What Defeat Will Look Like

Me, Election night 2006:

Whether you attribute tonight's results to the "six year itch" or the war that President Bush said from the beginning would be a long one or any of the myriad of Democrat memes throughout the year, the bottom line is that the American electorate has made some profoundly foolish and short-sighted choices the consequences of which will not be long in manifesting themselves beginning in January. A huge tax increase is a certainty without any legislative action at all from the new House majority by virtue of letting the Bush tax cuts expire. Pulling the plug on the war, both through bitterly recriminatory hearings that feed Bush lieutenants backwards through the bunghole on everything from terrorist surveillance to "torture" of enemy "detainees" and outright defunding of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is inevitable. [emphasis added]

The Hill, today:

When they won control of Congress in November, Democrats pressed their case to withdraw troops from Iraq and refocus on Afghanistan, but some are growing impatient with U.S. operations in Afghanistan as well.

A few congressional Democrats go so far as suggesting that the Pentagon should pull out of Afghanistan now, while others say that troop withdrawal will be addressed after the military is out of Iraq.

Representative Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), a senior defense authorizer [Goodness, but that's a terrifying thought], wants the U.S. out of Afghanistan immediately, calling operations there “futile” in trying to effect political change in a country with a tangled history....

“We are finished there, militarily speaking,” said Abercrombie, the chairman of the Air and Land Armed Services subcommittee.

“There is no useful purpose for our troops there,” Abercrombie stated in a recent interview. “The military should withdraw now,” he said, though he stressed that the U.S. could keep “isolated pockets” of special operators.

Instead of using the military to effect political change, the U.S. should have a complete diplomatic re-engagement in the region, “with an understanding that our role there should change,” Abercrombie added....

Representative Diane Watson (D-CA), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a staunch opponent of the war in Iraq, said that it is time for the U.S. military to start leaving Afghanistan and the Middle East altogether. “We are not securing America by being there,” she pressed. “The longer we are there, the more plots start growing in our country.”

Watson, who supported the war in Afghanistan, said that the military ought “to start leaving Afghanistan” and that the U.S. should allow Afghan officials to “formulate and run their own government.”

Am I a prophet? No. I just know the Democrats. Maybe not as intimately as every square inch of my pudgy, blemished, generally unsightly naked body, but well enough.

What we have here is a continuum. The left's "anti-war" fetish vis-a-vie Iraq started on the fringe (Yes, even a fringe can have its own fringe) and metastasized inexorably toward what laughably passes for the Donk "mainstream." While bashing the war helped cost John Kerry the 2004 presidential election, it won his party control of Congress last November. Now, as the Hill article observes, just about every Democrat is willing to be publicly identified with the "cut & run" crowd, but their "mainstream" still walk the logic tightrope of supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

However, as Brother Hinderaker points out, the arguments in favor of staying in Afghanistan are pretty much the same ones for staying in Iraq: in both theaters we're midwifing (or nursemaiding) fledgling democracies; in both theaters we're heavily engaged with al Qaeda; abandonment of either theater would have the same disastrous consequences - an Islamist administered bloodbath of the indigenous population we left behind, handing a giftwrapped new base of operations to the terrorists, and gifting an even bigger strategic victory to the Iranian mullahgarchy.

Consequently, having gone so far down the road toward running away from al Qaeda and the mullahs in Iraq, it is head-explodingly irrational to flip over and say that we've got to battle them to the death a few hundred miles to the east.

Not that Dems aren't still trying:

Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have stressed over the past several months that the U.S. should refocus on stabilizing Afghanistan and capturing Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“The Taliban played a role in the 9/11 attacks by providing a safe haven for bin Laden,” said Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s spokesman. “Preventing a successful resurgence by the Taliban is a national security objective of the United States, and our troops will remain in Afghanistan until the objective is achieved.”...

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) said, “A lot of the problems in Iraq are of our own making. In Afghanistan we still have the continued threat of al Qaeda having a base to operate. We have to continue to be there.”

“[The American people] are prepared to take losses, if they make sense. You don’t hear people saying, ‘We need to get out of Afghanistan.’ People know the difference,” said Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI).

Yeah, people know the difference - Democrats and their Fifth Column of a base haven't spent five-plus years viciously, hysterically, and treasonously lying about, mischaracterizing, demonizing, and all-around bashing Operation Enduring Freedom as they have Operation Iraqi Freedom. It's taken four years for them to bludgeon down public support for a theater of operations that is of far greater strategic importance to US national security interests in the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism than Afghanistan is. After they've dragged us out of Iraq, how long do you think it'll take them to reprise the meme where "Bush's war" began?

The logic is, as I say, irrefutable. Psychopathic lunatics like Congresscritters Abercrombie and Watson are already saying it. The Vietnamization of Iraq having greased the skids, I wouldn't think it would take even to the end of Bush's presidency to force our headlong retreat from Afghanistan as well.

Here, though, is a question that I don't think I've seen any Dem or RINO agitating for quitting the Middle East and surrendering to the Islamic Caliphate address: What would a crash retreat from Iraq (and Afghanistan) actually look like?

Frank Gaffney answers the question on NRO today. And the picture is not just not pretty, it's downright infuriating to even contemplate:

As it happens, the only way a truly rapid disengagement and redeployment from Iraq can be accomplished would be via a kind of Dunkirk in the desert: a pell-mell rush for the beachhead points of embarkation the object of which would be to extricate as many personnel as possible, probably without regard for their equipment and surely at the expense of their safety.

The reason for this is eminently practical: we have too many troops and too much stuff in Iraq to carry out an orderly withdrawal in anything less than ten to fourteen months at best. This is because all of the equipment, weaponry, vehicles, etc. have to be cleaned, assembled, crated, loaded on transports, etc. And given that we would be exiting via the same way we entered - Kuwait, with no access to Saudi ports - that would further slow down the unnecessary exodus, all the more so if the retreat was compressed into a ridiculously and dangerously compressed political timetable. Can you say "world's biggest bottleneck"?

But there is more than just practicalities involved. And this is where the unquenchable anger comes in:

[U]nder the approach to withdrawal advocated by virtually all Democratic leaders and several prominent Republicans, Americans will surely be retreating under fire. As Tom Bowman put it, Americans “would likely have to fight insurgents overland, all the way to Kuwait.” This endeavor, according to one officer quoted by NPR, would require “attack helicopters [and] recon helicopters in the air, possibly tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and, of course, armored Humvees [on the ground]” providing protection for the disengaging forces.

The result would almost certainly be calamitous. It may even be that the United States military would be subjected to the reverse of the notorious “Highway of Death” of Desert Storm, albeit on a smaller scale. Perhaps a few legislators still recall what happened to Iraqi Republican Guard and other units who were fleeing along a fixed road system in Kuwait and came under murderous Coalition fire — until JCS Chairman Colin Powell, unnerved by negative publicity, ordered U.S. forces to cease their assault. There is no likelihood that al Qaeda and other terrorists will be similarly moved to pity our troops should they be forced by politicians at home to make a similar evacuation. [emphases added]

Pissed off yet? Let's distill it down even further: the Democrats and their pathetic RINO pussy lackies want to get hundreds or even thousands of U.S. soldiers killed retreating that would come home safely if left in Iraq (and Afghanistan) to complete the missions there - and sent rolling into Iran to crush the mullahgarchy and win the war.

Remember this the next time a lib smarmily says that s/he "supports the troops". Then tell them that defeatism kills - and not just soldiers, either.

Speaking of Iran, they have evidently invaded southern Iraq with their regular armed forces and attacked British forces:

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces have been spotted by British troops crossing the border into southern Iraq, the Sun tabloid reported on Tuesday.

Britain's defence ministry would not confirm or deny the report, with a spokesman declining to comment on "intelligence matters".

An unidentified intelligence source told the tabloid: "It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran - but nobody has officially declared it."

"We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us. It is very hard for us to strike back. All we can do is try to defend ourselves. We are badly on the back foot."

The Sun said that radar sightings of Iranian helicopters crossing into the Iraqi desert were confirmed to it by very senior military sources.

The Admiral isn't comfortable with the source of the story being the British equivalent of "USA Today with hooters" and questions whether the Iranians would be foolish enough to jump the gun like this. I can't speak to the first part, but the latter makes perfect sense to me. After the past four years of feckless, appeasenik dawdling on the part of the West vis-a-vie Iran's nuclear weapons program, and the Coalition's utter passivity in the face of blatant Iranian proxy warfare against our forces in Iraq AND Afghanistan, can it really be surprising that the mullahs may have concluded we're so weak-willed and cowardly that they can send their regular forces rolling across the border before we've even started to evacuate our own? Put yourself in Adolph Ahmadinejad's shoes: if American politicans are demanding that we run away from mere "insurgents," wouldn't you conclude that a rout was just waiting to happen? Why NOT invade directly? It wouldn't be the first time that a dictator with global ambitions was emboldened to recklessness by the unkillable Western pacifism fetish.

Or maybe the Sun is full of silicone, and the mullahs will wait to invade until we're in the throes of the Democrat-enforced pell-mell bug-out. Bet they could turn it into a "highway of death" for the Great Satan a lot better than their scraggly "insurgent" proxies could.

Afghanistan is landlocked, so I don't know how the Dems are going to fill up the bodybags fleeing from there. Direct surrender to the Taliban? Loading up air transports that'll get shot down over Pakistan? Seek asylum in Iran?

I've long said that the Democrats' goose-stepping march back to power would wade through American blood. The sheer malevolence of their heedless, impenetrable ignorance is, it seems, making of me a prophet after all.