Andrew C. McCarthy of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (i.e., neocon central) spews volumes of
right-wing gas-froth at NRO about how Bush has "won the argument" in Iraq--not by virtue of his having put troops there and making it impossible to extract them easily, which is the honest to gods truth, but because, this jerk argues, the Democrats have conceded their main point: that the US should be fighting al Qaeda whereever al Qaeda is, and al Qaeda is in Iraq (my emphasis below):
Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd, a 2008 (no) hopeful, has always been a reliable barometer of pat left-liberal dogma. In a Sunday interview, he insisted that withdrawing our forces from Iraq was necessary so we could escalate our military commitment to Afghanistan — which he portrayed as al Qaeda’s “epicenter.” When Fox’s Chris Wallace repeatedly observed that the selfsame al Qaeda is behind much of the mayhem in Iraq, Dodd stuck mulishly to the script, countering that, no, even if there is some al Qaeda presence, Iraq is a civil war that we can’t win.
Now, I don’t buy for a moment that Sen. Dodd, Sen. Clinton, Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Soros/Hollywood/Netroot/New York Times thrall really want to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If President Bush were fool enough to take their advice and abandon Iraq to surge in Afghanistan, I’m confident they’d be telling us by next week that al Qaeda’s “epicenter” is in Iraq, and that the rube in the Oval Office should “redeploy” instead of miring us in Afghanistan’s intractable civil war.
But the point is not the fact of hypocrisy; it is why the Left feels the need to be hypocritical. Why don’t its champions just reaffirm their preferred “Come home, America” summons? Why do they posture about leaving Iraq to confront al Qaeda in Afghanistan (while, naturally, taking no actual steps to ratchet up military operations in Afghanistan)?
Because the last time they tried unadorned “Come home, America” in the midst of a frustrating war, they suffered the worst electoral deluge in American history. Because they know that however low Bush’s numbers may now be, their own will be bottomless if their policy of withdrawal from Iraq is revealed as the resounding terrorist triumph it would be. Because they fully understand that, no matter how much they’d like to turn the clock back to September 10th, the majority of Americans well remember September 11th. Because they know it is unacceptable to leave the battlefield while al Qaeda is still on it. The Democrats have to keep saying “civil war”; if they acknowledge al Qaeda’s catalytic role in Iraq, in the killing of our troops there, they know most Americans will see “redeployment” as a euphemism for surrender.
This presents a last opportunity for the Bush administration. However ruefully and emptily, Democrats admit that we have to fight al Qaeda where al Qaeda is strong. It is thus the administration’s burden to demonstrate, compellingly, that al Qaeda is making a menacing stand in Iraq. Yes, what’s happening there features sectarian infighting; but it is not, as the Left contends, a civil war. It is infighting stoked by al Qaeda and the Iranian enablers with whom al Qaeda has colluded since the early 1990s. Both are making their stand, and both are intent on emerging dominant once we’re gone.
McCarthy permits himself to gloss over the fact that so-called "al Qaeda" in Iraq is a direct product of our being there in the first place. This glossing-over enables neocons to pretend that "it was all part of the plan" to give bin Laden a front for his jihad in Iraq in order for "us" to win it somewhere once and for all. Idiots like McCarthy never explain why this jihad couldn't have been waged and contained in Afghanistan, where we (and a coalition of our NATO allies) already were. Nevermind that the original--the *real**--al Qaeda slipped out of our fingers there and is now most likely in Wajiristan; that shouldn't let dopes like McCarthy off the hook. Wouldn't it have been better, they should be asked, if they really thought al Qaeda would come to us no matter where we were, to wage jihad in a country that was already war-wasted and out of the way than right in the very middle of the very fragile Middle East?
Instead, we are supposedly trying to flatten al Qaeda's alleged official arm in Iraq (which very likely is not legitimately "al Qaeda" at all) while caught in the middle of sectarian battles between former Ba'athists and Shiites over the future of what once was Iraq. How can anyone think this is great military strategy? Or even mediocre military strategy? Or strategy at all?
But what really strikes me about McCarthy's insane ranting is his inability to pull back from his ant-like focus on "al Qaeda" to see what's right in front of his myopic eyes. There's no doubt that he sees it, as the emphasized portion of the cite above makes clear: "al Qaeda" and the "Iranian-enabled" are, as he puts it, both "making their stand, and both ... intent on emerging dominant." By "al Qaeda" he seems to mean all Sunni factions, and by the Iranian enabled, he has to mean the Shiites. He's clearly describing what Democrats and every rational person in the world sees: civil war. But McCarthy can't admit the obvious--and he's even so deluded or dishonest enough as to fabricate an alliance between these factions going back to the years immediately after the Iran-Iraq war.
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