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RUSH: Joe Biden is back, says we need to go to Darfur, we need to get out of Iraq and we need to go to Darfur. Bob Kerrey is back. He's the president of the New School, former Democrat senator from Nebraska, has an amazing piece at OpinionJournal.com today on the left's Iraq muddle. Yes, it is central to the fight against Islamic radicalism. It may be one of the best summations of where we are that I've read in a long time, and it comes from a Democrat.
 "At this year's graduation celebration at The New School in New York, Iranian lawyer, human-rights activist and Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi delivered our commencement address. This brave woman, who has been imprisoned for her criticism of the Iranian government, had many good and wise things to say to our graduates, which earned their applause. But one applause line troubled me. Ms. Ebadi said: 'democracy cannot be imposed with military force.' What troubled me about this statement -- a commonly heard criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq -- is that those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently. Let me restate the case for this Iraq war from the U.S. point of view. The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were 'over there.' It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the 'head of the snake.' But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.
"No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before," says Bob Kerrey, member of the 9/11 Commission. "And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq. Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. ... The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart." He's talking about Joe Biden here, who is out there saying, "We need to go into Darfur, that's what I would do," if he's elected president, he says. Bob Kerrey is putting these guys under the lights.
"American liberals need to face these truths: The demand for self-government was and remains strong in Iraq despite all our mistakes and the violent efforts of Al-Qaeda, Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to disrupt it. Al-Qaeda in particular has targeted for abduction and murder those who are essential to a functioning democracy: school teachers, aid workers, private contractors working to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure, police officers and anyone who cooperates with the Iraqi government. Much of Iraq's middle class has fled the country in fear. With these facts on the scales, what does your conscience tell you to do? If the answer is nothing, that it is not our responsibility or that this is all about oil, then no wonder today we Democrats are not trusted with the reins of power. American lawmakers who are watching public opinion tell them to move away from Iraq as quickly as possible..." I don't believe that, Bob, otherwise the Democrats wouldn't keep pulling away from a definite withdrawal. They can't get that done.
It's not the will of the people to get out of there and lose. The will of the people in this country is not for the defeat of this country or for the US military. "Those who argue that radical Islamic terrorism has arrived in Iraq because of the U.S.-led invasion are right. But they are right because radical Islam opposes democracy in Iraq. If our purpose had been to substitute a dictator who was more cooperative and supportive of the West, these groups wouldn't have lasted a week." So he rakes 'em over the coals, Bob Kerrey does, OpinionJournal.com. We'll link to it. I told you there are smarter people in the Democratic Party than what you're hearing about and they know that the Democrats are on a suicide mission with this, and this is one of the first efforts I've seen to try to prevent the suicide led by Nancy Pelosi and Dingy Harry. |
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