A Common Enemy
Michael van der Galien's quote of the day:
“This is one of the key failures of the Bush presidency, and it will dog his legacy. As Andrew Cochran observed today, the president never once used the words “Islamic” or “Islamist” in describing the core of this war. The war is with Al Qaeda, or Iraqi insurgents, or the Taliban or something. Abandoning his lofty, Wilsonian rhetoric from 2006, President Bush has once again changed the course and repudiated his very own doctrine. A war against finite gangs, or their various surrogates in Iraq and Afghanistan, is not what it’s about. The mullahs in Qom are not what it’s about. By declaring a litany of shadowy villains all around the world, the president creates an ambiance of war that has no direction and no clear finality”[Link]
Sullivan, and particularly Cochran, make it pretty clear what they would like to see:
Why did President Bush retreat from the obvious? Who imposed upon him, employing what logic, to depart from his past clear and accurate statements on the nature of Islamic-based terrorism and extremism?
The reason is entirely obvious, and one I'm sure they've celebrated, though their biases are obviously blinding them to it's implications.
The truly ironic part about this all is, is that the key failure that will be dogging Bush's legacy here is the exact opposite of what these guys are advocating, which is probably why they're not seeing it.
As Cochran also notes, before the mostly ignored SOTU last night, Bush has done everything he can to lump all of two-bit gangs and tinpot dictators into one cohesive threat. That "strategy" has cost the US from the very beginning, when it shut down the intelligence being provided to the US by the Iranians against their foes in Afghanistan; the Taliban. The "axis of evil" speech also lumped the Iranians in with their bitter foes in Iraq.
The whole concept of "divide and conquer" seems to have passed these people by. Which given they're the same demographic buying up Jonah Goldberg's drivel about how liberals are fascists because Nazis liked organic farming too, probably shouldn't surprise me.
Even if these fools were right, and there was some massive, Islamofascist movement out there trying to link up all of these disparate groups into a cohesive whole to face off against western civilization, only a complete and utter idiot would do as Bush has done and try to help link them all up by treating them as though they already were.
The Reagan administration was at least smart enough to realize that having Saddam Hussein's Iraq duking it out with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, (while they happily and secretly armed both sides), was an elegant if brutal solution to their regional concerns.
The neocon plan is to attack them both and fight their combined, (admittedly still puny in comparison), might with the blood of Americans and the borrowed treasure of the Chinese. Disciples of Sun Tzu, they ain't.
Fortunately, there are still a few professional individuals left out there whose strategic knowledge is based on more than the occasional friendly game of Risk, and they've provided the proof positive of why Bush's previous statements were so foolish, and why he, or at least his speechwriters, were a little less stupid this time around.
The great "awakening" in Iraq that has caused the much celebrated reduction in violence and apparent success of the "surge", happened in large part because the US military stopped treating every Muslim with a gun as though he were part and parcel of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and actually took the time to find out which groups they could work with, at least temporarily, to defeat the true extremists.
And hey! It worked! And it has given the war's supporters an at least temporary lull in violence to celebrate, even if the political reconciliation needed for long-term success is no closer than it ever was. One could hope that they might learn something from the strategy employed, but when you see your enemy through the prism of religious intolerance, and believe that Islam is the issue, than an Islamic militant is an Islamic militant, regardless of their actual interests and beliefs.
Attack them all and in so doing force them all to fight you. Al Qaeda's provocation strategy in a nutshell. And the true tragedy of Bush's legacy is how far he's assisted that strategy's furtherance.
