Polls taken through Iraq’s thick prism reflect increasing public disenchantment with the Bush presidency. The economy hums and the stock market climbs daily to heights previously unknown, but still the president has fallen to the sub-30-percent approval terrain charted only by Jimmy Carter in modern times.
Here, though, is the real anomaly: If one listens, truly listens, to the gloomiest war critics — Democrat congressional leaders and presidential candidates — the president has already won the debate about what is to be done in Iraq.
That’s because, (1) whether or not they actually believe it, top Democrats keep saying we should be fighting al Qaeda, and (2) al Qaeda, like it or not, is in Iraq — massed, determined and deadly. It is the enduring failure of the administration that it cannot seem to make Americans see these two stark realities.
Iraq: The place where jihadists commit the latest atrocity hard on the last. Iraq: The “capital of the Caliphate,” as Osama bin Laden has called it, further describing it as the center of the “third world war … a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam.” Iraq: The site of the battle bin Laden aptly says will end either “in victory and glory or misery and humiliation.”
Americans, of course, do not want to be immiserated and humiliated by our enemies. Democrats know this — which is why they dare not end the war, as it is in their power to do, right this minute, by cutting off funding.
They won’t try that, no matter how furious this dereliction makes their rabid base. They know they don’t have the votes. And they know they don’t have the votes because Americans will not abide losing to al Qaeda. For all the Democrats’ post hoc blather about the 2006 elections being a referendum on Iraq, Americans still revile jihadists more than war. That is the reason we went to war in the first place.
If we leave now, we lose. It’s that simple. We make a prophet of bin Laden, who has been saying all along that we’d quit once things got tough. We embolden the enemy, swell its recruitment, inflate its funding, and guarantee that suppressing it, after the inevitable next wave of attacks against us, will cost many, many more American lives.
Democrats are quite correct that the 2006 elections signaled public ardor for a new direction in Iraq. What they misread — or, better, what they are frantically trying to manufacture — is a purported national consensus about what that new direction should be.
Yes, there is indisputably a vibrant antiwar movement. Thanks to its sympathetic media megaphone, it is influential beyond its numbers. But for all its sound and fury, that movement makes up only a portion of those demanding a “new direction.”
For the rest of us, the desired new direction is the word that is such anathema to both the Left and the foreign-policy establishment: Victory.
MAKING THE CASE
Here is where the administration has betrayed its own cause and disserved Americans. For four years, it has been incoherent, or flat-out AWOL, in making the public case about why military operations in Iraq are inextricably bound with victory in the greater war against jihadists and their state sponsors.
Even as President Bush sought reelection, his administration failed to take heed (as I pleaded for it to do in
this pre-2004 election piece) of the Left’s contention that Iraq was a “diversion” from the “real” war on terror — a contention that was wrong but resonant because the public case had been neglected. To be sure, stockpiles of WMDs were not found as anticipated. Flawed intelligence, however, was a bipartisan failure. More to the point, it did not alter the fact that, had we not taken him out, Saddam was well positioned to be right back in business — with lots of Russian, Chinese, and European support for ending sanctions, lots Oil-for-Food money, and lots of jihadist contacts.
Those ties between the now-deposed Iraqi regime and jihadists — the vital connection between Iraq and the war on terror — were never well explained. The administration, grateful to be reelected despite being burned on WMDs, has since shunned all discussion of the justification for deposing Saddam, assuming a suicidally tin-eared “we’re looking forward, not back” posture.
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