McCAIN is qualified to be Commander in Chief as neither Hillary nor Obama would be but not because of his years of military service, but because even though it almost cost him the nomination, he fought for the surge which is bringing us victory in Iraq.
I also greatly appreciate Bush’s eminently successful war on terror (no successful attacks on our homeland since 2003. People don’t generally notice what doesn’t happen. They should. And I find Victor Davis Hanson’s analogy between Bush-Iraq war and Lincoln-Civil War brilliantly on target.
Lincoln became very unpopular during the first few losing years of the Civil War and was on the point of being defeated for a second term, to a non-fighting General McClellan who promised peace not victory, Then, Generals Grant and Sherman began to win (VDH’s THE SOUL OF BATTLE, chapters 4-6, and here at PJM) Lincoln won re-election and the war.
War is always unpopular with Americans when we’re losing. I who watched the 3 week war in Afghanistan and the march on Baghdad 18/7 could barely watch the bad news for the first years of the war. I wavered, but then I’d read Hanson and Hitchens and be OK. However, since General Petraeus took over, we’re WINNING and there is not enough war news for me . Jihad is on the ropes and muslims world-wide are losing their enthusiasm for it.
Why were Muslims initially so enthusiastic about Jihad? Because it fed their tattered self-esteem to think that Osama Bin Laden ( a very minor player) had defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, and so surely would be able to defeat America. Hah! CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, the book and the movie show all the people who had a role in winning that war: The Afghanis who share with us a belief in “Live Free or Die” fought heroically but with OUR high tech weapons, OUR doctors, and OUR incredibly generous financial aid.
Islam has to be slapped down hard every few generations President Jefferson sent the Marines to (the shores of Tripoli; i.e. Libya) on their first mission to fight the Berbers aka Barbary Pirates who were hijacking our ships and selling our citizens into slavery (p. 126-135 JEFFERSON: AUTHOR OF AMERICA, Christopher Hitchens) Thank God, Dennis Kucinich wasn’t around or he would have called for Jefferson’s impeachment since Jefferson waited till our navy was over the horizon and couldn’t be recalled before informing Congress.
General Pershing had a Muslim uprising to deal with in the Philippines, captured several rebel leaders, shot a few with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, then buried them face down, facing away from Mecca, with pig’s blood and entrails scattered over their bodies and let the other rebels go. No more insurrection because if you touch pig before dying you don’t go to Paradise. Was it a Frederick Forsyth film in which the hero tosses a football (pigskin) to the Muslim villain just before he dies? Same principle.
We couldn’t make Saddam Hussein kneel defeated before us when we defeated him in Desert Storm; hence, this Stalinist-Hitlerist monster persuaded himself he’d defeated us. We won that war but Colin Powell allowed the Republican Guard (think SS) to escape wouldn’[t have looked nice to the world to keep killing a defeated army. What happened to cutting off the snake’s head? Then, Schwartzkopf and the State Dept. rep allowed Saddam to use his helicopters because sob! we’d blown all his bridges sky high. Those helicopters then brought death to the Shiites and Kurds while we stood by.
We OWED these people. AND contrary to wet-eyed Omar Sharif, Iraq is THE perfect country in which to bring democracy to the middle east. Sharif prefers going to his Sheik; that’s because Egypt is a corrupt bureaucratic mess. We broke Iraq as we broke Japan, a feudal land to which we brought land reform and a constitution. Iraq has oil and fertile land and a largely secular population. Hernando de Soto has written of what we did right in Japan in his THE MYSTERY OF CAPITAL: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. It’s not failing in Iraq and their October elections will bring in Sunnis (who boycotted the last election) who know how to run things. Their democracy will be unlike ours. Sheiks will have a big role. Fine. Maybe, the Egyptians will then learn from the Iraqis.
