When America is about to throw an ally to the wolves, we follow an established ritual. We discover that the man we supported was never really morally fit to be a friend or partner of the United States.
When Chiang Kai-shek, who fought the Japanese for four years before Pearl Harbor, began losing to Mao's Communists, we did not blame ourselves for being a faithless ally, we blamed him. He was incompetent; he was corrupt.
We did not lose China. He did.
When Buddhist monks began immolating themselves in South Vietnam, the cry went up: President Diem, once hailed as the "George Washington of his country," was a dictator, a Catholic autocrat in a Buddhist nation, who had lost touch with his people.
And so, word went out from the White House to the generals. Get rid of Diem, and you get his power and U.S. support. Three weeks before JFK was assassinated, Diem and his brother met the same fate.
When the establishment wished to be rid of a war into which it had plunged this country, suddenly it was "the corrupt and dictatorial Thieu-Ky regime" in Saigon that was simply not worth defending.
Lon Nol, our man in Phnom Penh, got the same treatment.
"In this world it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal," said Henry Kissinger.
The army of South Vietnam and the Saigon government, the boat people of the South China Sea and the million victims of Pol Pot's genocide can testify to that before the judgment seat of history
Thus the daily attacks on Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- who sat beside Laura Bush as guest of honor at the 2002 State of the Union and got a standing ovation -- as the corrupt ruler of a corrupt regime, whose brother, a narcotics trafficker, has been on the CIA's payroll, seems a signal that the ritual is about to begin. The Karzai brothers should probably read up on the fate of the Diem brothers.
Yet never has an ally been more egregiously insulted in wartime than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's insulting of the Pakistanis on her "fence-mending" trip last week. In a meeting with editors, Hillary was asked why the United States was focusing its Predator strikes in the war on terror so heavily upon Pakistan.
Said Hillary, "Al-Qaida has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. ... I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to."
This is charging the Pakistani government, army and intelligence services with cowardice or collusion with bin Laden and al-Qaida in the war on terror. That it was made within hours of the bloodiest in a long series of terror attacks that have killed hundreds of Pakistanis only magnifies the insult.
So, too, does the fact that the Pakistani army, after cleansing the Swat Valley of the Taliban, is now fighting in South Waziristan in the most critical battle of the war.
But, if this is what the Obama administration and the Congress believe, why are they sending $7.5 billion in new aid to such a regime?
Moreover, the charge is, on its face, demonstrably false.
If Pakistan's intelligence services, army and government all knew the exact location of bin Laden, we would know it. For we have people inside sympathetic to us, just as some are sympathetic to al-Qaida.
And if people inside discovered the exact location of bin Laden or al-Qaida, they would leak it to us, if only because the money on the table for such intelligence is irresistible.
Is Secretary Clinton suggesting there are people throughout the Pakistani government who have information that could make them rich for life, but refuse to reveal it out of purest loyalty to a gang of terrorists who are massacring their countrymen as well as Americans?
That there are warlords who are war criminals, allied with the Afghan regime and us, that drug-traffickers are abetted by high officials, that Karzai stole the election, no one denies.
That the Pakistani intelligence services are shot through with elements loyal to a Taliban they helped bring to power in Kabul, that there are Pakistani army officers who believe they should be defending their country against India, not fighting America's war in Waziristan, is also undeniable.
But what does it avail us to insult these people who have cast their lot with us, many of whom will, with famines and friends, pay a far more terrible price than we if we lose these wars.
And if we are going to abandon these people, as we have so many others in the past, let us at least tell them, and ourselves, the truth. We didn't know what we were getting into. We don't have the stomach for a long war. We're sorry we got you into this. Your big mistake was in trusting us. You folks should have known better.
For the Blue Dogs, Tuesday was a fire bell in the night.
Virginia Republicans led by Robert McDonnell crushed the most conservative Democrat nominee in decades, rolling up a victory that rivaled Ronald Reagan's rout of Walter Mondale.
New Jersey GOP nominee Chris Christie, whose campaign had been the despair of its backers, won a 5-point victory over Jon Corzine, despite huge Democratic advantages in money and voter registration, two visits by Barack Obama and the presence on the ballot of a third-party candidate who took votes away from Christie.
Maine has gone Democratic in five straight presidential elections. Yet voters overturned a gay-marriage state law, 53-47, the 31st straight victory for traditionalists. This replicates California's rejection of gay marriage, 52-48, in a year Obama carried the state by 24 points and 3 million votes. Democrats see green shoots in the capture of New York's 23rd congressional district, which has been Republican since Ulysses Grant. Yet, even here, the conservative showing was impressive.
GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava is a fellow traveler of the Albany crowd of Gov. David Paterson. She is pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro "card-check" -- a euphemism for eliminating the secret ballot for workers deciding on whether they want a union.
Disgusted with a choice between liberals, the Conservative Party put up Douglas Hoffman. While he did not live in the district, his views did reflect the district's views.
Hoffman was going nowhere, however, until the Tea Party and town-hall activists and Club for Growth sent contributions and troops. Hoffman got ignition when Sarah Palin joined Fred Thompson in endorsing him. He began a rapid ascent from last to first, dumping Dede into third place. When Dede fell to 20 percent, the weekend before the election, she dropped out and endorsed Democrat Bill Owens, who won.
Nevertheless, Hoffman had come, in a month, from nowhere to knock a liberal Republican out of the lead and out of the race and out of the party, and closed to within two points of taking the seat.
The good news for the GOP is that, despite the unpopularity of their brand name -- Republican identification is down to 20 percent -- this is no longer the impediment it was in 2006 or 2008. The 40 percent who call themselves conservative will rally with energy and enthusiasm to Republicans willing to go to their capital, be it Trenton, Richmond or D.C., to battle Big Government.
As for the Democrats, their problems are not easily soluble, in the short term.
In 2006, the war in Iraq cost Republicans the Congress. Now, Iraq, like Afghanistan, is Obama's war. In 2008, the financial collapse on George W. Bush's watch enabled Obama to retake the lead that Sarah Palin's nomination had given to John McCain. Now, the economy is Obama's albatross and his party's responsibility.
Going into 2008, 27 percent of Americans approved of Bush. Eighty percent thought the country was headed in the wrong direction. Over 90 percent thought the economy was bad or poor.
If we can't win with those numbers, said James Carville, we ought to go into a new line of work. Obama won, but only because of those appalling numbers. In every state except Missouri where Bush's approval was above 35 percent, McCain carried the state.
In 2010, Obama will not have George W. Bush to kick around anymore and Republicans will not have "Bush's war" or "the Bush economy" to defend.
If Americans think the country is still on the wrong course, as most now do, and the economy is still dismal, as most now do, the only way to protest will be to vote against the party that controls Congress and the White House.
Despite all the media mockery of the "Birthers," "Truthers," Tea Party and town-hall "Nazis," it is the populist-conservative center-right that is not only on fire but came out to vote in 2009. Young voters and African-Americans who came out in record number in 2008 stayed home in 2009. What will cause them to rally to endangered Democrats in 2010, after they have endured another year of what they are enduring now?
After the election defeats, Obama flew to Madison, Wis., on the first anniversary of his victory, to remind Americans what a terrible hand he had been dealt. We had, said Obama, a "financial crisis that threatened to plunge our economy into a Great Depression. We had record deficits, two wars, frayed alliances around the world."
Since then, the financial crisis has eased. But millions more are now unemployed. And deficits are now three times as large as Bush's largest. And America's prospects in those two wars are more grim than a year ago. And the Middle East peace process is moribund, and there is the threat of a new war with Iran. What has the outreach to Chavez, Castro and the Ayatollah produced?
President Obama is today the victim of a disillusionment caused by the excessive hopes and expectations that were raised by candidate Obama.
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| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | November 10 2009 |