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Democrats: Let's Save Some Lives
By Orson Scott CardThe election is over, and the victory of the Democrats is having precisely the consequences in Iraq that anyone paying attention should have predicted. The people of Iraq interpreted the election results the way the extreme Left wanted them to: As a repudiation, by the American people, of President Bush's war policy. In fact that is not really what the election "meant," if a national election spread out over hundreds of candidates can be said to "mean" any specific thing. For instance, in Connecticut, the voters rejected the extremist wing of the Democratic Party (otherwise known as "The Democratic Party") by reelecting Joseph Lieberman, the most notable (but not the only) Democrat who has the brains to understand that the War on Terror is vital to our national security. And many of the new Democrats in Congress were elected because they ran to the right -- they coopted many of the stances that are usually identified as Republican. So what, exactly, is our new Congress composed of? Certainly it will be the Democratic Party that organizes both houses this winter, and makes committee assignments, and sets out to harass the White House as much as possible, to punish George W. Bush for being a better President than America had any right to have at this crucial time in our history. What the new Congress most definitely does not have is a majority to enact the Democratic agenda on any point. That is, unless the new crop of quasi-Republican Democrats were pulling a Bill Clinton and lying about their principles in order to get elected. We'll find that out soon enough -- if they vote just like other Democrats, then we'll know they were liars, because they promised not to. And the new Congress does not have a majority to force a withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. This is obviously true, because Joseph Lieberman is the crucial vote, and he knows we cannot afford to do anything so stupid, so contrary to our interests and inimical to our allies in the Middle East (of which we have many, despite the claims of opponents of the war). There are also too many Democrats in the House who come from districts where a vote for forcing a troop withdrawal on a timetable (i.e., "surrender") would be the end of that Congressman's career. The trouble is that the people of Iraq don't know that. They only know what our anti-Bush media tell them, which is that our election was an enormous defeat for Bush's war policy, and what their anti-American media tell them, which is that our election was an enormous victory for Al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents (a.k.a. murderers and terrorists) in Iraq. The Sunni insurgents celebrated their victory by slaughtering Shiites. Previously, the Shiites have shown astonishing self-restraint (for Arab countries) when provoked, because their leaders were able to persuade them that the Americans would deal with the Sunnis until the Iraqi defense forces were able to take over the job. But now, because of the way our election has been portrayed, the Shiites no longer have any trust that America will remain. They think -- wrongly -- that the American people favor a cowardly, selfish retreat from a policy on which the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds have staked their lives. Rest at link Posted by: FOTSGreg 2006-12-08 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=174297 |