WHAT LEGACY WILL IRAQ HAVE?

Forget Legacy-Building:Iraq is NO Japan Mr. President

By David Sanger, Washington Note, January 1, 2006


The following retort is republished here as it clearly shows how wrong all the critics of the war in Iraq and its 'unraveling' have been. It's obvious now, except for those who continue to be in a state of denial, that the new strategy of the Surge implemented by the capable and superb commander General Petraeus is defeating the insurgents and is laying down the rudiments of democracy in Iraq. If these offshoots of freedom grow eventually into the tree of democracy in Iraq, then president Bush's objective to start democracy rolling in the Middle East will be glowingly achieved. And the pessimists and the naysayers of the neocon strategy to spread and establish democracy in countries that breed terrorism, will have so much egg on their face that will be a full time job for nannies to wipe it off their face.

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis

Legacies do not fall like manna from the sky. Nor are they tailor-made of an original design. They are made by "wearing" for long the hard course of action that will ultimately shape and give birth to the legacy. Moreover, its creator is not one person, but a set of intelligent human beings, who however, are always "escorted" by the jump less shadow of fallibility and serendipity, which inevitably take their toll, but without which no great achievement can be accomplished in human affairs.

The Bush administration, despite some serious mistakes in its strategy (which must creatively and imaginatively be criticized, but not by doomsayer scenarios--which regrettably some readers on this blog are incapable of making a distinction between imaginative critics and doomsayers--is still on the right strategy, both in realizing the prowess and the malice of the enemy and how to confront him. To compare, as Sanger does, this prowess of the religiously fanatic terrorists, whose lethal actions have the great potential of becoming a ceaseless series of successes, with the one off bombings of anarchists, is historically ludicrous.

Secondly, to compare the fate of democracy in the Philippines in 1898, with the fate of democracy in Iraq in the age of TV and of the Internet, when most people in oppressed countries can see how other people live in democratic countries and can virtually breath the air of freedom that emanates from these countries, is to compound this incomparable inanity of Sanger.
Also, John Dower's proposition, "that people know what victory looks like", as he deems Bush's victory to be a fabrication, is overtly contradicted by the polls which showed Bush's ratings for the war jumping from 36% to 46%, after the President's intense campaign to explain the war to the American people. Lastly, David Donald's seemingly poignant statement, about Bush's comparison of the spying intrusions to the "sleeping partners" of the terrorists, with Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, that there was an uproar against Lincoln and a "lot of people believed it wasn't necessary", why is this so surprising, did he expect a unanimous agreement by the American people about such a fundamental, but necessary, reversal of rights even in times of war?

The Administration's strategy in Iraq was to establish an Archimedean point from which it could turn the terrorist's world and its sponsors upon their own heads. By defeating Saddam and the current insurgency, it can defeat by proxy, as Libya has shown, all other rogue states, and hence expedite the defeat of global terror. History has not as yet passed its verdict. But the chances are that the Bush administration will accomplish this historic task, and prove wrong all its doomsayers and shallow, unimaginative critics.

I rest on my oars: Your turn now