Carl Levin is just symptomatic of the losers on the left that have misread the last election and who have no compunction about the loss of freedom and the ensuing slaughter of Iraqis.
Let Them Eat Bullets
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/16/2006
Foreign Affairs: A nation that's defended Europe from aggression in the 60 years since World War II is asking why Iraq can't defend itself. The fact is, Iraqis risk their lives for their country every day.
Clearly the days when Democrats warned of a long twilight struggle and pledged to pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the success and survival of liberty are over, judging from remarks by Carl Levin, incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee.
"We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves," Levin opined Wednesday at a Capitol Hill press conference. "The only way for Iraqi leaders to squarely face that reality is for President Bush to tell them that the United States will begin a phased redeployment of our forces within four to six months."
"We cannot be their security blanket," he added. But why not, if it's in our best long-term security interest?
Yes, we should demand more of the Iraqis. But those who ask whether we can or should stop Iraqis from killing themselves forget that we're in this to stop others from killing us and using Iraq as a base camp from which to do it.
We've been Europe's security blanket for six decades. We are Japan's security blanket. We are South Korea's. It's been said that were it not for us, the French would be speaking German and the Germans would be speaking Russian. In 1938, the West decided it couldn't be Czechoslovakia's security blanket and sold out that country in Munich, Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.
"Phased redeployment" is a code word for retreat, one that may one day, Senator Levin, lead to car bombs going off in the streets of Detroit, not Baghdad. We forget that this war really began when a truck bomb went off in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993, nearly killing tens of thousands.
Iraqis — civilians, military and police — are risking their lives for their country every day, from the millions who proudly held up their purple fingers to the young police applicants who are murdered as they line up to serve their country. Then more line up in their place.
Are the Arabs ready for democracy or are they doomed by an ingrained tribalism? We need only to look at Lebanon, where a multicultural democracy once flourished. Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East until the country became a human shield for the PLO and then Hezbollah terrorists supported by Syria and Iran.
The Lebanese might have sustained their multicultural democracy had we not cut and run after Hezbollah killed 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, deciding we could no longer afford to be Lebanon's security blanket. Sometimes democracies need a little help from their friends.
Sectarian violence needs to be dealt with effectively by the new Iraqi government. But we are reminded that Americans did a good job of killing each other from 1861-65 in a war against ourselves that consumed more lives than all our other wars. We invented sectarian violence.
Democracy is a fragile and rare commodity. We forget how close this government of the people and by the people actually came to perishing from the earth. It might not ever have come into being if a French fleet hadn't provided a security blanket at Yorktown.
Our death toll in Iraq isn't close to the carnage of a single battle in World War II, Iwo Jima or one in our own Civil War, Antietam. Ironically, the place where John Murtha would have us "redeploy" to — Okinawa — was the site of one of the bloodiest battles in human history, due in part to the imperial Japanese version of the truck bomb, the kamikaze.
After Desert Storm we told the Iraqis to seize the moment, only to do nothing when they did and watch Saddam Hussein slaughter them. That sense of betrayal lingers and is not dampened by the results of the midterm election or the current talk of abandonment or redeployment.
If we want the Iraqis to step up to the plate, it doesn't help to be threatening to take our bats and balls and go home.
h/t Instapundit
