What's That Scent?

Blowback.


mmmm, What a sweet aroma it is.

Last year, following the bombing of the al-Askirya Mosque in Samarra and the wave of sectarian bloodshed that followed, it became hip to be anti-war. The left hitched their wagon to that mule and rode it right into razor thin majorities in the House and Senate. Upon taking office, the first words out of their mouths were: "This war is lost."

With party leadership buttoned securely in the pocket of the moonbat bloggers, Democrats mounted a furiously futile assault on President Bush's Iraq policy, scheduling vote after useless vote on non-binding resolutions and unconstitutional appropriations bills. Centrist Democrats, not eager to anger the voters that the left duped into electing them, kinda sorta went along. President Bush held his ground, gleefully vetoed the unconstitutional incarnation of H.R. 2206, and forced the Democrats to cave.

Undaunted by their defeat, Democrats vowed to return in the fall with a renewed vigor to force troop withdrawals and ultimately end the conflict in Iraq as a defeat they could hang on Bush. That defeat, as their grand scheme called for, would then be used to consolidate gains in Congress and sweep a Democrat into the White House in 2008.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that defeat. The Armed Forces of the United States maintained a momentum in Iraq and made undeniably good progress in the security situation in Iraq. More importantly, the heightened security in Baghdad and other major population centers began ushering in another key process: Political reconciliation between the basic units of Arab culture and society: The Tribe.

About three weeks from now, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will testify before Congress, providing answers and comments on their input to the much anticipated progress report due from the administration. Democrats, especially centrist Democrats in swing districts and swing states, are petrified. The administration's report will show progress. The story of that progress will go in one moonbat ear and right out of the other. The hardline liberals don't care what the report says and won't be affected by anything short of a Sunni-Shi'a-Kurd Peace Treaty and the end of all hostilities. But the centrists, the ones with conservative voters watching carefully from home, do care.

The report threatens to rip party unity right down an ideological line, in what Penn State University's Matthew Woessner called a "Nightmare Scenario" for Democrats. "A nightmare scenario for any party is when the pressure, the sum total of the pressures from their constituency groups, are out of step with mainstream America. That's a prescription for electoral disaster," Woessner told Reuters in an interview yesterday. "The explosion of the success of the left-wing blogosphere has placed the Democrats under even more pressure from their left," he continued.

"The Democrats can't control the House and the Senate unless they elect centrists. And they can't elect their centrists by having a totally liberal agenda."

Ahh, blowback. There's that scent again.

Liberal Arrogance

They want instant mashed potatoes, microwave popcorn, one hour
martinizing and Democracies Built in a Day. When they don't get what they want, they scream at waiters and berate dry cleaning clerks for making the coffee to strong, the taters too mushy and the starched shirts too stiff. And, they point to a "bunch of Arabs," sneer, and say "it will never work." They're talking about the Iraqi Parliament and Maliki government, who has been in office for a tad more than a year.

During this year, they have been battling a wicked insurgency, struggling to get the petroleum infrastructure up and keep a lid on sectarian mistrust that has existed for centuries. Meanwhile, the American left sits in comfortable, air conditioned offices and dismisses their efforts as meaningless.

The lack of Christian sectarian violence in western civilization is a fairly recent phenomenon. For centuries, Christian western powers fought religious wars against each other, killing each other in population proportions that make the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq look like a rush hour fender bender. Through a period of Rennaissance and Reformation, western civilization was able to rise above the propensity for violence and settle political, sectarian and religious disputes through a combination of tolerance and dialogue. We are not perfect, but we are not the barbarous slaughtering machines we were for the first thousand years or so after the founding of the Church.

It is the height of liberal arrogance to dismiss the efforts of the Iraqis to resolve their own differences. As our own history painfully points out, these things take time. Western civilization overcame its history. What makes us so special that we should believe Arabs can not do the same? These Arabs are the people who gave western engineers the concept of Zero. "Algebra" is an Arabic word. The most ancient Iraqis, the Sumerians, gave western civilization the written word. We are not talking about an ethnic group incapable of rational, intelligent thought. If we believe them intelligent and capable, then we should also believe them capable of working out their differences without killing each other. Mesopotamia is an ancient and beautiful land. Its people deserve the chance to live their in peace. It is in the United States' vital national interests to see the establishment of a peaceful and stable Iraq. But it is up to Iraqis to want that too, and want it badly enough to be willing to die for it. If they are willing to die for it, then they are willing to tolerate political and religious differences that do not, in the end, make them any less Arab or any less Iraqi than anyone else.

They are capable of doing that. To believe otherwise is the height of liberal arrogance and bigotry.