Michael Barone calls it:
Akin to this is the feeling shared by most Democrats and, it seems, by most American voters, that if we can just get our troops out of Iraq all will be well in the world.
I recall reading a few weeks ago an article on Democratic fund raising that quoted a woman as saying that “we were very safe under the Clinton administration.” No, we weren’t “very safe” — we just thought we were. Bill Clinton knew we weren’t “very safe,” and he took some steps — unfortunately, not enough — to make us safer.
You can say the same of George W. Bush during first eight months in office. There are evil leaders out there — the mullahs of Iran, Assad and his thugs, Kim Jong Il, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and his pal Fidel Castro — who hate the United States and want to do us as much damage as they can.
They don’t hate us just because the Republican Congress didn’t raise the minimum wage or because George W. Bush has a stubborn streak and speaks with a West Texas accent. They hate us because of our freedoms and because we have worked to export those freedoms around the world.
Friendship, hope and a determination to be on the road to peace are not enough to protect us in this world. A speedy exit from Iraq might make many Americans less unsettled while watching cable news — for a while. But it wouldn’t make us safer. It will just leave us more likely to face the kind of surprise we had on Sept. 11, 2001.
I’m starting to approach the conclusion that a big chunk of our friends on the other side of the aisle just cannot, and will not, see the world as it is until we have another great trauma, on par with 9/11. They insist that we can defuse all of the tensions in the world by altering our behavior; that all of those who are currently denouncing America have legitimate grievances.
They insist that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden, who is most likely in Pakistan, is simply a matter of moving manpower and armored vehicles to the mountains of Afghanistan (where they can’t operate well anyway).
They insist that Syria’s Assad will come around if we just play nice with him, and that we should talk to the Iranians and Ahmedinjiad, because they’re really reasonable and rational. That we can achieve any of our policy goals if we just try hard enough.
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April 9, 2007 - 7:35 pm
I dunno. I hate to disagree with Jim, but our friends on the other side of the aisle may have some valid points – or at least serve as “useful idiots.” Perception is reality. The Democrat leadership is out there looking like the “good cop” to President Bush’s “bad cop” in the eyes of Europe and Middle East.
Europe needs the Democrats’ sympathetic ear in order for Europe to remain as even nominal allies, while the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will react best to Bush when he is seen as the baddest of the bad.
We have two more years for Bush’s policies to bear fruit. He has had five and a half since 9/11. I’m still hopeful that more than seven years of aggressively fighting Islamic terrorism will be sufficient to tamp it down to the level that this can be treated as a law enforcement issue (as Kerry argued during the ’04 campaign.) Right now, however, we’re still at war. And as long as President Bush is commander-in-chief, I don’t think he will be capitulating to the Democrats’ “good cop” overtures or to public opinion on the war.