Lowry excuses inexcusable statement by Iraqi leaders

I said last night that the Iraqi leaders’ statement justifying resistance against U.S. forces should be a deal killer as far as our continued involvement in Iraq is concerned. Unsurprisingly, supporters of President Bush don’t see it that way. Richard Lowry writes at NRO:

Neither the statement about a timetable for US withdrawal (“dependent on an immediate national program for rebuilding the security forces”) nor the nod to national resistance (“a legitimate right of all nations”) has much significance beyond symbolism.

But by Lowry’s reasoning, what public statement by a political leader could ever have real, and not “merely” symbolic, significance? Politics consists of words, namely men discussing the good, as Aristotle put it. Politics, political discourse, establishes what a society regards as right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. The leaders of the Iraq government are saying that it is legitimate—i.e., right and acceptable—for the terror insurgents to keep blowing up the American soldiers who are in that country to protect that government. As far as political speech is concerned, you can’t get much more real than that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 22, 2005 12:13 PM | Send