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Ärende: 'exit strategy' from reality
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Mark Steyn
Senate adopts 'exit strategy' from reality
November 20, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
A busy time in the U.S. Senate, the "world's greatest deliberative body."
Judging from the 2006 conference report, the Senate subcommittee on Labor,
Health and Human Services and Education -- Chairman Arlen Specter (R),
ranking member Tom Harkin (D) -- has been deliberating especially hard:

"Sec. 221. (a) The Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center Building
(Building 21) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hereby
renamed as the Arlen Specter Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center.

(b) The Global Communications Center Building (Building 19) at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention is hereby renamed as the Thomas R. Harkin
Global Communications Center."

Good to see that even in the viciously partisan atmosphere of today's
politics, Republicans and Democrats can still work together to carry out the
people's business. In the same spirit, I wonder whether the Senate chamber
itself should not be renamed the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi United States Senate.
With increasingly rare exceptions, just about everything that emerges from
the chamber tends to support the Zarqawi view of Iraq -- that this is a
psychological war in which the Great Satan is an effete wimp who can be worn
down and chased back to his La-Z-Boy recliner in Florida.

Last week, the Republican majority, to their disgrace and with 13 honorable
exceptions, passed an amendment calling on the administration to lay out its
"plan" for "ending" the war and withdrawing U.S. troops. They effectively
signed on to the Democrat framing of the debate: that the only thing that
matters is the so-called exit strategy. The only difference between Bill
Frist's mushy Republicans and Harry Reid's shameless Democrats is that the
latter want to put a firm date on withdrawal, so that Zarqawi's insurgents
can schedule an especially big car bomb to coincide with the formal handover
of the Great Satan's cojones.

"Exit strategy" is a defeatist's term. The only exit strategy that matters
was summed up by George M. Cohan in the song the Doughboys sang as they
marched off to the Great War nine decades ago:

"And we won't come back
Till it's over
Over there!"

And that's the timetable, too. If you want it fleshed out a bit, how about
this? "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The
central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.'' That's Goh
Chok Tong speaking in Washington last year. Unfortunately, he's not a U.S.
senator, but the prime minister of Singapore, and thus ineligible to run, on
the grounds that he's not a citizen of Blowhardistan.

 What does the Senate's revolting amendment tell America's enemies (Zarqawi)
and "friends" (Chirac) about her will to prevail?
Any great power -- never mind the preeminent power of the age -- should be
engaged with the world. That means, among other things, that it has a
presence in those parts of the globe that are critical to its interest.

 For two years, the Democrats have assiduously peddled the line that Bush
"lied" about Iraq. A slightly less contemptible class of critic has sneered
that the administration never had any plans for postwar Iraq, hadn't a clue
what it was getting into, couldn't tell the difference between a Sunni and a
Shia and a Kurd if they were painted different colors and had neon signs
flashing off the top of their heads. If there's anything to this feeble
second-guessing, it's that the U.S. government simply didn't know enough
about Iraq -- and, in a crude sense, they're right. U.S. taxpayers would be
justified, for example, in feeling they're not getting their $44 billion
worth from the intelligence community.

But the only way to know the country is to be there on the ground, in some
form or other. I'm all for "Iraqification" -- though those Democrats
urgently demanding everything be done by the locals will be the first to
shriek in horror once the Iraqis start serious score-settling with the
foreign insurgents. But, even with full-scale Iraqification, America would
be grossly irresponsible if not clinically insane not to maintain some sort
of small residual military presence somewhere in the western desert.
Sorry, but that's part of the deal of being the world's hyperpower. To
pretend otherwise is an exit strategy from reality. If you're worried about
the ''cost,'' stop garrisoning your wealthiest allies -- Germany, Japan et
al. -- and thereby absolving them from stepping up to the traditional
responsibilities of nationhood.
One expects nothing from the Democrats. Their leaders are men like Jay
Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, who in 2002 voted for the war and
denounced Saddam Hussein as an "imminent threat" and claimed that Iraq could
have nuclear weapons by 2007 if not earlier. Now he says it's Bush who
"lied" his way into war with a lot of scary mumbo-jumbo about WMD.

What does Rockefeller believe, really? I know what Bush believes: He thought
Saddam should go in 2002 and today he's glad he's gone, as am I. I know
what, say, Michael Moore believes: He wanted to leave Saddam in power in
2002, and today he thinks the "insurgents" are the Iraqi version of
America's Minutemen. But what do Rockefeller and Reid and Kerry believe deep
down? That voting for the war seemed the politically expedient thing to do
in 2002 but that they've since done the math and figured that pandering to
the moveon.org crowd is where the big bucks are? If Bush is the new Hitler,
these small hollow men are the equivalent of those grubby little Nazis whose
whining defense was, "I was only obeying orders. I didn't really mean all
that strutting tough-guy stuff." And, before they huff, "How dare you
question my patriotism?", well, yes, I am questioning your patriotism --
because you're failing to meet the challenge of the times. Thanks to you,
Iraq is a quagmire -- not in the Sunni Triangle, where U.S. armed forces are
confident and effective, but on the home front, where soft-spined national
legislators have turned the war into one almighty Linguini Triangle.
It's easy to laugh at the empty shell of a Jay Rockefeller, bragging about
how he schmoozed Bashar Assad, dictator of a terrorist state, about Bush's
war intentions. But look at the news from France and ask yourself what
that's really about? At heart, it's the failure of Europe's political class
to grasp the profound and rapid changes already under way. This Senate is
making the same fatal error. I'd advocate throwing the bums out if there
were any alternative bums to throw in. But maybe the Thomas R. Harkin
Centers for Disease Control could persuade them to be the first deliberative
body to donate itself to medical science.


(c) Mark Steyn, 2005
Copyright (c) Mark Steyn, 2005

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