And the Liberal intellectual schism and disingenuousness they reveal

Baghdad

Voting From An Undisclosed Location

The Democrats, and the Leftists who bring up their ideological and fiscal rear, have spent the better part of this last year past decrying Iraq as an Islamic inter-intifada with which we have no business and in which we should play no further part.

Some in their ranks, and their Trumpeteers in the Media, have (at the very least partially) misread the results of November’s Republican self-inflicted coup de grâce as the sign of these times for which they seek, an excuse to again execute a Vietnam-esque abandonment of a foreign commitment we have made to people who have put very much more than their electoral lives on the line.

The reasons they cite as necessitating our Iraqi withdrawal are exactly those that ostensibly require our Sudanese insertion, a Muslim-on-Muslim civil war resulting in the murder of thousands of innocents.

It can be conservatively said that our 1973 unilateral withdrawal from South Asia cost three million of our disillusioned ex-compatriots their lives, as they were subsequently overrun by their Communistic Northern neighbors.

The rest were consigned to merely living with the Hellish ramifications of our proactive inaction.

We have once already left an Iraqi liberty movement to die, again at the behest of (amongst others) a then Secretary of State James Baker, after the 1991 Gulf War. We expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and left promising to back the Kurdish and Shi’a overthrow play, but when the time came we left them only high and dry.

Kurdish Re-Belief

That the Kurds have again put their trust in us is at once heartening and touching, although they seem to be more expressive of gratitude than confidence (as their own highly effective militia, the Peshmerga, plays a large part in their feelings of security). That their Shi’a neighbors have been less willing to in totality rely on us is more than a bit understandable given our recent desertionist record and current failings.

Democrats promising more of the retreatist same and appearing to attain the Majority as a result does little to bolster our standing there amongst; President George W. Bush’s imminent departure from office, and the Iraqi democracy effort’s unpopularity tilting all of his possible successors away from robust post-2008 support, further furls the sails.

Those who do certainly can not be blamed for thinking they are on their own, and acting accordingly.

I Hope Those Are Bullet Proof Burqas

With all of this in mind, it is still largely inappropriate to label this a civil war. Seventy percent of the populace, under threat of death, thricely found their ways to the polls to put their government in place. Certainly even more would have ventured out to cast their ballots were not virtually the entire region (Iran, Syria, al Qaeda) intent on ending them for so doing. This overwhelming majorative desire to see Iraq not be a second Lebanon muddle is hardly the makings of full-blown intercine strife.

In short, the “civil” warriors have plenty of outside assistance in the rousing of the rabble. As we were the ones to have opened the portal to at once either freedom or ruin, we have a moral obligation to our fellow doormen and women to not (again) leave when the political going 6,000 miles removed gets a little tough.

Darfur

But One Thing Sudan Lacks

The same people that desire our immediate departure from Mesopotamia, where we have a vital national interest (oil) and a responsibility to ensure a positive ending to what we began, seek to insert us into Sudan where we have neither. And the reasons they cite as necessitating our Iraqi withdrawal are exactly those that ostensibly require our Sudanese insertion, a Muslim-on-Muslim civil war resulting in the murder of thousands of innocents.

This is cognitive dissonance that only political expediency and Bush loathing can explicate. Democrats quickly realized post-September 11th that there was no electoral ground to be gained by being the “Me Too” Party in the War on Islamism, so they quickly switched tack. They have also (again) come to find far more common cause with the enemy we face than with those doing the facing. And they could not stand it placing them on the side of a President for whom they have little or no respect.

The Democrat Party has, since the Vietnam era, (rightly) been viewed as soft on our defense. But until this recent strategic shift, they have gone out of their way to shake any semblance of this appellation; they now fully embrace it in all but name and attempted semantic distinction.

Democrats Desirous of a Redux

They are proudly willing to claim defeat in Iraq, a proclamation of capitulation they were averse to overtly making in Indochina. They then wanted to “declare victory and go home”, knowing full well it was a win in claim only. Now, it matters not whether their approach is termed “strategic redeployment” or “cut and run”, only that it ensures an Iraqi descent into a chaotic oblivion morbidly reminiscent of the fall of Saigon.

Liberals have long felt comfortable exerting our military might only in circumstances where we have absolutely no tactical need to do so, thereby exhibiting the alleged moral purity of the flexes in question. We have a vital interest in the eradication of Islamism in Iraq, much as we did with Communism in Vietnam, and it is this essentiality of purpose that for Liberals taints the enterprise.

The Darfurian slaughter is indeed a tragedy, but it is not one that places our nation at imminent or even secondary risk. For Liberals, this lack of looming relevancy does not suggest a hesitance to act, it demands that we do, for it allows them the clean-hands international do-gooderism that only the self-interest free deed can.

It is just this sort of strategic-less humanitarian action for which the United Nations supposedly exists; the Left’s call for our arms in Sudan is their tacit admission that, even by their low standards, the global body they love is a failure.

The Gaza Strip and Samaria

A Day With a "Y" In It in The Strip

There is a third Muslim civil war underway in a portion of what purports to be a future Palestinian state. The scant coverage it has received is due to its service as austere visual aide to things that the Media and the Left (please pardon the redundancy) wish not be seen.

It puts the lie to one of the great fairy tales of our time, the Arab, Muslim and worldwide Liberal fable that the Middle East would be a peaceful place if only Israel would return to the resident Muslims possession of the lands from which the latter assailed the former in the 1967 Six Day War.

That the Zionist Entity has had rockets, attacks and incursions launched and invasionary tunnels dug therefrom before, during and after the taking of territorial custody, while providing welfare stipends to prop up their aspirant undoers, is all lost in the global conversational shuffle.

Despite all of this, Israel in August of 2005 fired what is universally asserted to be the Palestinian silver bullet; then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon removed all Israeli settlements (some forcibly, for the notion was far less than popular with the populace both within and without the pre-1967 plot lines) from the Gaza Strip and the portion of the West Bank known as Samaria.

I Have Here a Note From Hamas (Signed "Epstein's Mom")

Joyous rolling cascades of serenity should have gone pouring down the Strip from Gaza City all the way to Rafah; after all, this, we were told, was all that was standing in the way of Middle East peace in our time. It was in fact another Neville Chamberlain moment; in retrospect, Israel was the little Dutch boy whose digit was all that held back militant oblivion.

The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) dyke, already heaving with cracks, has since the disengagement broken wide open. (The PNA is, of course, the “temporary” government established in the territories in 1994 whose charter was to have expired eight years ago; yet here we are.) Gaza and the Strip quickly descended into lawless chaos, with thugs (many of them Hamas members) roaming the streets brazenly stealing from shops and individuals in broad daylight and generally wreaking havoc.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian attacks from these yielded lands on Israeli civilian populations (is it not always civilian populations?) immediately increased exponentially; included therein are a great many assaults from Katyusha rocket launchers, a weapon that had never previously made an incendiary appearance in Gaza (it has, however, long been the weapon of choice of Hezbollah in attacks on Israel from Lebanon).

And less than a year post-capitulation, Israel was further rewarded for this latest bit of unilateral peace making with the election of Hamas to a PNA majority, they of the “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” charter.

Since, the Strip has fallen altogether apart.

Hamas Winning Another Precinct

It seems that Hamas has a greater aptitude for genocide than for governance, and did not find mere electoral defeat of Fatah to be wholly satisfying, so but one week after their ballotory success they began to wage war on their political opposition. Fatah, incepted by (amongst others) that paragon of tranquility Yasser Arafat and currently led by his fellow founder and brother in arms, PNA President Mahmoud Abbas, is of course not at all unfamiliar with the heavier side of life, and the two parties have ramped up their militias and the damage done, to each other and the entire area they purport to lead.

Things appear to have very little probability of improving as they continue to get worse.

But again, you get very little of this delivered by the Press; it is certainly not relentlessly pounded home in the way Iraq and Sudan are, because the former does not further the Media agenda. We have been told, about what are in this one sense three fairly similar situations:

“Iraq is a Muslim sectarian war; we need to get out of there.”

“Sudan is a Muslim sectarian war; for what are we waiting? Get in there.”

And, in Gaza, “What sectarian war?”.

The Media's Sudan on the Left, Iraq on the Right

Dichotomy, thy name is Press.

They, and their favorite Party, have wanted, since nearly the campaign’s inception, us “redeployed” out of an Iraq we have a national interest in resolving, because a Republican got us in. They all want us in Sudan despite, and in fact because of, our complete lack of a genuine need to be there, because it allows them to portray Bush and his Party as more uncaring with each additional day that passes bereft of invasion. And they wish not to dwell at all upon the Gaza Strip, as it reveals that dreaded, dastardly Israel may very well have been right and righteous all along.

For the Left, to paraphrase George Orwell, all civil wars are equal, but some are more equal than others.