What the Heck was I Thinking!?

Iraq compares more accurately with postwar Germany and other parts of Europe. In that scenario, the US, Britain and France (at least for a short while) kept the Soviets and their client communist groups in check while the political process was allowed to mature in the former axis countries.

I’ve often wondered why people think we should pull out of Iraq now, when it’s clear that their government would fail miserably if we did. Everyone I’ve read or listened to has said matter-of-factly that the Sunnis and Shias would go to war until one or the other group was victorious. Nobody seems willing to dispute that.
Given that prospect, why on earth would some of the people in political power, not limited to Democrats, want to cut and run?
A milblogger, Acute Politics , I was pointed toward by Patterico writes,

If we pull military forces out of Iraq before the Iraqis are fully capable of managing their own affairs, if we go home and leave Iraq in a downward spiral, if we fail in this task of nation building that we find ourselves at, then we doom the American military to a long period of even greater risks. It’s your choice not to support the war; just don’t pretend to support the troops while using them as a political tool.

I believe this man speaks the truth. Why on earth would we want that kind of situation to take place? Why would we risk that prospect for short term “peace in our time.”
In whose time would it be better to have the conflagration? My grandchildren won’t be any better prepared to deal with a Middle-East in turmoil than we are now. Is that the kind of legacy we want to leave them? I don’t!

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You’ve read about the curious incident of the dog in the night.
Reading Glen Greenwald’s post about Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Did Rahm Emanuel lie about his knowledge of Mark Foley? Yes., I came away with both admiration for the even-handedness of Mr. Greenwald and a sense of wonder about why no article had been written about Foleygate until the election season. In the post, there are two references to the information about Foley being given to the press in October 2005. Somehow no article was written about this until September 2006. Does this point to an agenda from the press? Could it be that, even unconstrained or uncontrolled by Democrat politicians, the press will hold scandals until the point of maximum disaster and minimum repair for Republicans? It sure seems that way:

… To the contrary, Miller, the House Democratic Caucus staffer, appears to have been genuinely disturbed by the emails and he took appropriate action — he sent them to the media not in the weeks before the 2006 election, but all the way back in October, 2005, when he concluded (reasonably and, as it turns out, correctly) that the media was a far better vehicle for stopping Foley than the GOP-led House, which would protect Foley.

The media may have been the vehicle to expose Foley, but they picked a curious time to do so, given that they knew about it a year earlier.

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Dr. Sanity turns her analytic eye on the impact of the Baker-Hamilton-Chamberlain report on Akhmadenijad and the mullahs who back him up in Iran. In her post, Dr. Sanity: SHAME, HONOR, AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE BAKER-HAMILTON REPORT, She reminds the reader of the nature of a shame culture such as theirs. She also briefly examines the rationale used by the Iraq Surrender Group’s members:

You may be asking yourself, what in God’s name (or Allah’s perhaps) were Baker- Hamilton and that useless committee thinking?

That is easy to answer also. Like many people in this country at the present time, they were not, in fact, thinking at all. In point of fact, their conscious cognitive processes were outsourced to their unconscious feelings and fears, as they closed their eyes to an unpleasant reality (and I am not talking about Iraq, as unpleasant as the facts on the ground are right now) and retreated mentally from dealing with a post 9/11 world.

Feeling, not thinking - that’s a typically left-wing political tack. Maybe these old geezers think it’s time to make up for some of their past sins, so they should heap shame and weakness on themselves.
As the title of this blog says, “What the heck were they thinking!?”

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