Danny Carlton blogged First of all the margins are too thin to accomplish much.. Yes the Dims control the House, but if Webb is declared the winner in Virginia, then they control the Senate by one, and the one independent is Joe Leiberman, arguably one of the most conservative Democrats that was in the Senate, trashed by his own party, and now free to ignore any party loyalties he might have once held.
Also a LOT of the newly elected Democrats, in both houses, are conservative Democrats, and if the left wing of their party tries to push them to do too many liberal things, they may revolt.
I don't think they can count on him too much. So the Senate, while technically in the Dims hands, is really more or less a dead heat. And the White House is still Republican. So there's not a lot the Dims will be able to do, other that continuing to prevent Republicans from getting anything really successful done, then blame them for it. Meanwhile, on paper, they control both houses of Congress. So here we are, heading toward the 2008 election with the Dims controlling Congress, and a Republican in the White House.And Bush can veto any actual tax increases, so all they can do is allow the tax cuts to expire, and most of them expire in the 2008 to 2010 period.
Americans have always had a soft spot for the underdog, and had we faced the 2008 election with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress we would have not had the benefit of that. As it is we can claim "underdog" status, while still maintaining enough power to prevent the Dims from really screwing things up, in the man time.I assume you mean in the meantime.
We can emphasize the idiocy the Dims will inevitably display, and easily project it onto whatever moron they toss onto the ticket (Sometimes they make our jobs so easy, don't they. Please send Kerry in again, he's so fun to watch, but then again, he's hardly a challenge.)Not likely, and if Hillary is smart she will accept the Senate Majority Leader position they offerred her, instead of running in 2008.
Even the most die-hard Dims know full well that pulling out of Iraq would be disastrous and that disaster can easily be blamed on Congress. President says stay; Congress says leave; we leave; Iraq melts into a free for all...we could run Yogi Berra after that fiasco and get him elected in a land slide. So it's unlikely, even after all their rhetorical posturing that the Democrats actually will pull us out of Iraq.
Then again, sometimes they are stupid enough to actually believe their own lies. So you never know.If we stay we need to insist that they allow us to close down all of the militias, both Sunni and Shia, including Al Sader's, and if they refuse, we need to pack up and pull out, at least to Kuwait and nto the north to protect the Kurds.
They want to raise the minimum wage. A meaningless act, and everyone that has more than a Freshman economics understanding knows that. Very few minimum wage employees have a Freshman economic understanding, and that's the key. It's like the old trick of making your dog think you've thrown something up in the air, then watch him get all excited waiting for it to come down. "Here you go minimum wage workers. A raise! Oh and [mumbled under breath] prices will all go up, too." Personally I find it sick that the Democrats use a tactic like that, but then for the most part, their willingness to ignore basic morality is why they're Democrats.
So in the end we'll have two years of a lame duck Congress, unable to escape blame for the mess they do cause, leading up to an election which could easily toss control of the Presidency and Congress back to the Republicans. If only the GOP learned their lesson about abandoning the Conservative values that always win.We need to find a lot of true conservatives (both fiscal and moral) and be ready for the 2008 primary season.
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And what will happen in the Muslim world? Oh, crowing, of all kinds. Crowing from somewhere in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yes, we won, we won, the Americans have had to leave. And that apparently is what some in the Administration are so scared of.But they need not be. For if they leave, and when they leave, the natural centrifugal forces, whirring away, will cause Sunnis and Shi'a to be unable to compromise. Or if they do enter into any kind of compromise, it will immediately be broken by one side or the other or both, for it will be impossible for the Sunnis to accept their new status, and impossible for the Shi'a Arabs to share power and money in the way that the Sunnis demand. And if the Americans think that enlarging the pie by giving potentially-rich Iraq even more American -- i.e., Infidel -- money will bring about that spirit of compromise that is so foreign to, and so inimical to, Islam, they are only proving that their ignorance of Islam and the psychology of Muslims is nearly total. And being unable to compromise, they will fight.
And Muslims being Muslims, and Sunni Arabs regarding the land of the most glorious Abbasid Caliphate as important to their own history and their own identity, will never permit the Shi'a, those quasi-Persians, to win Iraq, and will offer their co-religionists every aid. And so will the Shi'a in Iran, which is not the same thing as saying that the Shi'a Arabs will necessarily wish their own state to be incorporated into a larger Shi'a state ruled from Tehran, just because they accept such aid -- money, men, materiel.
And as the American squandering of resources -- men, money, materiel -- is replaced almost overnight by a situation in which the squandering of resources is that of Muslim states and peoples whose money, men, and materiel are now being used up, the shrill voices expressing delight over "the defeat of America" will grow fainter. And as the conflict reverberates, as for example when the Shi'a in Bahrain, or Kuwait, or Al-Hasa become inspired by the conflict in Iraq to act up, and then to bring down the Sunni Arabs behaving as those Sunni Arabs will, and as the Sunnis in Pakistan attack, as they will, the Shi'a in Pakistan, and as Hizballah volunteers possibly march off to help fellow Shi'a in Iraq (and seen off at the station -- the one existing in their imaginations -- by deliriously happy Christians and Druse and even Sunni Muslims), and as the unstated American goal becomes, it is clear, no longer that messianic foolishness about making Muslim states happy and prosperous, but rather working to exploit the natural fissures -- ethnic and sectarian that are most obvious in, though hardly limited to, Iraq -- all sense of triumph over America, of having defeated America, will fade.
And then there is the matter of an independent Kurdistan. That too, spells trouble for the Arabs and for the unity of Islam. For Islam has always been a vehicle for Arab imperialism. Anwar Shaikh rightly titled one of his analyses of Islam "The Arab National Religion." An independent Kurdistan (with arrangements made for an enclave for Iraqi Christians, their safety to be guaranteed, on pain of loss of all American support, by the people and government of Kurdistan) will not only unsettle the Kurdish regions of Iran and Syria (causing migraines in both regimes) but ideally would raise, for non-Arab Muslims everywhere, the promise that they too might throw off Arab domination. Think only of the Berbers in North Africa, and think too of the Berbers in France, who might be turned against the Arabs in the same immigrant population, with useful results not least for the French security services.The spectacle of internecine warfare not only promises to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. No, it will also serve as a Demonstration Project to Infidels. Let them see how, without well-meaning Infidels to bring aid of all kinds and to keep the peace and to prevent one side or the other from behaving with their wonted barbarity (just read the reports of the corpses found murdered by Shi'a or Sunni militias or insurgents or irregulars or, for that matter, by members of regular army and police units), Muslims treat each other.
For time now needs to be bought, and Infidels tutored in the ways of Islam. There is no better way than to remove the controversial American presence in Iraq that so gets in the way of a clear-sighted view from a distance, a pisgah-sight of Islam, that many Infidels need.
Oh, there'll be much mafficking among Muslims when the Americans leave. It will last a week, maybe a month, maybe two. But not longer. And if the Administration has any sense, it will turn its attention to Western Europe, just as soon as the more-in-sorrow withdrawal is first announced and then quickly put into effect (with possibly just a very small force left in Kurdistan to help protect the Christians or oversee their exodus to Lebanon or possibly the "West Bank," but only as part of a population exchange with local Muslim Arabs).It will turn its attention to checking or disrupting in Europe the campaigns of Da'wa, and to changing immigration policies and supporting those in Europe who wish to do the same, and to engaging in propaganda to demoralize the camp of Islam and Jihad. (Hint: Karen Hughes is not the right person for this job; Ali Sina, and Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq should be consulted at every step on the staffing, and on the lines of information and argument to be disseminated; no more "life in America for Muslims is great" and no more rock music and other wonderful examples of Western decadence that do nothing to win or at least unsettle minds.)
So yes, I agree with Keith Ellison that the American forces should leave Iraq forthwith. But not for the same reasons.
Who do you think is right? Do you think an American withdrawal will be a victory for Islam, or do you think an American withdrawal will not only conserve our reserves, preserve or halt the degradation in the quality of our armed forces just in time, and help to divide and demoralize the camp of Islam and Jihad?
There are those who are indifferent to Islam, but not indifferent to the environment. Such people may have no interest in, or be completely unaware of, both the menace of Jihad and how important it is to reduce the OPEC oil revenues which supply the "money weapon" that is one of the main instruments of Jihad, without which the building and maintaining of mosques and madrasas all over the West, and the vast campaigns of Da'wa, and the employment of armies of Western hirelings to promote or defend Islam and the agenda of Islam, in government, in business, in the media, in the universities, would not be possible. But objectively, in their desire to rescue the world from environmental degradation, they are the allies of all those who are most concerned about the worldwide Jihad, or its local components.
And those who worry about the Jihad, and have concluded that the most important task is to reduce the use of oil and gas, may have little in common with members of some environmental groups, but objectively they will work for the very same goal -- a goal which will be pursued by some to save the natural world, and pursued by others to save, in a sense, the manmade world, or at least the world made somewhat better, somewhat more interesting, by all those names to be found in, say, the Index to Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence."
In similar fashion, some of those who want the Americans out of Iraq do so for reasons I deplore and abhor. One such person is Keith Ellison. But the policy in Iraq that he desires is exactly what I desire. For I know what will follow, and I welcome it. He does not know. He, just like many Sunnis in Iraq now convinced they will win, or like those people in the West who are convinced that "of course Iran will just take over" -- doesn't know what societies suffused with Islam are like. No compromise. Victor and vanquished. Until another despot comes along, to rule over this or that segment of what was once, but is unlikely to ever be again, Iraq.
And may both sides win.