When it comes to Iraq, mainstream conservatives are partisan liars and cannot be trusted

In an angry editorial, Investors Business Daily blames the massive bombings and deaths in Baghdad today on the Obama administration:

The 14 coordinated bombings that ravaged Baghdad on Thursday, killing dozens, only begins Iraq’s post-U.S. nightmare. America’s job was never finished.

We, along with many others, have been warning for years of the consequences of a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

After President George W. Bush’s 2007 surge strategy succeeded so resoundingly, you would think there would be no way Democrats in Washington could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Unfortunately, they did. And the question must now be asked: Is this war being lost so it can be pinned on Republicans?

What is taking place in Iraq, just days after the final departure of American troops, is the beginning of another Vietnam-style disaster debacle. The message will soon once again go out to all the world—friends and foes alike—that the world’s lone superpower can’t, or won’t, win a protracted war.

This is beyond despicable, and represents the level of dishonesty one would expect from a publication that claims to be conservative but tacitly supported (and at best did nothing serious to oppose) the homosexualization of the U.S. military last December. While the general level of violence in Iraq has greatly subsided since the horrible times of 2006-07, as a result of the combined effects of the surge and the Sunni Awakening, terrorist bombings have continued in Iraq throughout the entire post surge period, and the Republicans/conservative have had precious little to say about them. They gave no indication they were bothered by them. To the contrary, they kept preening about how we had “won” in Iraq, how Bush’s policy of democratization was a “success”—a “success” which should be imitated in Afghanistan. Last January, for example, there were massive bombings in Iraq. One series of bombings killed at least 133 persons, another killed at least 27. Did IBD or other mainstream conservative magazines run any editorials at that time saying that the bombings showed that the Bush policy had been a failure? No. They were still punchdrunk with our “success.” But now that further massive bombings and deaths have occurred after the departure of American troops, though fewer than the deaths in the bombings of last January, IBD has the audacity to claim that Obama has pulled failure from the teeth of Bush’s “success,” it acts as though everything in Iraq has been hunky dory up to this moment and that it’s only Obama’s precipitate withdrawal of the troops that is responsible for the bombings.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 22, 2011 07:49 PM | Send