Saturday, October 15, 2005
If It Had Been A Fight...
...they'd have stopped it in the first round. Victor Davis Hanson, who recently visited our fair State (and spoke at DU, my alma mater legis), takes on, over at NRO, former President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, for his poorly reasoned piece called American Debacle in the LA Times. Zbig, as he was sometimes called, thinks things are going poorly in Iraq in particular and generally in the global war against militant Islamacists.
Mr. Hanson proves that an accurate historical perspective certainly gives one a different perception of the current war from the one the sky-is-falling Democrats have (and, indeed, a greater moral clarity as well). Since I'm at heart a little catty, what I enjoyed most was Hanson's list of the major failings of President Carter and Mr. Brzezinski back when they ran things. Hanson noted that the criticism of the current administration was coming from:
...a high official of an administration that witnessed on its watch the Iranian-hostage debacle, the disastrous rescue mission, the tragicomic odyssey of the terminally ill shah, the first and last Western Olympic boycott, oil hikes even higher in real dollars than the present spikes, Communist infiltration into Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cambodian holocaust, a gloomy acceptance that perpetual parity with the Soviet Union was the hope of the day, the realism that cemented our ties with corrupt autocracies in the Middle East (Orwellian sales of F-15 warplanes to the Saudis minus their extras), and the hard-to-achieve simultaneous high unemployment, high inflation, and high interest rates...
OUCH.
What follows this body blow is a clear eyed assessment of what we've accomplished since 9/11/01. It is a great read and not that long.
What struck me, on the other hand with Mr. Brzezinski, was his closing, amazingly callow suggestion. He urges the President to form a bipartisan foreign policy (yea, that's a good idea--listen to the cut and run party) and get out of Iraq. And the sooner the U.S. leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail. In other words, he's perfectly willing to condemn Iraq to Lebanon-like civil war. The man (and his party) don't exactly have a zbig heart, do they?
There, I think, is the essential difference in vision between left and right: Hanson and his supporters see that a small but noble sacrifice by U.S. forces can create greater good. Brzezinski and his ilk metaphorically quote Dan Rather and say 'F--- 'em all,' if it's even the least bit hard.
Mr. Hanson proves that an accurate historical perspective certainly gives one a different perception of the current war from the one the sky-is-falling Democrats have (and, indeed, a greater moral clarity as well). Since I'm at heart a little catty, what I enjoyed most was Hanson's list of the major failings of President Carter and Mr. Brzezinski back when they ran things. Hanson noted that the criticism of the current administration was coming from:
...a high official of an administration that witnessed on its watch the Iranian-hostage debacle, the disastrous rescue mission, the tragicomic odyssey of the terminally ill shah, the first and last Western Olympic boycott, oil hikes even higher in real dollars than the present spikes, Communist infiltration into Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cambodian holocaust, a gloomy acceptance that perpetual parity with the Soviet Union was the hope of the day, the realism that cemented our ties with corrupt autocracies in the Middle East (Orwellian sales of F-15 warplanes to the Saudis minus their extras), and the hard-to-achieve simultaneous high unemployment, high inflation, and high interest rates...
OUCH.
What follows this body blow is a clear eyed assessment of what we've accomplished since 9/11/01. It is a great read and not that long.
What struck me, on the other hand with Mr. Brzezinski, was his closing, amazingly callow suggestion. He urges the President to form a bipartisan foreign policy (yea, that's a good idea--listen to the cut and run party) and get out of Iraq. And the sooner the U.S. leaves, the sooner the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis will either reach a political arrangement on their own or some combination of them will forcibly prevail. In other words, he's perfectly willing to condemn Iraq to Lebanon-like civil war. The man (and his party) don't exactly have a zbig heart, do they?
There, I think, is the essential difference in vision between left and right: Hanson and his supporters see that a small but noble sacrifice by U.S. forces can create greater good. Brzezinski and his ilk metaphorically quote Dan Rather and say 'F--- 'em all,' if it's even the least bit hard.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:44 AM 
