Dems AWOL from wr on terror
Mark Steyn:
"How goes the war? No, not Vietnam. The other one. You remember. It was in all the papers until a month ago when Vietnam returned for a Democratic Party dinner-theater tour starring Massachusetts' answer to Robert Goulet.
"Can't get into it myself. I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaeda down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust off their suits and said, 'But, Mr President, critics point out that National Guard pay stubs from the '70s are notoriously easy to forge. ...'
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"Meanwhile, there's this whole other war going on, the one Mr. Bush has to attend to while everyone else is on cable TV talking about the early '70s. This war has an ambitious aim: the transformation of the most dysfunctional region of the world. You can't do it overnight. But, 10 months after the Iraqi liberation, it should be possible to discern a trend. And right now all the Middle Eastern dominoes are beginning to teeter in the same direction.
...
"What's happening is that most countries in the region are moving toward the American position; the only variable is the speed. Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi decided to throw in the towel completely. This time last year he was still beavering away on his Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program. Did you know he had one? The International Atomic Energy Agency — the body John Kerry and the Democrats place so much faith in — were blissfully unaware.
"But he has now opened it up to British and American inspectors, and, in turn, we now know much more about his nuclear allies in North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. Even in that last ramshackle state, where Gen. Pervez Musharraf recently pardoned A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb, for his various freelance forays into pan-Islamic nuke-sharing, the Bush approach has managed to flush Mr. Khan into the open: He'll never be able to retreat into the shadows again.
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"In other words, the "coalition of the willing" has effected more positive change in the last 10 months than the multilateral establishment has in the last 10 years.
"If President Bush loses in November because he can't provide sufficient witnesses to prove where he was on certain weekends in 1972, he'll still have an impressive legacy: He has toppled two dictatorships, neutered a third and put the squeeze on several more. Yes, Americans are still being killed by Islamists in Iraq. But they're not being killed by Islamists in New York offices, or Washington government buildings, or U.S. Embassies and ships.
"Assume for the purposes of argument the media are right — that John Kerry's four months in Vietnam are so impressive they outweigh two decades of zero accomplishment in Washington, save for a series of votes remarkable for being wrong on every major issue, from Ronald Reagan's raid on Libya to the Gulf war to every new weapons systems for the U.S. military. What will President Kerry do?"
Mark Steyn:
"How goes the war? No, not Vietnam. The other one. You remember. It was in all the papers until a month ago when Vietnam returned for a Democratic Party dinner-theater tour starring Massachusetts' answer to Robert Goulet.
"Can't get into it myself. I dozed off the other day watching a White House press conference in which President Bush was asked nary a question about anything that had happened since 1972, and I dreamt there was a muffled explosion from al-Qaeda down the street blowing up the Capitol. And, when it had died away, the press corps brushed the plaster dust off their suits and said, 'But, Mr President, critics point out that National Guard pay stubs from the '70s are notoriously easy to forge. ...'
...
"Meanwhile, there's this whole other war going on, the one Mr. Bush has to attend to while everyone else is on cable TV talking about the early '70s. This war has an ambitious aim: the transformation of the most dysfunctional region of the world. You can't do it overnight. But, 10 months after the Iraqi liberation, it should be possible to discern a trend. And right now all the Middle Eastern dominoes are beginning to teeter in the same direction.
...
"What's happening is that most countries in the region are moving toward the American position; the only variable is the speed. Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi decided to throw in the towel completely. This time last year he was still beavering away on his Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program. Did you know he had one? The International Atomic Energy Agency — the body John Kerry and the Democrats place so much faith in — were blissfully unaware.
"But he has now opened it up to British and American inspectors, and, in turn, we now know much more about his nuclear allies in North Korea, Iran and Pakistan. Even in that last ramshackle state, where Gen. Pervez Musharraf recently pardoned A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb, for his various freelance forays into pan-Islamic nuke-sharing, the Bush approach has managed to flush Mr. Khan into the open: He'll never be able to retreat into the shadows again.
...
"In other words, the "coalition of the willing" has effected more positive change in the last 10 months than the multilateral establishment has in the last 10 years.
"If President Bush loses in November because he can't provide sufficient witnesses to prove where he was on certain weekends in 1972, he'll still have an impressive legacy: He has toppled two dictatorships, neutered a third and put the squeeze on several more. Yes, Americans are still being killed by Islamists in Iraq. But they're not being killed by Islamists in New York offices, or Washington government buildings, or U.S. Embassies and ships.
"Assume for the purposes of argument the media are right — that John Kerry's four months in Vietnam are so impressive they outweigh two decades of zero accomplishment in Washington, save for a series of votes remarkable for being wrong on every major issue, from Ronald Reagan's raid on Libya to the Gulf war to every new weapons systems for the U.S. military. What will President Kerry do?"
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