August 15, 2006

Irony for the day

...courtesy of the WaPo.

George Will points out the aptness of the intelligence-first, law-enforcement approach to counterterrorism, AND that Kerry was a proponent of this in '04, AND the White House's contorted, delusional, strawman-reliant response to such an America-hating approach.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fold, E.J. Dionne wrings his hands about the Democrats' "self-image" and lack of a position on security.

So the choice is: do they resurrect an effective and specific method of shoring up American security that will attract bipartisan, nonpartisan, and military support while laying the groundwork for future operations, or do they cower over a few schoolyard jibes, turn around and get therapy and self-visualization sessions?

Don't answer that.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

One of the reasons I liked Dean is that he came across as strong.

Dems should react to the knuckle-dragging republicans (as opposed to the "kinder, gentler" republicans) by asking what kind of safety killing people has bought us.

8/22/2006 10:01 PM  
Blogger Bennett said...

Every time we go into one of these places we have to understand the cost of killing indiscriminately. Dean made that rather elementary point in a militarily assertive way.

One thing that is left out of the military-first approach is that modern urban warfare cannot be conducted without good intel. Otherwise you end up with soldiers fighting for their lives against an indistinguishable enemy.

If there needs to be some killing, our soldiers and our military are up to the task. But they can't get their own intel. That information needs to be obtained in advance for them to be deadly - in an effective way.

Intel and analysis were telling Paul Bremer not to disband the entire Iraqi army, and not to shut all the members of Saddam's government out of public office. It was the same knuckleheaded idealogues who wanted none of it, citing Saddam's evilness. It is curious, what crucial decisions we made that would tend to give rise to a significant insurgency.

Yes, curious...

8/28/2006 8:54 PM  

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