Of course, the dearth of one or more Viables of a true Conservative nature is of tremendous assistance to these three ideologically imperfect volunteers, but the longer we go without one enlisting the more resolute the base will become about their individual choices amongst those from whom they have to choose.

First and foremost, the Elephantary primary deciders know that foreign issues trump those domestic, certainly so when we are faced with a resolute enemy therefrom that seeks our destruction (as we almost always are; Bill Clinton was fabulously fortunate in his Presidential timing). Unlike the current Democrat Congressional majority, these voters are not at all unclear as to whether this is a global War on Terror (it is) or merely President George W. Bush’s flight of Islamist fancy (‘tis not).

A great many of these with the keys to the Republican nomination are not at all disillusioned with the concept of introducing democracy into the snake pit that is and has been the Middle East, in Iraq or anywhere else. Where they find fault is with the execution thereof, and they are inordinately frustrated with the ease with which these cataclysmic problems could have been avoided.

But Those Lessons Never Learned

General George Patton did not dispatch in totality the Nazis upon entering Berlin in World War II. He understood the machinations of totalitarian rule; that one’s hopes to rise as even a plumber or janitor rested upon membership in the one Party in town. Besides which, the Nazis were the only ones capable of keeping the dilapidated electric, sewage and transportation grids running on time, and that they would be most appreciative of continuing to receive a paycheck despite the change in management.

Our wholesale ejection of the Ba’athists upon the Saddam Hussein toppling, therefore, was the elemental error from which all subsequent Iraqi troubles have flowed.

In 2002, his last full year in power, Hussein spent all of $2 million on infrastructure, for a state the size of California. Extrapolate that dismal total over the three decades of his rule, and then flash back to all of the Media stories decrying our inability to provide 24/7 power and water to every inch of the Mesopotamian hinterlands.

Iraqis, of course, were not in reception of that kind of service in the Press Hussein glory days of yore, either.

State of the Iraqi Art

But to dispatch the Ba’athists, who knew where to apply the necessary chewing gum and baling wire to keep the antiquated equipment at least somewhat online, was disastrous on several fronts. Not only did we lose any semblance of how to operate the Iraqi infrastructure, we created the populace of Wave One of the insurgency, who then subsequently melded seamlessly with the extra-territorial Al Qaeda-ists, Iranians and Syrians who entered to wreak further havoc.

The terrorists and the ongoing insurrection have been infinitely more successful as a result of this Ba’athist intelligence providing them where, when and whom to bomb and kill for maximum disruptive impact. (Why do you think fundamentalist Sh’ia Iran rushed to join forces with this secular Sunni force?)

Suffice to say, we are still today paying dearly for this egregiously bad decision. It is the fundamental font of the disorder General David Petraeus has only now begun to reign in.

Rudy Giuliani, Starting Small

Iraq, and the daunting prospects of the global Jihadist network, is of a sort of the chaotic, seemingly hopeless disarray that Rudy Giuliani stared down, beat back and ultimately broke in New York City, both before and during his tenure as Mayor.

It has been much ballyhooed that as a federal prosecutor in the Ronald Reagan 1980s, Giuliani fearlessly and repeatedly took on the New York mob, a group not unreminiscent of the enemy we currently face as a nation (sorry, Speaker Pelosi). And we have previously discussed his revitalizing of the Burroughs’ and the nation’s resilience and resolution on and after September 11th, 2001.

But it was what Giuliani did for the city alone prior to the national horror, when Gotham was its own private hell, which further steels his place atop the current primary pile.

(Please stay tuned for Part V.)