Unlearning History

Steven den Beste worries that President Bush might be going wobbly:

[Saudi US Ambassador] Prince Bandar is a snake. Why is he still here?

More generally, when will the Bush Administration finally get around to dealing with the core problem facing us: the Saudi deal-with-the-Wahhabist-Devil and their ongoing practice of providing funding to support export of Wahhabist extremism all over the world? Before this war can end, that is one of the things which has to stop.

The biggest long term benefit from crushing the Taliban, crushing Saddam, and rewarding Qaddafi, is to establish a strong precedent for others in terms of what they can expect from us. But by letting Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia get away with murder (and in that I’m not speaking figuratively), we blow that precedent.

Instead, we establish an entirely different one: we make clear that we can be mollified by empty gestures and insincere promises. That is not the message we want to send to the governments of that region; it will ultimately cause far more damage than we would suffer even if all three of those nations were ultimately taken over by radical Islamists.

Steven is on to something here, especially considering the Administration’s apparent (and new) casualty averseness, as evidenced by the on-again/off-again fighting/meaningless-ceasefires around Fallujah.

There’s more. Why isn’t Bush lending so much as mere moral support to the people of Iran? Why is he letting the EU take the “lead” in nuclear weapons talks with Tehran? Why has the White House made no direct request from Congress to increase the size of the Army?

Does Bush not understand what he means when he says we’re in a global war? Does Bush – and this would be especially damning – have no game plan past Baghdad?

Or is Bush trying to make the war look less brutal and less risky because