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Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Friday, October 31, 2003
15:13 - What if you threw a bomb party and nobody came?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44857-2003Oct30.html

(top) link
Everybody's linking to Charles Krauthammer today, and so I'll jump on the bandwagon, if only because it's a pretty good summation of what a lot of one-off essays around the blogosphere have been piecing together, bit by bit, for months now. It's sort of a status report, a checkpoint on what those of us who have been paying attention have known from the start would be a long, bitter trudge, rather than an effortless magical transformation. (The only difference being that we evidently decided that just because something is hard doesn't make it not worthwhile.)

It's a short column, and I could nearly quote the whole thing. But I won't.

Our enemies in Iraq have learned these lessons well. The car bomb of Oct. 12 was aimed at the Baghdad Hotel, housing not just large numbers of Americans but much of the provisional Iraqi government. It would have been the equivalent of the two Beirut bombings in one: a psychologically crushing massacre of Americans -- which would have sparked immediate debate at home about withdrawal -- and the instantaneous destruction of much of the pro-American government, a political decapitation that would have left very few Iraqis courageous enough to fill the vacuum.

The bomber failed. Most significantly, it was Iraqi police who assisted in shooting up the car at a relatively safe distance and thus preventing a catastrophe. The car bomb campaign has, however, continued with singular ferocity since. The war in Iraq now consists of a race: The United States is racing to build up Iraqi police and armed forces capable of taking over the country's security -- before the Saddam loyalists and their jihadist allies can produce that single, Beirut-like car bomb that so discourages Americans (and Iraqis) that we withdraw in disarray.

Who wins the race? If this president remains in power, the likelihood is that we do.


Maybe this is why suddenly a whole bunch of liberal Democrats, politicians and bloggers alike, are coming out of the woodwork and endorsing Bush. Zell Miller. Roger Simon. A bunch of others. (Read the post for some great one-liners and links to the original sources.) Suddenly people are realizing what even this Democratic Underground seething fury-boy (passed on by Andrew Sullivan) has suddenly evidently come to realize:

regardless of right or wrong.
we dont want to be associated with supporting the killing of our own troops.
that would be political suicide… we dont want to be associated with “supporting” Iraqi resistance.
something like that would make us (dems, libs, progs, whoever) look terrible and just give the opposition fuel.

And who knows-- maybe even some of them think that supporting terrorists against our own troops is wrong for other reasons than merely "political suicide". I mean, hey, I don't expect miracles-- there's a long way to go on the ol' rehabilitation trail for some of these people. But it's a positive first step, as they say.

A couple of days ago, there was the oddest feeling, among my friends and in my inbox, that there was a chill wind a-blowin'... that people were suddenly digging in, taking sides, and lashing out at each other in a cross-spectrum all-out free-for-all, tearing apart old friendships and turning implicit trust into bitter disappointment and betrayal. I watched this happen in various LiveJournal comment pages, and I wondered if the witching hour of All Saints' was upon us-- if all the usually friendly and occasionally sarcastic back-and-forth over the past two years was finally about to give way to all-out ideological war.

Well, the situation seems to have been defused somewhat... but from the look of these links, the Left is sitting on top of a big frickin' juicer. There's this enormous sharp wedge being driven right up into the middle of the movement, and we're already seeing everybody to the right of a certain line start to peel off and join the world of the practical, gritting their teeth if necessary, but knowing that if forced to choose between supporting the War on Terror and lying down with people who shriek "Zionazis!" if you so much as breathe on them wrong, there are some things that are worse than war.

After all, if even Democrats are now saying things like this:

"I remember the day, and it wasn't so long ago, that liberals like me were attacking our government for supporting dictators. Now these new "liberals," or whatever they want to call themselves, attack our government for taking down dictators. "

... then they'll have to be quicker on the draw to catch up with Lileks, but better late than never.


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