Alternate reality
Posted by Richard on December 8, 2006
One little excerpt from the Iraq Surrender Group report told me everything I needed to know about it and confirmed the fears and suspicions I had: "No country in the region wants a chaotic Iraq." Ahem. In what alternate reality do these tired old political reprobates reside? In this reality, Iran absolutely, positively does want a chaotic Iraq, and is working 24/7 to create one! And it’s client, Syria, is doing its share!
There is more wisdom, insight, judgment, and sense of history in the head of one young American soldier than in the entire preening, self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing Baker-Hamilton commission — as evidence, consider the reaction of T.F. Boggs, a 24-year-old Sergeant in the Army Reserve who returned from his second tour in Iraq just last month (emphasis added):
The Iraq Survey Group’s findings or rather, recommendations are a joke and could have only come from a group of old people who have been stuck in Washington for too long. The brainpower of the ISG has come up with a new direction for our country and that includes negotiating with countries whose people chant “Death to America” and whose leaders deny the Holocaust and call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth. Baker and Hamilton want us to get terrorists supporting countries involved in fighting terrorism! …
…What the group desperately needed was at least one their members to have been in the military and had recent experience in Iraq. The problem with having an entire panel with no one under the age of 67 is that none of them could possibly know what the situation is actually like on the ground in Iraq. …
We cannot appease our enemies and we cannot continue to cut and run when the going gets tough. As it stands in the world right now our enemies view America as a country full of queasy people who are inclined to cut and run when things take a turn for the worse. Just as the Tet Offensive was the victory that led to our failure in Vietnam our victories in Iraq now are leading to our failure in the Middle East. How many more times must we fight to fail? I feel like all of my efforts (30 months of deployment time) and the efforts of all my brothers in arms are all for naught. I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than a 24 year old but apparently I have more patience for our victory to unfold in Iraq than 99.9 percent of Americans. Iraq isn’t fast food-you can’t have what you want and have it now. To completely change a country for the first time in it’s entire history takes time, and when I say time I don’t mean 4 years.
Talking doesn’t solve anything with a crazed people, bullets do and we need to be given a chance to work our military magic. Like I told a reporter buddy of mine: War sucks but a world run by Islamofacists sucks more.
HT: Hugh Hewitt, whose assessment of the report is spot-on, including an apt historical comparison:
The report combines an almost limitless condescension towards the "Iraqi sovereign government," even going so far as to lay out a timetable for its exact legislative program for the next six months, with a cavalier indifference to the Syrian death squads operating in Lebanon, and the certain nature of the Iranian regime –still, on this very day, hosting the anti-Holocaust conference.
It is a wonder, this bit of appeasement virtuosity, and I think it will gain for its authors all the lasting fame that has attached itself to the name Samuel Hoare, and his brainchild, the Hoare-Laval Agreement.
I think Dean Barnett may have correctly identified the mindset of these morons:
Yesterday, the self-esteem movement reached its zenith. A nation and a government, eager to feel better about themselves, rounded up a passel of political has-beens to offer policy prescriptions that we could all support. And, other than the brain-dead nature of its policy prescriptions, what’s there not to love about the Iraq Study Group’s report? It’s the foreign policy equivalent of “a chicken in every pot.”
If this vacuous and venal piece of tripe isn’t dismissed and ignored — if its policy recommendations are actually followed, and the United States commits itself to appeasing terror states into being a bit nicer — then a few short years from now, when the nuke takes out Tel Aviv, we should refer to it as the Baker-Hamilton Holocaust.
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