Oh, My

I can fully appreciate the fact that our ideological opposites don't support the war in Iraq and would prefer that our military be recalled. I can even accept some of their rationalizations, even though I think they are purposefully downplaying the full-on genocide that would be the likely result of their retreat-at-any-cost mentality, of what they view as a Republican war in Iraq. To be fair, the Iraq War isn't the only thing liberals see as a "Republican war." They seem to think everything is the result of one Republican War or another, except, perhaps, their own War on Hyperbole.

Rick Moran highlights one example of the overwrought wailing and knashing of frappacino-stained teeth this morning, a post on the liberal blog Booman Tribune that is highly emotional, to put it mildly:

So here we are in the midst of an escalation oops, surge, in their futile involvement in the Fertile Delta, sending ever more of what they have been determined to be our fully expendable American youth to die amid the filthy corrupt realities of the modern, oil saturated Arab world. All the while our boy Junior adds daily to his litany of pious pronouncements on peace and freedom for a part of the world where there is little respect for peace and no respect for liberty because 13 centuries of Islamic fatalism and authoritarian rule have not allowed, and may never allow either.

As the bullets and shrapnel fly and the bodies are stacked in great rotting piles and the Mothers of Iraq and the Mothers of America weep in endless screams of pain and anguish our congress plays political games in a disgusting, half ass tug of war with President Puke that makes me want to offer Monica Lewinsky a chance to perform just one more public service so that we might at long last give the Republicans and the Democrats something to get stirred up about enough to impeach this criminal son of a bitch.

I talked briefly with a young man today who is leaving for Army boot camp in a few days. We were introduced by his friend's father who is a close friend of mine from my favorite watering hole, the local pool hall. The young man is 19, fresh of face and rosy cheeked, not an ounce of guile in his spirit and ripe for the slaughter. As we spoke I couldn't shake the feeling that I might never see the kid alive again. I wanted to cry as I shook his hand and told him to pay attention and cover his ass.

The author is said to be Bob Higgins, but the near-hysterical, semi-coherent and sobbing tone of the post sounds like it could easily have come from the dead-on lefty-spoofing troll known as CheChe.

Both the Moran and Higgen's posts were proximately triggered by a Joshua Partlow article in this morning's Washington Post titled, Gunmen Go On Rampage In Iraqi City, a follow-up story on the Tal Afar massacre two days ago that I've discussed previously.

For those of you just coming to this story, the Tal Afar massacre were the extrajudicial summary executions of 45-60 Sunni men in a Sunni neighborhood by off-duty Iraqi police and militiamen (all believed to be Shia) in retaliation for a pair of truck bombs in primarily Shia areas earlier that day that killed 63 and wounded 150.

The revenge attacks are chilling, and an undoubted setback, and yet they are perhaps unsurprising in some ways, as the Shia have been hit time and time again by insurgent forces recently, and finally hit their breaking point. There is obviously no excuse for the attacks and a joint investigation by Iraqi Interior Ministry, Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry for National Security is underway.

It is unknown if the recent tit-for-tat in Tal Afar is just the beginning of a resurgence of violent in that Iraqi citizen, or if time with prove these to be horrible isolated incidents.

One thing is for certain, however. There are not "great rotting piles" of bodies in Iraq to speak of yet (Sunni and Shia alike bury their dead within 24 hours), but if liberals such as Higgens get their way and force an arbitrary withdrawal date, "great rotting piles" of dead Iraqis are indeed in Iraq’s future, as noted yesterday by New York Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns in an interview with Matt Lauer on Today:

LAUER: What do you think happens if there's a date certain set for that withdrawal?

BURNS: If United States troops stay, there will be mounting casualties and costs for the American taxpayer. If they leave, I think from the perspective of watching this war for four years or more in Baghdad, there's no doubt that the conflict could get a great deal worse very quickly, and we'd see levels of suffering and of casualties amongst Iraqis that potentially could dwarf the ones we've seen to this point."

And later: "Most would agree there is a civil war, but a countervaling force exercised principally by Americans but also other coalition troops is a very significant factor that leaves the potential for a considerable worsening once you remove that countervaling force. . . Remove that countervaling force and then there will be no limit to this violence."

LAUER: What about this idea that if we leave, we leave behind a vacuum that other states in that region will rush to fill?

BURNS: Very difficult to tell what they would do, but of course this could come as a wake-up call to them, once they were convinced that American troops were going to withdraw and that they might get drawn in, perhaps they would get serious amongst themselves about drawing up some sort of compact to avoid that possibility, but that's purely in the realm of speculation. We really don't know what their intentions would be, but there's certainly a potential for regional conflict.

None of these concerns seem to touch the American political left, which views this as a "Republican War," our soldiers as children "ripe for the slaughter," and notably silent about the hihg probabability that the catastrophic and arbitrary withdrawal they would arrange would lead to more slaughter in Iraq, and perhaps a regional war fought primarily in Iraq.

I noted on March 8 in Left Behind:

It is expected that the power vacuum left by a Democrat-forced American military retreat from Iraq would be filled by foreign nations fueling a sectarian war in Iraq that would be both civil and proxy in nature. Saudi Arabia has made clear their intention to provide military and financial resources to Iraq's Sunni minority to hopefully keep their co-religionists from being "ethnically cleansed," while Iran would continue or increase its military and financial support of Shia factions in hopes of gaining a sphere of influence over oil-rich southern Iraq.

The end result of the Democrat plan of defeat would be a war-torn landscape not too dissimilar to the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian War, writ large.

A repeat of events like the Srebrenica massacre are possible in Iraq's future if Democrats have their way.

Democrats, of course, know this, but simply seem to find political games in America far more important than the regional destabilization and projected increase in civilian deaths their plan for defeat would bring.

Democrats claim to care about our troops, which they do, when it’s politically convenient and they’re fresh out of spit.

Sadly, the millions of Iraqi civilians that would suffer as a result of their plan for defeat don't matter nearly as much to Democrat politicians.

Iraqi children won't send out important action alerts over frappacinos, or fund presidential campaigns in either America. It isn't their grandchildren that will suffer and die if we leave before the job is done.

The Democrats won't mention the cost of pandering to their radical base.

Apparently the one thing too shameful to discuss is the legacy they would leave behind.

Perpetually-anguished liberals like Bob Higgins are always quick to lament the lives lost in Iraq as they occur, holding them up as examples of the evils of what they see as a Republican War. Higgins closes his post saying:

I am sick of reading of war, hearing of war, writing of war and speaking of war and I know that all of the knowledge of war that comprises so much of my own human experience has only created in my soul a world in which I no longer have a thirst to live. I will take to my eternal grave the knowledge and stench of war and death and in my dead ears will dwell the clamor of the agonized keening of all the victims of war of human history.

The hell with it, I need a drink.

Higgins is sick of reading of war, hearing of war, writing of war and speaking of war.

I suspect that this means he will refuse to write or think about the widespread genocide and the regional war that may result from liberal policy of arbitrary surrender for which he so feverishly advocates.