N.O. Pundit

Norman Podhoretz on Iraq

Norman Podhoretz stands, in my opinion, in the triumvirate of great historian columnists, the other two being Victor Davis Hanson and Mark Steyn.

In his latest, The Panic over Iraq, Podhoretz states explicitly what I believe many (certainly me) feel: that Democrats (and by extension the transnationalists) fear victory in Iraq. Yes, fear success of the Bush Doctrine.

We have all been hearing the chorus coming from the Deans and Pelosis and Kerrys and Murthas that we are failing and failing badly in Iraq. In reality, we are succeeding, brilliantly, and on a timetable that if put forth three years ago as the strategic plan would have been laughed out of the room. These unpatriotic scoundrels would rather see American defeat for political gain than American victory (the politics having stopped at our shores).

Excerpts:

Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic party—fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come—is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush’s new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat. Leaning heavily on the turn in public opinion largely brought about by reports in the mainstream media and the lucubrations of the theorists, the Democrats now joined in by clamoring openly for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.8

A goodly number of these Democrats (Howard Dean and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, to name only two) are the “Tories” of today, in the sense of having from the very beginning stood openly and unambiguously against the revolution in foreign policy represented by the Bush Doctrine and now being put to the test in Iraq. But a much larger number of Democrats fit more smoothly into Tom Paine’s category of “disguised” Tories. These are the Congressmen and Senators who in their heart of hearts were against the resolution authorizing the President to use force against Saddam Hussein, but who—given the state of public opinion at the time—feared being punished at the polls unless they voted for it. Now, however, with public opinion moving in the other direction, they have been emboldened to “show their heads.”

Finally, we have a certain number of Democrats who correspond to the “the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots” of the American Revolution.9 One of them is Congressman John Murtha, who backed the invasion of Iraq because (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he really thought it was the right thing to do, but who has now bought entirely into the view that all is lost and that the only sensible course is to turn tail[.]

And more:

Moving on to the economy, [columnist Max] Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that “for all the insurgents’ attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy,” per-capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30-percent higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8 percent in 2006; and that there are five times more cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein’s day, five times more telephone subscribers, and 32 times more Internet users.

Finally, Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers.

To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction.

Read it all.

Posted by nopundit at December 9, 2005 12:11 PM