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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (23665)	1/9/2004 10:26:28 PM
From: gamesmistress	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793717

The campaign was born on the Blog, but it can’t sustain itself there. Dean is getting the endorsements, but apparently he doesn't wear well in person with some of the non-blogging voters. Hmmm.

To: LindyBill who wrote (23665)	1/9/2004 10:29:51 PM
From: gamesmistress	Respond to of 793717

Speaking of Churchill, from Hugh Hewitt: Winston Churchill on the Reconstruction of Iraq: Howard Dean's stubborn insistence that the capture of Saddam has not made America safer continues to plague him and rightfully so. If you are a member of the "you can't chew gum and walk at the same time" school of foreign policy, as Dean is, voters will wonder how you intend to manage the complexities of the international stage. If a candidate doesn't think it is possible to wage war in Iraq and hunt Osama at the same time, then surely they will have a very cramped vision of what the U.S. can and thus should seek to accomplish. Limited minds see limited possibilities. Charles Krauthammer develops this point at length in today's column "Why We Are Safer," and there is no serious rebuttal to the argument. Here is just one of many irrefutable insights from the piece: "The other part of the statement -- we cannot be safe because we are still threatened by terrorism-- is even more telling. It rests on the wider notion, shared not just by Dean but by many Democrats, that so long as al Qaeda is active, we are never any safer. This rests on the remarkable assumption that we have a single enemy in the world, al Qaeda, and that it alone defines 'safety.'" "It is hard to believe that serious people can have so absurdly narrow a vision of American national security. The fact is that we have other enemies in the world." Of course we do, which is why Dean's silliness is what I have been calling "self-evident." Dean defenders call the show and rant that it isn't "self-evident," and I suppose it isn't --to third graders. But it is to a sizable majority of voters, which is why a Dean nomination is doomed. His naivete will strike a large majority of Americans as dangerous. But it isn't just Dean who is rejecting the complexity of the world and thereby disqualifying himself from the presidency. In fact all of the Democratic candidates have attacked the post-war reconstruction of Iraq as deeply flawed, thus revealing either deep dishonesty or dangerous naivete about the complexity of rebuilding a country liberated from totalitarian rule. In this regard, it is useful to study an August 27, 1944 message that Winston Churchill delivered to the newly liberated people of Italy on how to judge the new regime that would follow the fall of fascism. Churchill posed seven questions that needed to be answered about any particular government that followed. He didn't specify the shape of the government -he was too wise to predict such a thing in the middle of a vast war which continued even then within Italy and far beyond it, not unlike the situation in Iraq today. Rather, Churchill laid down the principles on which to judge the reconstruction effort that was underway and which would take years. Here is Martin Gilbert's account of Churchill's outline: "He also wrote out a message to the Italian people, setting out what he called 'one or two quite simple, practical tests,' by which one could answer the question 'What is freedom?' There were in fact seven questions, which were 'the title deeds on which a new Italy could be founded.' The questions were: - Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day? - Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are the constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent? - Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free of all association with particular political parties? - Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice? - Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government officials? - Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted? - Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and trying to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single Party like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist Parties, will tap him o the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment? " Churchill didn't offer timetables or blueprints or a sudden and certain end to the killing or even a regular power supply. What he detailed was a guarantee of a lasting freedom, the benefits of which continue to animate Italy to this day. It was just one of many incredibly complex tasks --reconstruction had to occur throughout the shattered world, and it would not succeed where Stalin dispatched his forces first-- but Churchill knew they had to all be tackled at the same time and with the same vigor. He knew that every victory made the Allies safer, even as tens of thousands of them continued to loose their lives in combat, and he knew the advances in Italy and France made England safer even as the V-1s and V-2s took a terrible toll on London. Howard Dean and the other complexity-denying Democrats are just silly talking heads because they will not engage this complexity, hoping that America wants to pretend the world is as simple as we would wish it to be. But I don't think for a moment that, outside the feverish precincts of the Democratic primaries, this approach has a prayer. For our collective sakes, it had better not. [I can see Blair saying something like this. Wish Bush would.] hughhewitt.com