Belmont Club calls it a rout, for which no rally point has yet been found.
The argument that this is a necessary mea culpa, a necessary retreat comes up against the question: retreat to what? Every rearguard action has a fallback line of defense prepared. Since the Democrats have not indicated where they want the retreat to stop, and there is no indication that the President has prepared a fallback position the appropriate term isn't a rearguard action. Retreats without an endpoint have another name. They are called a rout.Rather than be alarmed, this fills me with joy.
There is no sense getting excited about Rumsfeld's resignation. It is but the first step on a long road to ... has anyone decided yet? Therefore the only rational thing to do is relax. Take a loaf of French bread and cut off two slices with a utility saw and make another mayo and peanut butter sandwich. Sooner or later the enemy is going to realize what the Guderian knew in 1940. That it doesn't matter how many men, tanks or forts are serried before you. If there is no mind in opposition, and no awareness of the need to set a mind in opposition, then the road to Paris is open. The bread is theirs. The saw is ours. And the sandwich is good.
Although many tried to get the warnings out, on how to pre-empt and stave off the worst scenarios that any fool can see hurtling towards us, history shows nobody ever, EVER, listens to the Cassandras.
Therefore, it was clear that things would have to get much worse before they got better.
Well, we're moving right along then, aren't we?
Entering much worse, directly ahead.
Rejoice!
Because now better will result all the sooner.
Too bad about all the innocents who could have been saved but now have to die in the meantime, however.
The sooner much worse begins, the sooner it's over.
One way or another.
And dragging things out does not favor us; given demographics and nuclear hyperproliferation, time is not on our side.
The idiots trying to recreate the glorious high of engineering retreat and defeat in Vietnam (we stopped a War, man!) think no consequences will follow them back at home, apparently, out of the Middle East:
Viewed from that perspective, it really is America's or Jew's fault that folks are fixing to kill each other in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Now some people are inevitably going to ask why, if the Sunnis and Shi'as are dead set on killing each other across the Middle East because of some disturbance caused by the presence of America or Israel (remember this makes sense in some way), the reason this shouldn't be cold-bloodedly regarded as the greatest act of strategic genius since Alexander beat the Persian Empire. A variety of objections come to mind, chiefly to do with morality and the oil security, the preferred order depending on whether you are an idealist or a "realist". I will add a third. The killing's not going to stop and we're not going to stop it. In another era we might not have cared, but the lesson from 9/11 which we have forgotten already is that they will carry their magically realistic hatreds to other shores with unimaginable weapons. And remember, it's always our fault.Savor in advance the bitter surprise they will feel.
And when Average American wakes up one day wondering what the hell happened, have no qualms in pointing out how the international leftists and media made their pain inevitable.
Rejoice!
UPDATE: I just saw that Prof. Hanson has a similar take on things:
Or is it a deeper malaise that modern liberal internationalism is neither liberal nor international. Lacking any real belief that the United States, now or in its past, has been a continual force for good, the contemporary Left hardly wants the rest of the world to suffer the American malaise of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental degradation, and consumerism. That self-doubt is buttressed by the idea as well that confrontation is always bad, that evil does not really exist, but is a construct we create for misunderstanding, that the world’s ills are remedied by reason and dialogue.
In essence, the progressive Leftist is often affluent, insulated from the savagery about him by his material largess, and empathizes with those who are antithetical to the very forces that made him free, secure, and prosperous—as a way to assuage the guilt, at very little cost, of his own blessedness.
...
All that said, the West is encountering something novel, as it fights its first politically-correct war, in which all the postmodern chickens of the 1980s and 1990s have come home to roost. Thus multiculturalism makes it hard to fight non-Europeans from the former third world, inasmuch as it argued there was not just little distinctively good about the West, but rather the once recognized universal sins of mankind—racism, sexism, class oppression, inequality, patriarchy—were to be seen as exclusively Western.
...
Add into this dangerous modernist soup moral equivalence, or what we know as “conflict resolution theory.” It postulates that any use of force de facto is equivalent to any other. We see those ripples with this Orwellian notion of “proportionality”, that a democratic Israel must calibrate its response to missiles aimed entirely at its civilians by ensuring none of its own aimed at Hezbollah terrorists and their supporters miss.
Then there is moral relativism and utopian pacifism.
...
So it is going to be hard, but not impossible, to win this war. Why, then, as readers have complained, my dogged optimism?
For two reasons. One, all these nostrums are theoretical, and anti-empirical. Ultimately as lies, they will be disapproved by the evidence before them. A progressive can call the ACLU all day long, but after 9/11 if he stands in line at an airport gate listening to an imam chanting Allah Akbar as he and his friends board, our liberal friend will begin to worry. And second, our enemies have no intention of relenting. They smell blood and want our carcass, so eventually even the progressive mind will give up the pieties of peace and face the inevitable.
