Karl Rove's White House deputy Peter Wehner takes conservatives William F.
Buckley, George Will, and Francis Fukayama to task for expressing dissention
from Bush's "freedom agenda."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008182
The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve
A response to Messrs. Buckley, Will and Fukuyama.
BY PETER WEHNER
A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will,
William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of
the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure
and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is
dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab
Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for
freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed
from the outset. Or so the argument goes.
Let me address each of these charges in turn.
The war is lost. "Our mission has failed," Mr. Buckley wrote earlier this
year. "It seems very unlikely that history will judge either the
intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly," saith the man (Mr.
Fukuyama) who once declared "the end of history" and in 1998 signed a letter
to congressional leaders stating, "U.S. policy should have as its explicit
goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful
and democratic Iraq in its place."
These critics of the war are demonstrating a peculiar eagerness to declare
certain matters settled. We certainly face difficulties in Iraq--but we have
seen significant progress as well. In 2005, Iraq's economy continued to
recover and grow. Access to clean water and sewage-treatment facilities has
increased. The Sunnis are now invested in the political process, which was
not previously the case. The Iraqi security forces are far stronger than
they were. Our counterinsurgency strategy is more effective than in the
past. Cities like Tal Afar, which insurgents once controlled, are now back
in the hands of free Iraqis. Al Qaeda's grip has been broken in Mosul and
disrupted in Baghdad. We now see fissures between Iraqis and foreign
terrorists. And in the aftermath of the mosque bombing in Samarra, we saw
the political and religious leadership in Iraq call for an end to violence
instead of stoking civil war--and on the whole, the Iraqi security forces
performed well. These achievements are authentic grounds for encouragement.
And to ignore or dismiss all signs of progress in Iraq, to portray things in
what Norman Podhoretz has called "the blackest possible light," disfigures
reality.
more>>> http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008182
Turdblossom Rove who spent his Nixon internship like Monica Lewinsky;
On his knees in front of the President's zipper. What a Turd.
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