Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe wrote a hard-headed and
admirable column earlier this week, "Fighting to Win in
Iraq." Jacoby pointed out the ways that James Baker and George H.
W. Bush had promoted American treachery and betrayal in key
conflicts from 1989 to 1992, and he looked askance at Baker's being
employed to head the Iraq Study Group.
"If Bush the Elder is remembered for a rather heartless and
cynical foreign policy," Jacoby wrote, "then much of the credit
must go to Baker. And what Baker did for the father, he is now
poised to do for the son."
Of the Iraq Study Group's recommendations -- which he sees as
rationalizations for a bug-out -- Jacoby said, "If (George W.) Bush
prefers success to failure and would rather live up to, not
abandon, the principles he has articulated in the war against
radical Islam, he should politely accept the ISG report and then do
the opposite of what it recommends."
And the Globe's sole conservative voice nailed the
American heartland sentiment, so different from the abstract
gobbledygook endlessly promulgated and debated in the mainstream
press:
...I would wager that countless Americans are upset
with Bush, not because he isn't skedaddling from Iraq quickly
enough, but because he seems to have no serious strategy for
winning....It is losing that Americans have no patience
for -- not casualties or a protracted war. Let Bush make it clear
that he is serious about victory, and that he will do whatever it
takes to achieve it. The political support he needs will
follow.
I WOULD WAGER FURTHER than that, my friend Jeff.. I would wager
that Bush already could have that political support, and that he
would have had it powerfully and continually all along were two
things different.
First, Bush has to be able to appeal for that support and
explain the need for it, Reagan-like, at every opportunity,
formally and off the cuff. Second, he would need to be able to
pursue U.S. victory without constantly being hamstrung by real
domestic enemies -- not opponents, enemies. Primary among those is
the opinion-making elite of the United States, led by the New
York Times.
James Q. Wilson wrote a wonderful lead in a column in an early
November issue of City Journal, reprinted on Opinionjournal.com November 6: "The
Press at War: Whatever Happened to Patriotic Reporters?" I share it
with you in its entirety for its wonderfully bitter truth.
We are told by careful pollsters that half of the
American people believe that American troops should be brought home
from Iraq immediately. This news discourages supporters of our
efforts there. Not me, though: I am relieved. Given press coverage
of our efforts in Iraq, I am surprised that 90% of the public do
not want us out right now.
And then he showed how the media destroyed the war effort, and why,
and where that impulse came from.
With the Iraq Study Group, the media has now promoted itself to
a position of actual policy-making. And if the ISG does not say
what the panjandrums of the press think it ought to say, why, then
the press will report what the ISG ought to have said, just as
though it had said it. And chances are those headlines will become
the policy actually implemented.
As Wilson concluded:
The mainstream media's adversarial stance, both here
and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he
will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some
faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read
and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we
lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in
the newspapers, magazines and television programs we
enjoy.
LET IT BE STIPULATED that no insurgency can stand up to a
determined superpower, if that superpower will not choke on the
need to annihilate. Thus Michael Ledeen's repeated urging, "Faster,
please." War is like that. You must pursue total victory with total
effort. It's dirty, ugly, awful -- and sometimes necessary, as when
someone else is trying to kill you.
Total effort includes informing and motivating the citizenry, at
the very least. Now it may take the realization that war needs be
fought at home, too. James Q. Wilson did not say it, but I will:
There is a movement abroad to destroy the United States. The peace
party -- Wilson estimates about 20 percent of voters to be a
"permanent peace party" --- the global warming hysterics, the gay
"marriage" movement, the ugly outsproutings everywhere of political
correctness, multiculturalism, the free immigration movements, all
the prominent pieties of the modern age, are all of a piece, all
the enemy. They aim to destroy America. What's more, they
explicitly say so.
George W. Bush couldn't handle that. He couldn't stand up to it.
He had his moment, he had the ball right after 9/11, and he dropped
it. I have come to agree, agonizingly, with Mr. Bush's liberal
mockers in one regard. The man just can't talk. We have needed a
good talker, so, so badly.
So although I, too, support victory in the war on terrorists,
not only in Iraq but wherever they are found or supported -- the
Bush doctrine, gone, gone -- I must say "Yes, but" to my friend
Jeff Jacoby. Because I fear we've lost this one, and maybe a great
deal more. Absent another Reagan. Maybe absent a Lincoln. Maybe
absent even a Pinochet.
Lawrence Henry writes every week from North Andover,
Massachusetts.
topics:
Foreign Policy, Mainstream Media, Television, Islam, Global Warming, Law, Iraq, Immigration
