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The courageous Dems will make sure America is safe and defended, as long as no one is shooting at any of our troops. If someone shoots at our troops, then the Dems believe the correct thing to do is to "redeploy" the troops to someplace else. That's a fair summary of what Dean said on the radio today:
In his party's weekly radio address Saturday, Howard Dean said the Republican plan of "stay the course" is not an option in the 3-year-old war and emphasized the Democratic call for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops to begin by year's end.
He also rejected the Republican criticism that Democrats want to "cut and run."
"Among the victims are brave American soldiers who are the targets of an insurgency because of failed political leadership and a lack of foresight and planning," Dean said. "We don't want another wall with 55,000 names of courageous Americans who were let down by their government."
...Dean rejected the "cut and run" moniker, saying Democrats "will defend America, but we will be tough and smart."
How much more pathetic can the Dems get? How does Dean expect to fight Al Qaeda without having Al Qaeda shooting at our troops?
It wasn't long ago that one of the mantras of the Dems, in criticizing the war, was that the war in Iraq had nothing to do with going after Al Qaeda. One of the responses was that Al Qaeda would be drawn into fighting our troops in Iraq. This was called the "flytrap" or "flypaper" strategy. In September of 2003, Andrew Sullivan had this remarkably prescient post:
Listen to U.S. Army Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq. He just opined on CNN that attacks against U.S. forces have increased in "sophistication, especially in the improvised explosive devices that they are using, and we're working to learn from that and to be able to counter them." He went on, critically: "This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity... But this is exactly where we want to fight them. ...This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States." You won't find a better description of the "flytrap" strategy anywhere - or from a more authoritative source.
The extra beauty of this strategy is that it creates a target for Islamist terrorists that is not Israel. A key objective of the current U.S. strategy is to show that Israel is not the fundamental cause of instability and mayhem in the Middle East - but a victim of the same kind of pathological religious extremism that has destroyed Iran, brutalized Afghanistan and blackmailed Saudi Arabia. Before the Iraq war, the U.S. could do little to counter these maniacs directly. Now they have a theater of war - and it isn't the West Bank.
Will this strategy work? Its obvious disadvantage is that it's tough to fight an escalating terrorist war in the same country you're trying simultaneously to nudge toward civil order and democracy. Terrorism undermines civil society even in countries with very advanced traditions of democracy, let alone a country like Iraq. Certainly, that internal contradiction helps explain why the U.S. is now desperate for more help in pacifying Iraq as well as waging war within it. One possibility is that better and more aggressive policing in urban areas (by Iraqis and foreign troops) will enable U.S. soldiers to leave the cities and fight a guerrilla war against al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the Iraqi hinterland, putting extra pressure on Iran and Syria at the same time. That would be an elegant solution. But at the moment it's a somewhat optimistic one.
At some point, I'd argue, the president therefore has to make this strategy more formal. He has to tell the American people that more violence in Iraq may not in some circumstances be a bad thing. It may be a sign that we are flushing out terror and confronting it, rather than passively waiting for it to attack again. He has to remind people that this war is far from over, that the mission is still very much unaccomplished, and that this is not Vietnam.
The flytrap strategy worked. We're capturing and killing Al Qaeda terrorists literally by the hundreds:
The US says coalition forces in Iraq have carried out more than 450 raids since the death last week of al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The US said 104 insurgents were killed and 759 "anti-Iraqi elements" captured.
Iraq says documents seized after the killing of Zarqawi yielded vital leads and that this may be the "beginning of the end" of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
So what do the Dems want to do now that the Iraq war has proven to be a powerful way of destroying the perpetrators of 9-11? They want to run away. The Dems want to get our troops out of a place where they are "targets," just as if Al Qaeda had arrived in Iraq and driven us out. Oh, the Dems are all for using the military to keep America safe -- just as long as nobody shoots at any of the troops.
And the Dems are all for going after Al Qaeda -- as long as Al Qaeda doesn't shoot back.
At a time when we are capturing and killing Al Qaeda terrorists by the hundreds, the Dems want to cut and run. It is one of the most pathetic things I've ever witnessed in politics.
