December 16, 2003

Read It and Weep

Yesterday, Howard Dean, M.D. gave his foreign policy speech that was suppose to fill in the holes of his most glaring weakness. Oh, what a lurch to the center. actually had the gall to call the current administration "radical." Much of it sounds like it was taken from President Bush's speeches. However, Dean's speech contains a significant falsehood.

The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show that the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at unbelievable cost. An administration prepared to work with others in true partnership might have been able, if it found no alternative to Saddam's ouster, to then rebuild Iraq with far less cost and risk.

Dean continues the canard that the U.S. went into the Iraq War alone. If that's the case, then what are those British, Polish, Italian, and Spanish soldiers doing hanging around Iraq? Did they come for a ring-side seat at a guerilla resistance movement? Later on Dean wacks the Bush administration for choosing "unilateral action as our weapon of first resort." If that's what happened then the U.S. would have toppled Saddam much sooner instead of taking time to bend over backwards to please the French.

Seriously, the blame for other nations not joining the "Coalition of the Willing" lie with France, Germany, Russia, and those that refused to join. Months and months of diplomacy both across the globe and at the U.N. were tried to convince unwilling countries that finally dealing seriously with Saddam was critical to the security of the free world. The "Coalition of the Unwilling" wasn't convinced. Some of the resistance was due to those countries not particularly liking President Bush. Much of the resistance was animosity toward the U.S. France and other coutries saw Iraq as an opportunity to knock the United States' global stature down a notch. They fear the continued American Century more than the Islamist threat.

As for less cost and risk, if the coalition were bigger, Dean has made a point, but only a slight one. A larger coalition would have spread out the cost of the war and rebuilding as well as risk to soldiers across more nations. So the U.S.'s relative costs and risks would have been less, but the total costs and risks would still be the same.

Dean's theme in this speech is that the U.S. shouldn't have gone into Iraq until it convinced more countries to help fight. But what about what actually happened? France, Germany, and Russia said, "No." They weren't going to help free Iraq. German President Gerhardt Schroeder used anti-American and anti-war fervor to win a narrow re-election while France claimed that oodles of U.N. resolutions should be ignored because it finally found a way to stymie American "hyperpower." In his speech, Dean said, "America should never be afraid to act alone when necessary." Fine words, but doesn't answer this question: If no other country was willing to invade Iraq, would you have sent in U.S. forces? A related question is this: How long would you have tried to build a larger coalition knowing that Saddam was in possession of WMD (at least that was the conventional wisdom that not even war opponents denied)?

But wait, there's more:

The Iraq war diverted critical intelligence and military resources, undermined diplomatic support for our fight against terror, and created a new rallying cry for terrorist recruits.

If it wasn't Iraq, something else would have been Islamist terrorist recruiters' ralling cry. If Osama bin Laden was under siege in Pakistan, Islamists would be encouraging people to march upon the location to aid with the monster's last stand as well as calling for attacks upon the U.S. to try and break the will of the American public. Dean is critical, but he really hasn't thought this through at all. Knee-jerk Bush bashing helps pump up his followers and gets them to "hit the bat"--his nickname for donating to the campaign.

Here's an example of sloppy thinking on Dean's part:

We have, rightly, paid much attention to finding and eliminating the worst people, but we need just as vigorous an effort to eliminate the worst weapons. Just as important as finding bin Laden is finding and eliminating sleeper cells of nuclear, chemical, and biological terror.

The problem with WMD isn't that they exist. It's that the wrong people have them or are trying to get them. Great Britain, France, and Russia all have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons yet the U.S. isn't planning on invading them to make sure they don't fall into terrorists' hands.

Let's finish this up with another example of Duck, M.D.'s loose lips. In the speech, he said, "[T]he capture of Saddam has not made America safer." An Iraq without Saddam was the whole key to the war. Saddam's Iraq in possession of WMD (at least in the past) threatened his neighbors and the U.S. Saddam' links to terrorism (housing Abu Nidal, funding Palestinian homicide bombers) only made him that more threatening. Now that he's been captured, it's assured he will never have the controls of a state to use for his evil intentions. That makes America safer. Dean can't see that and exemplifies Sen. Joe Lieberman's hard-hitting attack on him.

The speech was filled with lots of what was bad about President Bush's foreign policy and vague notions of what Howard Dean would do as President. What Duck, M.D. displayed was how unsophisticated his thinking is. The ideas sound like they came out of the mouth of a undergraduate foreign relations student. Yesterday, along with this important speech, Dean announced his foreign policy advisors. Many of them have extensive foreign policy experience. Unfortunately for Duck, M.D., none of them impressed any wisdom upon him.