The Wall Street Journal‘s editors note that Beltway Democrats are in panic mode, watching the non-recovery, the unemployment figures, and the reduction in third-quarter GDP. The problem, the editors point out, is ”that politicians think everything they do is free-standing. Markets, however, combine all the potential costs of Washington’s policies and then decide whether to invest, or not.”
On the horizon are a monstrous health-care bill, a not-quite-dead cap-and-trade bill, and lots and lots of new taxes. The solution might just be to stop doing things that alarm the people who will have to hire and invest. But as the editors explain, “The Democratic agenda is doing precisely the opposite, which is how you get subpar growth and fewer new jobs.”
It may be that in political paralysis and legislative failure the Democrats save themselves. Should the lion’s share of their domestic plans collapse, the voters — and the investor class — may very well breathe a sigh of relief. But for now, Democrats naturally want to “succeed,” even if that success unnerves and hobbles the recovery on which their political futures depend.
The number one threat to the Iraqis could very well be the Democratic Party. Let’s just stop fooling around and calmly and precisely state the obvious—the Democrats may be the foremost threat to Western Civilization. It is largely comprised of narcissistic individuals infected with self-hating Americanism, pseudointellectualism, and dishonest pacifism.
Two points (apart from the fact that Iraq violence is up this month and most of the political benchmarks met by Iraq’s government have proved to be fraudulent, i.e. the limited gains made by the surge are already over, and Iraq remains stuck in the hellish civil war conditions of 2005):
1. Cordesman also noted in summer 2007, before Sadr’s cease-fire, that the surge had failed to improve Iraq in any major way. By quoting him now, you are ironically admitting the fact that General Petraeus was lying throughout 2007 about progress in Iraq, and that the drop in violence in late 2007 was not due to the failed surge, but due to Sadr’s cease-fire.
2. If Iraq has not even a marginal chance to be a stable state unless we’re there through 2016, then the surge has clearly failed. Cordesman is saying that Iraq will be a failed state unless we spend infinite money and lives for another decade – and that even if we do, Iraq may still be a failed state. It is doubtful that Americans will want to waste trillions of dollars and thousands more lives for that kind of chance, but in any case, if Iraq is guaranteed to be a failed state if Americans ever leave, then the surge has been a miserable failure: President Bush announced that the surge would allow America to leave Iraq with “victory,” and instead it may simply lead to the humiliating defeat of staying in Iraq forever and wasting much more money on this bloated federal program (it is ironic that conservatives oppose useful federal programs but want more money thrown at useless federal bureaucracies like the Iraq occupation).
At the very least we now know that overthrowing an anti-Islamist dictator in Iraq was a bad idea.
Dr. Cordesman has never held a convincing argument as to why the surge would not work. In fact, Dr. Cordesman has been consistently nay-saying Iraq since the invasion. Someone like him who has held a consistently contrarian view at every turn quickly loses all credibility.
When the Sunni tribes we’ve rearmed are done with Al Qaeda, and go after the Shi’a, and Muqtada mobilizes, what then?