Bush democracy supporters are as irresponsible and dishonest as ever

An editorial at Investors Business Daily says:

As we’ve said, you have to watch what Obama does, not what he says. Press Secretary Jay Carney says the president has not blocked the pipeline, but once again he has. Carney blames the GOP for trying to rush a review, yet the project has been studied for three years, almost as long as it took to win World War II.

Interesting comparison, because, if I may change the subject, it’s one I have often made with regard to George W. Bush and Iraq. It took over 3 1/2 years for Bush to realize that his policy of drawing down the number of our forces and using the remaining troops mainly for training and democracy building instead of security, had reduced Iraq to a state of chaos, and for him to adopt another policy, the surge, which put security first, and which, while it did not (and could not, as I always made clear) result in Iraqi democracy (contrary to what the Bush supporters have always claimed it would do and has done), at least helped reduce the terrible sectarian blood-letting, thus making it possible for the U.S. eventually to pull out its forces without a helicopters-on-the-rooftop scenario. Did the conservative IBD ever, in all those years, say that it had taken Bush longer to change his failed policy in Iraq than the U.S. had been involved in World War II? Not likely. But in December 2006, when the surge was announced, I pointed out:

Between December 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to August 14, 1945, the day Emperor Hirohito announced the Japanese surrender (it was August 14 in the U.S., August 15 in Japan), 1,346 days passed. From April 9, 2003, the day the U.S. forces formally took control of Baghdad, to today, December 20, 2006, 1,351 days have elapsed. We have now been occupying Iraq for five days longer than we fought World War II.

I expanded on the same point in October 2008:

The United States initiated military operations against Iraq on March 20, 2003. We then occupied the country incompletely and incompetently, allowing chaos to reign, allowing the horrible insurgency to blossom, allowing our soldiers (who were not fighting and defeating any enemy, because the war was already “won,” but were just driving along roads) to be continually killed and maimed by roadside bombs, month after month, year after year, allowing demonic terrorism to control the country, resulting in four million Iraqis being forced to flee their homes, with two million of them, including several hundred thousand Christians, fleeing the country altogether; and it kept getting steadily worse, reaching the point of almost complete catastrophe, until Gen. Petraeus took command in Iraq on January 2007 and instituted the surge.

During those three years and ten months, as I stated over and over at this one-man website, the U.S. had no strategy in place by which it could even theoretically prevail in Iraq. Yet during those same three years and ten months, the President kept telling us that he was giving his commanders in Iraq the forces they said were needed—those same commanders, such as George Casey, who, we now know from Bob Woodward’s new book, had no thought of actually prevailing in Iraq. Yet Bush let such commanders call the shots for three years and ten months. During that same period, the administration and its neocon promoters insisted over and over again that we were “winning.” With each new Iraqi election or adoption of a constitution (a constitution that makes sharia the ruling principle of the country), they said that we had “succeeded,” and that Iraq was now a “democracy,” even as the actual situation kept deteriorating. It was only when they were faced with the prospect of the literal collapse of the country and total U.S. defeat and humiliation that the Bush team finally adopted a new strategy aimed at suppressing rather than just managing the insurgency, a strategy that should been in place from the beginning.

From March 20, 2003, the day the Iraq war commenced, to January 26, 2007, the day Gen. Petraeus took command, 1,408 days elapsed.

America’s involvement in World War II lasted from December 7, 1941, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to August 14, 1945, the day Japan announced its intention to surrender. That was 1,346 days.

Thus the period of the incompetent, irresponsible, dishonest Bush-Republican-neocon leadership in Iraq prior to the surge lasted 62 days longer—two months longer—than America’s engagement in the greatest war in history.

And now these same Republicans and neocons want credit for the “success” of their leadership in Iraq!

[end of 2008 excerpt]

And now get this. Victor Davis Hanson, in an NRO article in which he throws up his hands in despair about the various approaches we have tried to subdue militant Islam these last ten years, has not given up on the one approach he has always fanatically supported. “The verdict on … nation-building,” he writes, “is still out.”

As reported in yesterday’s New York Times, a million or two million Iraqi Christians have been forced to flee their homes and their country, and Iraqi Christian community has essentially been destroyed, by the Islamic sharia power that America liberated in the name of nation-building and democracy. Yet Hanson, this neocon fool,

this vainly smiling idiot, is not embarrassed to declare that the jury is still out on whether our nation-building effort in Iraq has succeeded.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2012 12:33 PM | Send