{"id":4040,"date":"2009-01-21T06:12:03","date_gmt":"2009-01-21T11:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4040"},"modified":"2009-01-21T06:12:03","modified_gmt":"2009-01-21T11:12:03","slug":"the-real-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4040","title":{"rendered":"The Real Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

The DC\/New York\/LA political\/media establishment has always hated W. At first it was because he, like Reagan, wasn’t really <\/em>one of them.\u00a0 He beat the “smart” guy in 2000.\u00a0 He cut taxes and (regrettably) triangulated around them on spending.\u00a0 He beat the “smart” guy Kerry.<\/p>\n

But why do they really\u00a0 <\/em>hate him?<\/p>\n

William McGurn Wthinks he knows why<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Here’s a hint: It’s not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush’s disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I wrote a couple of years ago <\/a>at the dawn of the surge,\u00a0 the Dems really only have two templates for a “successful” war:\u00a0 World War II (a big-government war won, to a great extent, by socialist means; universal service, government commanding the means of production, immense control over society) and Vietnam (which was a military defeat for the US, but a political bonanza for them. We’ll come back to that).<\/p>\n

Outside those two comfort zones, I’m afraid Democrats don’t know what to make of things.<\/p>\n

Here in the afterglow of the turnaround led by Gen. David Petraeus, it’s easy to forget what the smart set was saying two years ago — and how categorical they all were in their certainty. The president was a simpleton, it was agreed. Didn’t he know that Iraq was a civil war, and the only answer was to get out as fast as we could?<\/p>\n

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — the man who will be sworn in as vice president today — didn’t limit himself to his own opinion. Days before the president announced the surge, Joe Biden suggested to the Washington Post he knew the president’s people had also concluded the war was lost. They were, he said, just trying to “keep it from totally collapsing” until they could “hand it off to the next guy.”
\nFor his part, on the night Mr. Bush announced the surge, Barack Obama said he was “not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq are going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”<\/p>\n

Three months after that, before the surge had even started, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pronounced the war in Iraq “lost.” These and similar comments, moreover, were amplified by a media echo chamber even more absolute in its sense of hopelessness about Iraq and its contempt for the president.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another problem for the left is that the Vietnam template keeps getting more and more obsolete:<\/p>\n

For many of these critics, the template for understanding Iraq was Vietnam — especially after things started to get tough. In terms of the wars themselves, of course, there is almost no parallel between Vietnam and Iraq: The enemies are different, the fighting on the ground is different, the involvement of other powers is different, and so on.<\/p>\n

Still, the operating metaphor of Vietnam has never been military. For the most part, it is political. And in this realm, we saw history repeat itself: a failure of nerve among the same class that endorsed the original action.<\/p>\n

As with Vietnam, with Iraq the failure of nerve was most clear in Congress. For example, of the five active Democratic senators who sought the nomination, four voted in favor of the Iraqi intervention before discovering their antiwar selves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Making Dem leaders look like fools after doubling back on themselves; that <\/em>is the ultimate crime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The DC\/New York\/LA political\/media establishment has always hated W. At first it was because he, like Reagan, wasn’t really one of them.\u00a0 He beat the “smart” guy in 2000.\u00a0 He cut taxes and (regrettably) triangulated around them on spending.\u00a0 He beat the “smart” guy Kerry. But why do they really\u00a0 hate him? William McGurn Wthinks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}