August 08, 2007
Prospects for Dems dim, according to big-league Lefty
Leftist lesbian professor and cultural warrior Camille Paglia laments the endless campaign, dragging through the dog days of Summer, with a long, l-o-n-g way to go until November after next.
Despite her allegiance to the Democrats, Paglia is afraid that their (mis)handling of the Iraq war all but guarantees a GOP victory and retention of the presidency.
Meanwhile, the war drags on in Iraq, where the worthless Baghdad government has fled the blistering summer heat while American soldiers, laden with their battle gear, suffer and die. When will this fruitless exercise in nation building end? No one will ever resolve the eternal hatreds and ethnic rivalries of the Middle East, which have been churning and festering for 5,000 years. The extremist Muslim drama is only half the story.
As I replied to a Salon reader in my last column, yes, if the United States makes a strategic retreat from Iraq, we may well be returning in a decade or two, this time with regional allies. But things will be vastly different: no more happy facade of pacification and reconstruction; no more corrupt protectionism of commercial contractors; no more costly police or military training of volatile, faithless local recruits; no more intrusive neighborhood patrols with our soldiers blown to smithereens by cheap booby traps. It will be real war, heavily applied by air force, with maximum damage inflicted at minimal cost to our troops.
The thick-headed Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triad may have grotesquely bungled the Iraq incursion, but Republicans (barring a breakaway third party) will still comfortably retake the White House next year if my fellow Democrats don't get their act together on the cardinal issue of geopolitics. Terrorism isn't going to go away if and when we withdraw from Iraq. We need to recalibrate our global strategy and more intelligently address the fractured, dispersed nature of jihadism, which is germinating everywhere from Indonesia and the Philippines to the Western world. Throwing billions into the desert morass of Iraq isn't getting us anywhere -- especially with our porous domestic security and our alarmingly decaying infrastructure needing urgent remediation.
I disagree with some of her premises, but think she's right on the political analysis; despite the bumbling of the Stupid Party, the candidates likely to win the GOP nomination (Romney, Giuliani, Thompson) are not in favor of cut-and-run in Iraq -- and the American voters will not reward the Democrats for their feckless attitude on national security, Bush fatigue notwithstanding.
Posted by Mike Lief at August 8, 2007 07:31 AM
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