The Democrats' General Incompetence
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS | Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007 4:20 PM PT
Iraq: Democrats can't seem to handle America winning the war, having invested so much in losing. But why enlist as party spokesman a discredited — and disingenuous — general, whom they themselves used to attack?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, give the Democrats' radio address last weekend. That's beyond puzzling.
Back in 2004, during the investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison abuse flap, Pelosi and other prominent Democrats wanted to see Sanchez's head on a platter. Abu Ghraib was a big reason Sanchez was forced to retire.
Sanchez: Bush's McClellan.
Not too long ago, Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin was comparing U.S. troops to Nazis because of Abu Ghraib. Now Democrats want the highest-ranking general tainted by the episode to be their poster boy.
This month, Pelosi even appeared with Sanchez at a San Antonio fundraiser for a Texas Democratic congressman. Is the Texas native being groomed for a congressional run — or even to be the running mate of whoever wins the Democratic nomination for president next year?
Sanchez has called the Iraq War over which he presided "a nightmare with no end in sight," and has accused the president of failing to devise a victory strategy for it. But his real beef seems to be that the victory strategy entailed the removal of Gen. Sanchez.
In a widely read article in the Armed Forces Journal earlier this year, Army Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who served in both Iraq and Bosnia, seemed to have Sanchez in mind in criticizing the silence of top brass when things were going wrong in both Iraq and Vietnam (though he made no mention of Sanchez by name).
"If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results," Yingling contended. "Failing to visualize future battlefields represents a lapse in professional competence, but seeing those fields clearly and saying nothing is an even more serious lapse in professional character."
Since his retirement last year, Sanchez has been saying that for years he believed the forces under him had not been given the resources needed for success, but that as a member of the armed forces he could not say so.
Members of Congress say that during his command they asked Sanchez repeatedly if he needed more forces, and Sanchez's answer was always no. According to Sen. Lindsey Graham, "He never said any of these things when it could have made a difference."
And while Sanchez's silence while in uniform hurt our cause in the global war on terror, his outspokenness as a civilian is even more counterproductive.
In his radio address, he praised the Democrats' dead-on-arrival $50 billion war funding bill demanding a withdrawal from Iraq. It "makes the proper preparation of our deploying troops a priority and requires the type of shift in their mission that will allow their numbers to be reduced substantially."
It's doubtful Sanchez's successful successor, Gen. David Petraeus, would agree.
Sanchez also claims it "puts America on the path to regaining our moral authority by requiring all government employees to abide by the Army Field Manual on interrogations, which is in compliance with the Geneva Conventions."
That's a shot at the CIA terrorist interrogation program, which has foiled attacks and undeniably saved scores of American lives.
The parallel in President Bush's removal of Sanchez to Abraham Lincoln's firing of the ineffective Gen. George McClellan during the Civil War is remarkable. McClellan soon ran against Lincoln as the Democratic presidential nominee and lost.
In embracing an incompetent, less-than-straightforward general, the Democrats may once again prove their abilities at losing. |
