The Ming Report

ROOTING OUT THE BUSHES

August 5, 2006 - The President has gone back to where he was five years ago – Crawford, Texas. It is fitting that he should do so. It was, after all, in Crawford, Texas that he took what was perhaps the most important decision of his Presidency. He was at the ranch when he decided not to decide to do anything in response to an intelligence briefing warning him that Al Qaeda was going to strike inside America. It was a decision that made him a war President and defined the future that his leadership would make for his country.

Five years later he can sit on his front porch and take his ease unmindful of the travails besetting the nation and the world. He is on vacation and on vacation one leaves worry’s behind. The President need not reflect that Shiite crowds of 100,000 thronged the streets of Baghdad shouting death to Israel and to America. That, and more deaths, was the news coming out of occupied Iraq yesterday. In a little more than three years the President’s policy has been a howling success – if viewed by Teheran, that is. As evidenced by the largest single anti-American – anti-Israeli demonstration in the Islamic world the President’s policy has been a success if the objective was to create an Iranian Shiite Satellite in Mesopotamia.

The Pentagon announced that an additional 7,500 American soldiers would be deployed to Baghdad and the first of those troops arrived today. With 100,000 Iraqis in the streets shouting solidarity with Hezbollah those reinforcements are not going to be enough to pacify Iraq’s capitol. With every Israeli bombing attack and every land engagement the depth of anti-Americanism tied to the anti-Israeli jihad grows in depth and breadth. That is the result that nearly 4 years of sacrificing American lives has achieved.

Last week the Pentagon finally admitted that Iraq is on the cusp of civil war. The rest of us have known for sometime that Iraq is already in the midst of a sectarian civil war – and one that the Sunnis have already lost to Iran surrogates. Soon the Pentagon will have to admit that the Taliban is waging a guerilla war against the regime that Washington has installed in Kabul. What is it that four years of war has brought us? What great national purpose has been achieved?

Yes, it was in the nation’s interest that Osama Bin Laden be apprehended and brought to justice. That has not occurred. Yes, it was in the nation’s interest that a free, independent and democratic Iraq emerge in the Middle East. Iraq is neither free, independent nor democratic and no such Iraq is visible on the Horizon.

And so while Condi Rice flies from capitol to capitol deferring a ceasefire until Israel announces it has achieved its war aims; while the Pentagon expedites shipment of smart bombs and laser guided missiles lest Israeli stockpiles run dry; our President, the leader of the not-so-free world retires to Crawford to clear his mind and root out the bushes in the fencerows.