an even marginally Democratic Iraq, where that country's citizenry might enjoy many of the privileges and opportunities we in western Democracies take for granted.

One recalls New York Democrat Senator Charles Schumer gleefully predicting that Iraq will be "another Vietnam," as if the outcome of that war was in any way positive to the interests of freedom-living nations and their citizens.

As they were in the 1970s regarding the War in Vietnam, Democrats are today committed to failure in Iraq. Their perversely joyful anticipation of a pullout of American troops from Iraq — especially if it's forced by their own legislative machinations — is palpable. Never mind that their working to bring about the very American military defeat that they have been predicting will, if it occurs (and this is highly doubtful), be nothing more than the most defeatist self-fulfilling prophecy in the history of civilization.

For Democrats, a repeat of the fiasco that their withdrawing funding for our troops in Vietnam in the early '70s represented would be nothing less than total victory, if by "victory" you're willing to accept a definition of "America's admitting defeat and withdrawing from a conflict they were on course to win militarily."

Simply put, the realization of the Democratic agenda depends for its success on our nation's military failure in the Middle East.

If the terrorists win, the Democrats win. In fact, among the things Democrats have in common with the Islamist terrorists who will be victorious if we abandon our military commitment in Iraq are the following:

Like their Islamist terrorist counterparts, Democrats despise individual freedom of choice and support state-mandated standards of behavior. America's self-imposed "defeat" in Iraq at the hands of Democrats will insure precisely that.

Like their Islamist terrorist counterparts, Democrats despise Christianity and its message of peace, brotherly love, and Divine grace, while they support state-dictated religious slavery that would eliminate Christianity's values and principles and replace them with a fascistic religiosity that denies the freedom to worship as one chooses. Again, America's self-imposed "defeat" in Iraq will insure that this state of affairs will follow and that Democrats and Islamist terrorists will both declare victory.

Ann Coulter once famously (infamously?) remarked, "There are no Democrat men; there are only big hairy Democrat women." Coulter was referring, as I understand her remark, to the fact that Democrats in general seem devoid of the "backbone" that enables most American males to make a decision and see it through to its conclusion.

The disdain she would seem to hold for the afore-referenced Democrats relates to the inability of those on the left to make decisions based on the best available intelligence and to stick by those decisions even as the polls by which Democrats daily reconstruct their political philosophy appear to indicate that their positions seem to be going against them. Democrats' inability to own up to the fact that they voted to go to war in Iraq and their propensity to switch their votes based on the utterly childish notion that they would, somehow, not have voted the same way they did if they had known then what they know today...well, have you ever heard any rationale so patently absurd as this one?

We're hearing supposedly mature, not to say popularly elected, government officials resorting to arguments none of us would countenance if our children made them. Imagine!

Own it, Democrats! The intelligence was what it was at the time. It was what you had to go on. If it had been different back then, your President would probably not have been making the arguments he and his administration made. And if you had been privy to knowledge that didn't surface for several years after you cast your vote, well, you might just have voted differently.

But for you to say in retrospect that if you had known then what you know today you would have acted differently is patently absurd. It's nothing more than a sophomoric exercise in "hindsight," in the art of rewriting history, which, by the way, your communist predecessors are famous for.

For leftist Democrats' positions to be vindicated, something approaching total societal breakdown would be necessary. In this case, Democrats will be vindicated if the situation in Iraq degenerates into total chaos and anarchy. The choices Democrats would have us make in Iraq will lead, as they did in Vietnam, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, caught in the imposition of totalitarian revenge that will result when terrorists take power in Iraq, as communists did in Vietnam.

The blood of Vietnamese citizens is, to this day, on the hands of Democrats such as John Kerry, and if Kerry's leftist cohorts have their way with Iraq policy, the blood of equal numbers of Iraqis will be on the hands of this second generation of leftist cowards that has taken power in Congress.

Indeed, in this light, the term "village idiot" doesn't even begin to get at the enormity of the Democrats' current moral malfeasance.