Posted by
Always To The Right on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 3:37:38 PM
Joe Biden went on offense
on national security against John McCain today, but skipped a few
points in making his attack. He painted McCain as dangerously out of
touch, and used Iraq as an example. However, Biden made the
counterpoint himself — without even realizing it
We need to do better in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to be sure. But
part of the problem there is the NATO command structure — the very
multi-nationalism that Biden and other critics of the Bush
administration wanted in Iraq. The muddled chain of command and the
unwillingness of most of our western European allies to contribute to
actual fighting in Afghanistan has handicapped our effort there for
years.
However, on Iraq, let’s recall that Biden voted for the
authorization to use military force (AUMF) that approved the war in
Iraq. He exercised the exact same judgment as McCain did in 2002, and
for years Biden expressed support for ongoing operations in Iraq. Not
until Democrats decided to use it as a political football in 2006 did
Biden begin to back away from his support for the war.
Even then, Biden and Barack Obama would have created the
very kind of terrorist sanctuary that he now decries in Iraq, had they
been in charge of American military policy in 2006-7. With al-Qaeda
terrorists engaging us throughout western and central Iraq, Obama would
have had American troops retreat, leaving AQ in place to establish its
own state within the borders of a failed Iraq. Biden would have forced
a sectarian/ethnic split of Iraq that the Iraqis themselves rejected,
creating a civil war along with the failed state and giving even more
impetus for terrorist groups to use Iraq for their bases of operations.
In fact, Biden still promotes his plan to partition Iraq even now. He still wants to snatch defeat from the jaws of obvious victory.
John McCain, on the other hand, backed the one military policy that actually defeated the terrorists and the militias:
the surge. Even Obama has finally acknowledged the success of the
surge, an admission that McCain’s judgment proved superior in this
case. He diagnosed the problem early in the war and put his political
career on the line by supporting the surge strategy, while Obama and
Biden scurried to pander to the Code Pink contingent by backing defeat
and retreat.
Biden guarantees that another major attack on America will not come from Iraq. Why not? Because
George Bush and John McCain stood firm and fought for victory, despite
the ankle-biting from people like Obama, Biden, Harry Reid, Nancy
Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton. If they had controlled policy
during the critical years of 2006-7, we’d be looking at the rise of a
terrorist caliphate in western Iraq that would have gained recruits,
international prestige, vast territories for their purposes, and access
to oil revenues for their plots.