Betting on Defeat?

Victor Davis Hansen has a superb piece on Iraq today: VDH's Private Papers::Betting on Defeat?





"Lately, it has become popular to recant on Iraq. When 2,500 Americans are lost, and when the improvised explosive device monopolizes the war coverage, it is easy to see why — especially with elections coming up in November, and presidential primaries not long after.

Pundits now daily equivocate in their understandable exasperation at the apparent lack of quantifiable progress. The ranks of public supporters have thinned as final victory seems elusive. It is hard to find any consistent public advocates of the American effort in Iraq other than the editors and writers here at National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, Norman Podhoretz, and a very few principled others.

But for all the despair, note all the problems for those who have triangulated throughout this war.

First, those who undergo the opportune conversion often fall prey to disingenuousness. Take John Kerry’s recent repudiation of his earlier vote for the war in Iraq. To cheers of Democratic activists, he now laments, “We were misled.”

Misled?

Putting aside the question of weapons of mass destruction and the use of the royal “we,” was the senator suggesting that Iraq did not violate the 1991 armistice accords?

Or that Saddam Hussein did not really gas and murder his own people?

Perhaps he was “misled” into thinking Iraqi agents did not really plan to murder former President George Bush?

Or postfacto have we learned that Saddam did not really shield terrorists?

Apparently the Iraqi regime neither violated U.N. accords nor shot at American planes in the no-fly zones.

Senator Kerry, at least if I remember correctly, voted for the joint congressional resolution of October 11, 2002, authorizing a war against Iraq, on the basis of all these and several other causus belli, well apart from fear of WMDs." {...}


A superb assesment, as always from VDH...a must read.