Thus Spake Petraeus

Even before the General and the Ambassador were able to begin their remarks to a joint session of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, CODEPINK, Cindy Sheehan and other anti-war protesters were at work, shouting "tell the truth" and "troops home now" (as reported by NPR News.) For its part, MoveOn.org was also up to its usual tricks, posting a full-page ad in today's New York Times intended to sway the public. But if the jeering mob hoped to get GEN David Petraeus off of his game, the tale of the (video)tape suggests that their mission was not accomplished.

As seen in Petraeus' written testimony, along with his slides, a corner is being turned in Iraq by way of the military surge. (Emphasis added.)

As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.

One reason for the decline in incidents is that Coalition and Iraqi forces have dealt significant blows to Al Qaeda-Iraq. Though Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq remain dangerous, we have taken away a number of their sanctuaries and gained the initiative in many areas.

The one pleasant surprise from Petraeus' remarks was his conviction that the U.S. could "reduce our forces to the pre-surge level... without jeopardizing the security gains we have fought so hard to achieve."

As was expected, the progress evidenced in Ambassador Ryan Crocker's report was less tangible; the Ambassador acknowledged "[t]here will be no single moment at which we can claim victory," adding, "any turning point will likely only be recognized in retrospect." Nevertheless, Crocker echoed Petraeus' sentiments in not supporting a precipitous withdrawal of forces from Iraq.

I cannot guarantee success in Iraq. I do believe, as I have described, that it is attainable. I am certain that abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts will bring failure, and the consequences of such failure must be clearly understood. An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering - well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq's borders. It could well invite the intervention of regional states, all of which see their future connected to Iraq's in some fundamental way. Undoubtedly, Iraq would be a winner in this scenario, consolidating its influence over Iraqi resources and possibly territory. The Iranian President has already announced that Iran will fill any vacuum in Iraq. In such an environment, the gains made against al-Qa'ida and other extremists groups could easily evaporate and they could establish strongholds to be used as safehavens for regional and international operations. Our current course is hard. The alternatives are far worse.

Their efforts notwithstanding, there were two tragedies that overshadowed the testimonies of Petraeus and Crocker. The first was that men such as these who have excelled at every task their country has asked of them must be questioned - and have their credibility impugned - by lesser mortals whose sole qualification for employment was the ability to persuade a majority of their co-imbeciles to vote in their favor. Here is video of Bob Wexler (D-FL) manning the ramparts of outrage in his lambasting of the General. Similarly, here is video of Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) questioning Crocker, while simultaneously slamming Petraeus.

Neither Wexler nor Sanchez will be bringing the cole slaw to the Mensa picnic, and it is beyond doubt that both the General and the Ambassador have more courage in a stray eyelash than Wexler, Sanchez or many of their fellow inquisitors have in their entire beings. We are a blessed nation for the likes of these patriots. Which gets me to the other tragedy, which is that still greater patriots will give their lives to defend the right of MoveOn, CODEPINK, et al. to embarrass themselves and befoul the People's House with their antics.

But as discussed elsewhere and , their most base purpose is hurt President Bush on a personal level. They wish to cause Bush embarrassment, if not outright pain, all for the purpose of validating their cowardice, their vanity and their stupidity. We can only hope that the resolve displayed by Crocker and Petraeus during today's hearing's will be matched by that of the President and his party. As Crocker himself put it, our current course is indeed hard, and the alternatives to victory are far worse.

Power Surge - One could make a halfway decent argument that a measure of the correctness of a goal is the means by which it must be achieved. When the value of a course of action is not readily apparent, its adherents must resort to more guile or coercion than when the benefit is more evident. History is replete with examples that support this theory. From racism in the Jim Crow South to Communism in the old Soviet Union to apartheid in South Africa, the effort that was expended the maintain such systems laid bare the inevitability of their collapse. The desperation of these efforts is nearly rivaled by those of the elites of the American Left as it pertains to the Iraq War.

YOUR GOVERNMENT, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in its sites [sic].

YOUR GOVERNMENT is openly torturing people and justifying it.

YOUR GOVERNMENT puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting hem in the dead of night.

People look at all this and think of Hitler – and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.

The foregoing was a portion of a full-page public notice taken from the Chicago Reader, and was intended to announce a series of protest marches across America designed to help "drive out the Bush regime." The ad was placed by worldcantwait.org, and was organized to "commemorate" the first anniversary of George W. Bush’s re-election on November 2, 2005. National endorsers of the marches included professors from both Penn State (Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Ph.D.) and Princeton University (Dr. Cornel West, Ph.D.) as well as stalwart Americans like former "Peace Mom" Cindy Sheehan. (More on her elsewhere.) Marches were organized and held in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco among other places, all with the goal of forcing President Bush to "step down," and "take your whole program with you."

It is at moments like this when I really appreciate the courage of the Founding Fathers. Even coup leaders in Third World countries start to look downright heroic compared to these stiffs. If President Bush is such an international threat, comparable in demeanor and behavior to Adolph Hitler, wouldn't you expect these folks to do a bit more than request that he simply step down? If worldcantwait wants us to follow, they must do more than point the way. Indeed, they should lead by example, in this case by personally taking up arms against the enemy devil Bush.

But of course, worldcantwait really never intended for their efforts to be the cause of George W. Bush's stepping down from office. They, like all of his critics, know that Bush won a second term decisively after the war began. Americans would be well served to know that if the Left was indeed successful in running him out of the White House, that action in and of itself would be a clearer threat to our values than anything Bush could do during the remainder of his term. The simple, if not straightforward goal of worldcantwait and their ilk is to feel good about themselves while getting everyone else angry at conservatives, particularly the dreaded neo-cons. Their taking substantive action on the basis of convictions is as foreign to them as the back page of a Beijing phonebook. Anger at the Bush agenda merely serves as an opportunity to sublimate their fear that someone else may act when all they have the courage to do is yammer.

And now, having been neutered by the anti-war Left, Democrats in Washington seem fit only to repeat their talking points almost verbatim. As the "surge" in Iraq continues to build on its own momentum (and as al-Qaeda now faces defections of former Iraqi collaborators), Congressional Democrats - with the welcome exception of Joe Lieberman - have to go to greater lengths to make their talking points stick (but Sen. Harry Reid continues to prove himself to be up to the task); they are certainly quick to remind us of the inefficacy of a military solution to positively impact Iraq's long-term stability.

And for their part, even when the MSM is forced to report the undeniably good news coming out of Iraq, they seek to obscure it in a sandstorm of pessimism about the ultimate success of President Bush's strategy (as seen in reporting from CBS and Time Magazine.) To be sure, even Time has to face the facts as state them as they are known.

Col. Bryan Owens, the commander of U.S. forces in Salahuddin province, isn't hoping for the kind of tribal "awakening" seen in neighboring Anbar. In the desert reaches to the north of Owens' command, a number of tribal leaders have gathered themselves and their followers under the banner of Sunni chieftain Sheik Abdul Sittar, who has vowed to work with U.S. forces at crushing insurgents associated with al-Qaeda. The pact has brought some significant successes. The daily average of insurgent attacks in Anbar province has dropped by almost 50% in roughly a year, coming down to about 26 per day. Those gains have brought praise from military commanders in Iraq and even the White House. But Owens feels the strategy of putting tribes in the lead of fighting insurgents isn't the right approach for his area, where Sunni guerillas are stepping up their attacks even now. (Emphasis added.)

Fortunately we need not rely on biased reporting from the fourth estate. We have only to take the word of those in a position to evaluate what is going on from their perspective. To that end, we welcome the assessment of retired Army General John M. Keene (presently senior managing director of Keane Advisors, LLC), as taken from a recent National Review Online.

Well I think [the surge is] going better than we had expected, particularly as it pertains to the security operation. The success that the security operation is achieving is, in my judgment, very definable. What I have done is, in my first visit in February since the operation began, I went into neighborhoods in Baghdad and then returned 90 days later to make a comparison. And I will do the same in August.

And remember, flashback to '06. What happened is the al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents provoked a predictable response from the Shia militia by the Samarra mosque bombing and the assassination plots killing Shias. There was an overpowering response from the Shia militia into the Sunni neighborhoods where hundreds and then thousands of Sunnis and Shia were killed as the result of that. The city was in flames. No schools were operating, no government services were being provided. Marketplaces were shut down and people were shut into their homes, afraid to go out on the street. And this lasted through most of '06 and it was at its height in the summer.

Despite two military operations that the United States led, Together Forward One and Together Forward Two, we were not able to stop the level of violence. And then a counter offensive began in earnest in February and finally culminated with all forces in play in June. And what you see is a stark contrast to '06 in those neighborhoods.

When one takes account of where we are in Iraq currently, it brings to mind the philosophical question of whether a tree fell in a forest if no one actually heard it. If no Democrats acknowledge the success of the surge, and no media will report on it objectively, does that make the position of worldcantwait more in concert with reality? My sense - or more correctly, my hope - is that chance will favor those brave souls who are conducting military operations in Iraq, and that history will find favor with the outcome.

"At least she's being honest about it." - Much has been made as of late about Cindy Sheehan's abrupt resignation "as the 'face' of the American anti-war movement." I must be forgiven for observing that her missive reads more like a suicide note than a two-week notice. Although she now lives in a hell of her own design, it can be said in her defense that she definitely has much over which to be distraught. By her own admission, she has lost not only her son, but has weathered several other storms in her personal life.

I have spent every available cent I got from the money a "grateful" country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.

I suspect that the most grievous emotional injuries came from her being the object of Democratic disdain. Her letter goes on to detail the vituperation that came her way from both ends of the political spectrum.

... I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."

I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on.

Sheehan specifically mentions some of the verbal slings and arrows that she suffered at the likes of "'liberal blogs' as the Democratic Underground." For its part, Democratic Underground was so scandalized that they felt it necessary to issue a response.

The drama of Mother Sheehan vs. the "Soros-crats" neatly circumscribes a few essential truths about progressives. First, it appears that the Left intends to establish and maintain an orthodoxy every bit as totalitarian as they imagine conservatism to be. The arcs of liberal thought seem to be converging on a few essential themes: George Bush, et al. lied and continue to lie about Iraq, the war itself cannot be won and U.S. troops must be withdrawn immediately, and the entire span of Republican policies enacted over President Bush's two terms must be reversed forthwith. All of this occurs while conservatives seem to be less certain than ever about the future of their movement (as articulated in the Wall Street Journal.)

To be sure, some standard-order issues remain easy for both sides. Democrats instinctively want to repeal the Bush tax cuts, establish government supervised universal healthcare, and impose greater regulation on trade. Just as instinctively Republicans wish to extend the Bush tax cuts, find market mechanisms to broaden health care coverage and reduce limitations on trade.

But on non-standard issues--involving dramatic changes in national security and foreign affairs, the power of medicine and technology to intervene at the early stages of life, and the social meaning of marriage and family, the partisans show a clear difference: the left is more and more of one mind while divisions on the right deepen.

Secondly, Cindy Sheehan (and by extension, the New Left) was/is certain that the traditional rules of public citizenship do not apply. To be sure, Cindy herself can be forgiven for making this assumption, as the media did everything that it could to ignore her equally abundant and outrageous faux pas and not challenging her absurdities, as mentioned elsewhere.

By draping herself in the sackcloth of the grieving, Cindy was hoping for a suspension of the rules of discourse. I guess she thought that we would ignore her casual lobbing of the "F-grenade" in reference to the President. Perhaps she hoped that we would not ask ourselves how "the universe" chose such an imperfect instrument to spark massive political upheaval, as she was more Patty Hearst than Rosa Parks. Maybe she vainly hoped that her media acolytes would not find out about her long stint as an anti-war activist, one minute delivering rants to ABC's Nightline regarding "neo-con PNAC agendas" to defend Israel, and sidled up all cozy with Rep. John Conyers at the mock hearings on the Downing Street Memo the next.

The truth that eventually came out was that far from simply being a grieving mother, Ms Sheehan had sold herself out to the likes of MoveOn.org long before her stints as Honorary Chairwoman of the Crawford, TX Chamber of Commerce. The nature of her allegiances became more evident as Ms. Sheehan made common cause with Venezuela’s left-wing autocrat Hugo Chavez during a January 2006 appearance at the sixth annual World Social Forum in Caracas.

Third, liberalism has maintained its obsession with self as opposed to kind. The fact that the Left is more concerned with feeling good than doing good renders it unable to concern itself with much more than mere ego maintenance, and as such it often appears to be merely fratricidal, if not overtly cannibalistic. We need look no further than to the words of Cindy Sheehan herself to establish the truth of that statement.

I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won't attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.

Lastly, by way of liberalism's essential nature - that is of favoring emotion over thought, "resignation" is the logical end of liberals' efforts to be "anti-" everything. The Left's confused thinking is made plain by the fact that good liberals abhor the deaths of Iraqi civilians (but only if they are killed by U.S. firepower), Darfurian refugees and Mumia Abu Jamal, while simultaneously being unperturbed by the deaths of Iraqi civilians (as long as they were killed by a brutal dictator), countless unborn children, and Terri Schiavo. The Left is constitutionally unable to proffer an affirmative political agenda that is intellectually consistent. As such, they will seldom be able to
garner electoral majorities in as much as voting is an act of affirmation for most Americans.

"...as we forgive those who trespass against us." - And now comes Cindy Sheehan. After being acquitted of other charges in connection with a 2005 protest at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, Ms. Sheehan was convicted last week of trespassing, as reported in the Boston Herald. We are all by now more familiar that we might have preferred with her story. Indeed, it sounded like something we’ve seen in a Sunday School play, with Ms Sheehan playing a bereft Mary, George W. Bush standing in as an aloof Pontius Pilate and Casey Sheehan as the untimely crucified Christ. By all the cherubim in heaven, everything fit, except that there will be no victory over death in this Passion. For a time, every day in Crawford, TX felt like Good Friday.

As the tale was told and retold by the apostolic media, the narrative was fixed: it became the story of an all-American boy martyred in a cause that was trumped up by a slow-witted, callous Commander-in-Chief, leaving behind a grief-stricken mother to ask why. As our minds filled in the blanks, we remember most of all that Cindy is grieving and she wants to know why it all had to happen. With no hope of Casey’s resurrection, Cindy’s overwhelming grief becomes central to the story.

Sadly for Cindy, facts are stubborn things and they only occasionally stick to the plot of a good tear-jerker. Before a fortnight passed in Crawford’s Golgotha, Ms Sheehan showed us her true aims and the means by which she would bring them to pass. She shared her thoughts about the true source of terror in the world (who else but Pontius Bush), and how “the universe” chose her as the spark of a great movement. We were reminded of her initial telling of the story of her meeting the President (at the foot of Casey’s cross if you will), with George Bush playing more of the role of Peter than Pilate.

But through it all, Cindy reminded us of the centrality of her grief. We were focused on this by design. If Cindy Sheehan where just another anti-war protester advocating a premature withdrawal from Iraq in particular and an American exit from the world stage in general, she would be stacked on the pile like another piece of cordwood. (We’ve seen the “bedraggled war protester story” before too.)

By draping herself in the sackcloth of the grieving, Cindy was hoping for a suspension of the rules of discourse. I guess she thought that we would ignore her casual lobbing of the “F-grenade” in reference to the President. Perhaps she hoped that we would not ask ourselves how “the universe” chose such an imperfect instrument to spark massive political upheaval, as she was more Patty Hearst than Rosa Parks. Maybe she vainly hoped that her media acolytes would not find out about her long stint as an anti-war activist, one minute delivering rants to ABC’s Nightline regarding “neo-con PNAC agendas” to defend Israel, and sidled up all cozy with Rep. John Conyers at the mock hearings on the Downing Street Memo the next.†

The truth that eventually came out was that far from simply being a grieving mother, Ms Sheehan had sold herself out to the likes of MoveOn.org long before her stints as Honorary Chairwoman of the Crawford, TX Chamber of Commerce. The nature of her allegiances became more evident as Ms. Sheehan made common cause with Venezuela’s left-wing autocrat Hugo Chavez during a January 2006 appearance at the sixth annual World Social Forum in Caracas.

The stabbing irony to all of this is that if any mother’s grief warranted a suspension of the rules, it was not that of Cindy Sheehan. It would not diminish the palpability of her grief to point out that Casey Sheehan was a knowledgeable volunteer when he joined the military. Presumably he was of both sound body and mind, neither mentally deranged nor intellectually diminished. With all due respect to Ms Sheehan’s (and America’s) loss, my nominee to receive a suspension from the rules of public discourse would be another grieving mother whose story we are sadly familiar with.

While Cindy Sheehan was spared seeing the moments before her son’s death, the mother of Terri Schiavo, Mary Schindler, had to watch her daughter’s death unwind, in slow motion, for 14 years. His mother’s post-mortem remarks notwithstanding, Casey did die in pursuit of a noble and enduring cause. Even to this hour, no one can explain what was gained through the judicially-sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo. The lasting testament to the callowness of the Left could be found in the media’s treatment of one grieving mother juxtaposed with its treatment of the other. Terri Schiavo was guilty of living an inconvenient life, so she simply had to die; the will of her mother, the rules of due process, and the expressed will of the Congress of the United States be damned. Casey Sheehan, whatever he was in life, suffered a convenient death. He will live on as a useful, if involuntary tool to bring about the will of the American Left.

The real story of Cindy Sheehan is that she is yet another useful idiot helping to bring about ends that were seen as untenable even by those who devoutly wished them to be so. No serious observer truly believed that Cindy Sheehan and her dwindling retinue were concerned one bit about peace anywhere other than their own living rooms. Can we imagine an immediate withdrawal of American and coalition troops from Iraq leading to peace there or anywhere else in the Middle East? Just as important, if the United States leaves Iraq before the mission is accomplished, whose values will be left to flourish?

The post-modern craving for convenience leads many Americans to judge this war on the basis of the sacrifice it will require. For progressives in America, this war is inconvenient because it distracts America from their “skim, no-whip lattes for everybody” agenda. Unfortunately, death goes on when America takes a holiday from guarding the freedom of others unable to do so. The dead of Kigali, Srebrenica and Halabja speak to the perils of American navel-gazing. But the mass graves of Rwanda, Yugoslavia or Iraq are nothing to Cindy or the remaining few that the Left’s imploding universe has assembled around her. Like small children, they gather together to be comforted by stories they’ve all heard before.

† As best as can reasonably be concluded, Ms. Sheehan was concerned about the influence of the scholars at the Project for the New American Century on the conduct American foreign policy. In a January 26, 1998 letter, the PNAC encouraged President Clinton to utilize his upcoming State of the Union Address to “enunciate a new strategy” with the goal of “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” Apparently, by Ms. Sheehan’s reasoning, PNAC wielded undue influence on both Presidents Clinton and Bush, the former having signed the act that provided an initial impetus for the latter to invade Iraq.

The Insufficiency of Truth – More than any other, the most bedeviling trait of progressives is the appearance that they are ahistorical. As discussed previously, liberals seem to have no appreciation for historical developments, particularly as they pertain to examining events that have occurred over decades or centuries, as their orientation seems to be confined to the here and now. Their disdain for history is of a piece with their discomfort with anything resembling objective fact. The mutuality of these dislikes should not surprise, as the Left seems to have declared itself an enemy of both history and truth, being as truth and history are both poor expedients to the goals of progressives. The Left eschews definitive, dispassionately ascertainable facts and instead clings to impassioned recitation of their shibboleths.

Progressives seem especially hostile to societal truths. As Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago law professor put it recently, “[l]iberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others.” The question left unanswered by liberals is why certain truths are so disposable such that they have to be challenged in the first place, especially those that came by the great efforts of many societies down through the millenia. If a set of beliefs illuminates the dark places in our lives, why then should we question them, or - as the Left so devoutly wishes - abandon them outright? (The Left seems to view "truth" as a ubiquitous and easily obtained commodity, much like dandelions in a backyard.) If anything, we should cherish our truths, and hold tightly to them.

In truth, the Left only wants us to question certain truths, and prefers that other “truths” remain unchallenged. The Left never questions the intrinsic value of quota-based affirmative action, the benefit to society of abortion on-demand with no restrictions, or the veracity of the benefits of embryonic stem cell research. But as it pertains to the intrinsic benefits of civility, decency and restraint, those truths are to be challenged, even disparaged, unceasingly.

Liberals also tend to become incensed when objective fact does not support their beliefs. This accounts for the particularly bitter nature of today’s liberal politics. Simply put, the truth has not been kind to liberalism. Over the past two decades much of the intellectual heft that provided muscle and sinew to liberal policies has been stripped away by reality or overwhelmed by history, leaving the skeleton of leftist canon and knee-jerk reaction to withstand conservative challenge. For example, how is it that Harry Belafonte can travel all the way to Venezuela, as he did in January of 2006, and call President George W. Bush, “the greatest terrorist in the world?” Ever the performer, he encored by railing against America’s homeland security efforts in a speech in New York two weeks later, opining that, “We’ve come to this dark time in which the new Gestapo of Homeland Security lurks here, where citizens are having their rights suspended.”

Mr. Belafonte’s behavior evidences nothing short of derangement from the truth. Even if Mr. Belafonte is no fan of George Bush, he should freely acknowledge that the President is far from an Osama bin Laden in either behavior or aspiration. (Besides, what is the sense in a black leftist of considerable wealth going to a country where citizens of African descent live in squalor compared to the rest of the population, all to denigrate America, where blacks live in relative comfort?)

And as for Bush leading a “Gestapo,” how would Mr. Belafonte rank the President compared to, let's say, North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, who has 250,000 people imprisoned in “reeducation camps?” How would Bush compare with Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, whose campaign of ethnic and religious terror has led to the deaths of 400,000 civilians in Darfur? And where would Bush end up on Mr. Belafonte’s dictator’s scale vis-à-vis Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Libya’s al-Quaddafi or Cuba’s Castro? For his part, Mr. Belafonte, along with Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy and Cindy Sheehan, has been left to fume about how to “take back their country,” neglecting the fact that they were the ones who left it long ago, preferring instead to reside above it as citizens of the world.