The latest installment of Bush’s legacy: Two American officers are murdered inside the Afghan Interior Ministry building in Kabul

As Reuters reports it:

An Afghan security source said the American officers killed on Saturday had been found dead with gunshot wounds deep inside the heavily fortified Interior Ministry.

“There is CCTV there and special locks. The killer would have had to have the highest security (clearance) to get to the room where they were killed,” the source told Reuters.

Hey, those craven apologies from President Obama and Afghan NATO commander John Allen really smoothed the waters, didn’t they?

It is being said that these murders were committed by a Taliban agent. But whether the killer was Taliban or not, what difference does it make? As Andrew McCarthy pointed out this morning (before these latest killings):

Abdul Sattar Khawasi—not a member of al-Qaeda but a member in good standing of the Afghan government for which our troops are inexplicably fighting and dying—put it this way: “Americans are invaders, and jihad against the Americans is an obligation.”

So, yes, the Taliban are much worse than the pro-government Afghans whom we have been defending. But both sides are Muslims, both sides are our enemies.

What can one say, other than that we deserve it? We committed our country and our military forces to helping a people who are commanded by their savage god to kill us. And guess what? They kill us.

I don’t say the individual American soldiers who have been murdered deserved it; they were just doing their duty of serving their country (though one must say that they do have the aspect of dumb, helpless sheep delivered to slaughter). I say that we as a country deserve this, and that we as a country are responsible for the deaths of our men.

Our previous president, George W. Bush, explains it all in his memoir, though without realizing what he is explaining, i.e., not reality, but his own delusions. Writing about the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq, he says:

If we had to remove Saddam from power, Tony [Blair] and I would have an obligation to help the Iraqi people replace Saddam’s tyranny with a democracy. The transformation would have an impact beyond Iraq’s borders. The Middle East was the center of a global ideological struggle. On one side were decent people who wanted to live in dignity and peace. On the other were extremists who sought to impose their radical views through violence and intimidation. They exploited conditions of hopelessness and repression to recruit and spread their ideology. The best way to protect our countries in the long run was to counter their dark vision with a more compelling alternative.

That alternative was freedom. People who could choose their leaders at the ballot box would be less likely to turn to violence. Young people growing up with hope in the future would not search for meaning in the ideology of terror. Once liberty took root in one society, it could spread to others. [George W. Bush, Decision Points, p. 232.]

Bush and all his supporters believed this garbage. And they continued believing it, after democratic elections in one Muslim country after another produced victories for “Islamist” (translation: Islamic, sharia-observant, jihadist) groups, showing that when Muslims are given freedom to choose their governments, they choose jihadists. Because Muslims don’t believe in freedom; they believe in Islam, the Islamic law, and jihad.

What can one say? A powerful country that pursues such a patently mistaken policy, a policy that has been proved grossly wrong over and over, and refuses to learn any lessons, is a crazy country.

But “craziness” does not describe it accurately. We are not merely out of touch with reality, like some raving maniac in the street. We have been rendered out of touch with reality by a specific belief system, a belief system that is as sacred to us as Islam is to Muslims. That belief system is liberalism, which tells us that all people are basically like us and want our kind of freedom. Our liberalism prohibits us from seeing the reality that Muslims are fundamentally different from us, that they want fundamentally different things from us, and that they are eternally at war with us. And we continue to sacrifice our military men, our freedom, and ultimately our country itself to this false ideology.

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LA writes:

Also, Gen. Allen showed again what a helpless liberal he is when he called this latest murderer “a coward.” That’s what liberals always say about enemies. It’s the strongest statement of moral condemnation they have at their disposal. Liberals can’t call people enemies or evil, because enemies and evil don’t exist in the liberal universe (except when liberals are thinking about conservatives). So whenever an enemy kills one of us, even when the enemy sacrifices his life in the act, our leaders puff out their chests and call it a “cowardly” act. Clinton did this all the time.

S. Brooks writes:

I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for two years in the early 1980s. It would take no more than a few hours there for anyone with a brain to realize that Bush was crazy. Did anyone try to explain reality to him?

LA replies:

No. I do not believe that he has ever had a single conversation with anyone who tried to explain the reality of Islam to him.

Ed H. writes:

Reading GWB’s understanding of Islam or rather his complete abject failure to understand one iota of Islam is painful indeed. A deeply provincial man, in essence an ex alcoholic trust fund baby, he should have played out his life on the golf course. Instead we have him floundering in the currents of world history while understanding nothing of what is happening to him.

While purporting to be a Conservative, Bush was blinded by the same liberal belief system as his supposed opposite, Obama.

Diana West writes:

I haven’t read the memoir (it must be excruciating). In a sane world, the passage you quoted would be offered as evidence of presidential malpractice at his trial.

LA replies:

It’s not excruciating reading. In fact, it is quite well written, and is in his voice.

It does not purport to be the whole story of his presidency. It focuses on what went into the decisions he made, with each chapter on a different issue.

Bush is thoughtful, in that he worked his way carefully through his every decision as president. But then, on so many issues, his thought process goes so far and no further, the worst example of course being his democracy idea.

As a friend put it after I described the book to her, Bush “is not stupid, but he’s limited.”

So on one hand, the book shows that the man who his enemies thought was an evil moron is obviously not that. He was sincerely working his way through issues, trying to make the best decisions. On the other hand, his stunning limitations of understanding remain what they have always been. So the book ultimately does not give one a more favorable view of him.

For example, he tells in detail the excruciating process of realizing that the Iraq policy was not working and moving toward a new policy, the surge. But he never asks himself, “Why did it take me the length of America’s involvement in World War II to realize the policy wasn’t working?” (And while he repeatedly though politely criticizes our Iraq ground commander the uber bureaucrat George Casey for being stuck in a policy that wasn’t working, he doesn’t explain why he subsequently appointed this clueless failure to be the Army chief of staff.)

He realizes that his appointment of Harriet Miers created problems, and he blames himself for not handling it well, but he never acknowledges that in appointing her he violated an important pledge. His self-criticism doesn’t go that far.

He does admit, however, over and over, to various mistakes he made, so many that the book does make him seem a failed president. I’m not sure if he realizes this.

He was effective, however, in defending America after the 9/11 attack. And he did make tough decisions that were, within the circumstances and within his limitations, well thought out. But so many of his major initiatives were either based on information that turned out to be wrong (the WMDs in Iraq, though Bush can’t be blamed entirely for that since Saddam Hussein gave every indication that he was hiding WMDs) or that were simply wrong and disastrous (establishing American policy on the basis that Islam is a “religion of peace,” No Child Left Behind, etc.)

LA continues:

To amend something I said, I think that for Bush haters, people who never gave him credit for anything, the book would give them a more favorable impression of him.

Expatriot writes:

The apologies of Obama, General Allen and their ilk (i.e. everybody in a position of leadership or influence in the West) actually have the exact opposite of the intended effect. Liberals don’t realize that the Afghan reaction is driven by feelings of shame rather than righteous indignation at perceived injustice. To have been defeated by non-Muslim outsiders is shameful enough to begin with. When those non-Muslim outsiders are feminized, over-accommodating wimps like Allen, the shame becomes unbearable. To Afghan eyes, there would be no honor even in victory over such unmanly “warriors”, who have no sense of honor themselves. They might be able to take losing to real men, but the U.S. military appears as an unworthy opponent to them. Yet this unworthy opponent occupies their country and rubs salt in their wounds by saying in effect, “You can’t even beat pussies like us.” The sensitivity and forbearance that liberal Westerners pride themselves on come off as ill-disguised contempt to people like the Afghans.

LA replies:

The people in the government were not defeated by us. They were our allies in overthrowing the Taliban.

However, in the sense that we are there, in their country, running things, and that they are relying on us for all kinds of things, I suppose that the shame syndrome you’re talking about would still apply.

But at the same time, Abdul Khawasi, a member of the Karzai government whose existence we are upholding, funding, and defending, calls us invaders against whom jihad is justified. So it would seem that even our allies and clients see us as people who have defeated them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 25, 2012 02:59 PM | Send