Newt Gingrich is right.
The Hamas victory in Gaza is a warning that World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz has called it) is going to be long and hard. It is also a warning that the West is currently losing that war. [...] The source of failure is not to be found in the American people but in the inarticulate and unimaginative leaders all across government who now preside instead of lead.The tragedy of the current debate in Washington is that while the inarticulateness and the failing performance of the Bush administration have led the American people to desire a new direction, the politics of the left insists that the new direction be less than President Bush. Yet the lessons of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, New Jersey, the JFK plot, the Algerian bombings, the Iranian nuclear program, the conflict in Lebanon and now the defeat in Gaza all point to the need for a war policy that is substantially bigger and more robust than Mr. Bush.
Exhibit A: GOP surrender monkeys:
Republican support for the Iraq war is slipping by the day. After four years of combat and more than 3,560 U.S. deaths, two Republican senators previously reluctant to challenge President Bush on the war announced they could no longer support the deployment of 157,000 troops and asked the president to begin bringing them home."We must not abandon our mission, but we must begin a transition where the Iraqi government and its neighbors play a larger role in stabilizing Iraq," Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Bush. Voinovich, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, released his letter Tuesday — one day after Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the panel's top Republican, said in a floor speech that Bush's strategy was not working.
Andy McCarthy understands.
I don't mean to be harsh regarding Senator Lugar. He is hardly a singular voice here. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, however, I have spent many years dealing with real live jihadists. Fact: They really do think they can and will win. They don't need a lot of hope to carry on — people willing to kill themselves in order to kill you are already pretty motivated. But they derive great hope from what they (rightly) see as our surrenders and our ambivalence — compared to their own great certainty and confidence.Posted by Alan at June 26, 2007 09:39 PMI am not a fan of how the war has been directed, and I believe expending our time and effort on the democracy project rather than on defeating our enemies in Iraq and elsewhere will go down as one of history's great blunders. But with all that said, I note with the heartache of one who has seen it all too many times before: We will rue the day we leave Iraq without routing radical Islam. What we have not killed, we have made stronger.