"Great Progress" In A Vacuum Of Defeatism

U.S. Senator and undeclared 2008 GOP presidential frontrunner George Allen (R-VA) was on Press The Meat yesterday and said something that so flummoxed Tim Russert that the usually level-headed (for a liberal press jackal) NBC newsman momentarily sounded as dimwitted as the rest of his coifed on-air colleagues:

Senator George Allen said Sunday that last week's vote on the Iraqi constitution shows that the U.S. is making "great progress" in the war on terror - contrary to claims of Bush Administration critics who say the White House has no plan for success in Iraq.

"There has just been a monumental benchmark achieved...Now, they're still counting the votes, but it appears that the people of Iraq, in stronger numbers that even in January of this year, have come out and voted for this constitution."

The Virginia Republican noted that the Iraq constitution codifies "individual rights, men and women having freedom of expression, religious freedom, where rights are not enhanced nor diminished on account of religious beliefs."

Senator Allen said the new constitution assures that the Iraqi people will be governed under "the rule of law," noting that it "will give them a motivation [for] what they're fighting for, for themselves, for their children."

"I think this is great progress and we ought to celebrate it," Allen insisted.

In this he echoed the words of Victor Davis Hanson last Friday:

[A] second national referendum was even more tranquil than the first. Things are not static in Iraq, but are on a clear path to key parliamentary elections and the first truly popularly elected government in the region’s history in December. This is already putting enormous pressures on the Syrians and some of the Gulf states, as Arab audiences see less Americans patrolling and more Iraqis voting on their television screens. And now we go from a humane and sober election to the trial of Saddam Hussein, as the first tyrant to be tried in the Middle East experiences the justice that neither he nor any other regional strongman ever granted to others.

On the periphery of all this, we are seeing a decline in Osama bin Laden’s popularity, more European worries about radical Islam, and a number of formerly ambivalent nations like Japan, India, and the former Commonwealth ever more eager to work with the United States.

To Russert, however, Senator Allen might just as well have been speaking Klingonese:

Meet the Press host Tim Russert, however, sounded unimpressed, responding to Allen's call for celebration by noting: "But there has been no weapons of mass destruction."

To which the proper response would have been, "Saddam shipped them to Syria two months before we invaded, numbnut." But that fact wouldn't penetrate either, because Russert is a press jackal, and the press has been so submerged in its Bushophobic pro-jihadi propaganda for so long that they don't remember anything else. Senator Allen was not unlike Galileo telling the medieval Roman Catholic Church that the Earth revolves around the sun. He'd have been just as well off talking to his microphone, or bringing along a ventriloquist's dummy.

VDH lamented this defeatist dementia as well:

And the reaction at home? Apparently no matter. The media has long since written Iraq off as a “quagmire” and a “debacle.” The war is now hopelessly politicized and has been misrepresented in two national elections. Then we heard that the war’s purpose was either to steal oil (the price actually skyrocketed), enrich Halliburton (in fact, few other conglomerates wished to venture to Iraq), or do Israel’s dirty work (it just withdrew voluntarily from Gaza). Our aims were said to be anything other than to remove the worst dictator in modern memory, allow the Arab world a chance at democracy, and undo the calculus of Middle-Eastern terrorism that is so parasitic on the failures and barbarity of regional autocracies.

While no mainstream Democrat has yet gone the McGovern route, it is still politically toxic for any to state publicly that we should be optimistic about the future of Iraq, inasmuch as they are convinced that such an admission could only help George W. Bush....

The public too is turned off. Perhaps it is the constant media stream of IEDs and suicide bombs — never the news of thousands of new schools, a free and stable Kurdistan, progress in the Shiite south, or any of the other countless positive developments from elections to Saddam’s trial. Polls reveal that the American people care little that, in terms of military history, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a constitutional government in his place — in less than three years and at the cost of 2000 lives — are still formidable achievements, making the lapses seem minor in comparison to those in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

No, we have now gone too far for all that. And how could we not, after the wild charges of Richard Clarke, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Joe Wilson, the celebrity venom of everyone from Sean Penn to Donald Sutherland, the media revelations of Rathergate, Eason Jordan’s false charges that our military targets journalists, and Newsweek’s falsities about flushed Korans?

Don’t forget either the contributions of U.S. senators such as Dick Durbin (comparing our Guantanamo guards to Nazi, Stalinist, and Cambodian murderers) or Ted Kennedy (claiming Abu Ghraib was reopened for the same Saddam-type atrocities by Americans), who did their small part to libel those who gave freedom to millions. Whatever the good news of this election or the one in December — much less the increasing isolation of the nearby tyrant Assad, the flowering in Lebanon, and the rumbles in the Gulf and Egypt — it won’t make much difference anymore to the American people. They have decided that they are tired of the Middle East and only want to go back to the world before 9/11, forgetting that the easy shoot-a-cruise-missile-at-a-cave strategy ultimately led to the 9/11 attacks. [emphasis added]

That last sentence is chilling in its implications. It suggests that the traditional GOP advantage on national security could, in 2008, be turned against the Republican ticket by a Democrat running on a McGovernik pacifist platform. It also suggests that, for all that we in the blogosphere like to believe that we've taken down the Extreme Media and that there is no more media monopoly in this country, it is in fact the Extreme Media, through sheer volume of screeching anti-American propaganda, that has, in the very midst of a victory of historic proportions, worn down the American public to the point where it may just as well have been the defeat the EM has spent so long dishonestly portraying.

The only saving grace is that 2008 is still three years away, and as VDH concludes:

So when this is all over — and it will be more quickly than we imagine — there will be a viable constitutional government in Iraq. But the achievement will be considered either a natural organic process, or adopted as a success by former critics only at its safe, penultimate stage.

Most of us tragically will forget many of the American soldiers who courageously fought, died, and gave the Middle East its freedom and us our security. Purple fingers, not overloaded American helicopters taking off from the embassy roof, is the future of Iraq.

Yes, the terrorists’ assault against the Iraqi democracy will end — as all failed insurrections do — not with a bang but with a whimper.

And - also more quickly than we imagine - a GOP presidential candidate George Allen will be able to cite a free, democratic Iraq as a stupendous achievement, and perhaps (if the Bush Administration belatedly follows through on liberating its two neighbors and bringing the war to a victorious conclusions), in a reversal of Winston Churchill's famous phrase, "not the end of the beginning, but the beginning of the end" for Islamic fundamentalism.

Dubya would seem to have little to lose. After all, foreign policy is the usual focus of second-term presidents, and he's bleeped up his domestic agenda, perhaps for good, anyway. Might as well make his legacy one that will stick as far into the craw of his enemies as humanly possible.