WANTED..AN AMERICAN CHURCHILL ASAP! EXCELLENT READ ON IRAQ REPORT!

Thursday, December 14, 2006
Wanted - An American Churchill
Posted by Dean Barnett 5:50 PM
It’s been over a week now since the Iraq Study Group
released its consensus findings. It is an indication of how
much faster things move today than in the past that has
taken the Baker Commission a mere eight days to find
history’s ashbin. It took Marxism a century to reap a
similar destiny.

So what happened? Throughout the election season,
anxious Democrats panted that they couldn’t venture
any policy prescriptions regarding Iraq because they
had to wait to hear what the vaunted Study Group said
first. The intimation was that regardless of what tune
Jim Baker and his cohorts called out, the Democrats
would eagerly dance a jig to it.
But even in Democratic precincts, the Report, once
read, was dead on arrival. While the country’s liberals
did a collective swoon over the Report’s admission that
things aren’t going swimmingly in Iraq, they were no
more eager to implement the Committee’s 79 keys to
success than their Republican counterparts.

Aah, the Republicans. On the conservative grassroots
scene, the return of James Baker to prominence was
greeted with the kind of enthusiasm last seen when
the “The Conservative Soul” thudded into bookstores
across the land. But even given the right’s well-founded
suspicions of the erstwhile Bush family consigliere, the
Study Group’s Report was a surprisingly dreadful effort.

Considering the genesis of the study group, there’s a
touch of irony concerning the Report’s ultimate nature.
Representative Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia,
asked Jim Baker to form a commission so that “fresh
eyes” might be brought to the Iraq struggle. Set aside
for the moment that one could scarcely imagine a group
of less-fresh eyes than those belonging to a pride of
wizened, septuagenarian, one-time Beltway lions.

Wolf sought boldness, but obviously he went looking
for boldness in all the wrong places.What made the
Baker Group’s Report so supremely pathetic was the
tepid nature of its prescriptions. In an era that cries
out for boldness and leadership, the Baker bunch
offered compromise and defeatism.

FOR ALL HIS TIME IN AMERICA’S CORRIDORS
OF POWER, James Baker has never understood his
country. America and Americans aspire to greatness.
This country is full of people and the descendants of
people who came to America seeking better lives.
They didn’t get on the boat so they might pursue
mediocrity; they wanted more, a lot more.

An ambitious and striving nature is an integral part
of our national DNA. That’s what makes the situation
in Iraq at the moment so intolerable for most of the
country. Nearly 3,000 troops have sacrificed their
lives there, and yet the nature of the mission for
most of the country is opaque. It’s not the sacrifice
itself that’s unbearable; it’s the seeming pointless-
ness of it.

It’s interesting that the sacrifices don’t rankle the
members of the military and their families the same
way they do the rest of the country. The military
understands the ambitious nature of the Iraqi under-
taking. But the military is a self-selecting group of our
most ambitious and patriotic citizens who believe in
America’s greatness with a fervor that the typical
citizen doesn’t match. It’s understandable that their
perception of the fight would be different from others’.

I think it’s fair to ask, why the gap? And I think it’s
fair to point to the White House as the cause. The
American people have never shrunk from a challenge
when they’ve understood the necessity of taking it on.
That too is one of the characteristics of our country’s
genetic code. By putting so much emphasis on Iraq
while never putting the battle for Iraq in the context
of the bigger global struggle that’s afoot, the adminis-
tration has caused the public to view the Iraq War as
an exercise in nation building on behalf of a bunch of
people who really don’t want us to build them a nation.

At some point, I think President Bush flinched and lost
faith in the American people. I think he thought if he
explained the scope of the struggle ahead and the sacri-
fices that are going to be necessary to prevail, the
American people would have blanched and turned to a
different leader, perhaps even one as lame as John Kerry.

The good news for the president, and the good news for
all the guys and gals jockeying for position in the 2008
presidential race, is that the American people have never
wanted a path to mediocrity. Such a thing may knock ‘em
dead in Europe, but Americans want more. None of those
Goldman Sachs people who are in the news this week for
pulling down eight figures in 2006 have ever advocated
for the 35 hour work week. And while they make more
money than the rest of us, their ambition and their drive
are American through-and-through.

Today and for the foreseeable future, America will face
great challenges. The forces of darkness are gathering,
this week literally as they’ve convened a Holocaust denial
conference. They can only be defeated by force. Prevailing
will require willpower. And it will have to be a communal
effort; the upcoming struggle will be of such a scale that it’s
likely that every American household will feel its impact.

So let the small-minded James Baker-types offer their 79
point plans for national mediocrity. Let the entertainment
community sing their tired hymns about peace, under-
standing and how George W. Bush is worse than Hitler.
Let the academics bicker as they prepare their never-to-
be-read monographs, and let the newspapers look to
today’s opinion polls as if they’re as definitive as
tomorrow’s history books.

The great majority of the American people pine for a path
back to greatness. The first politician who honestly
confronts our problems and illuminates that path will be
the American Churchill. Hopefully it will be President
Bush since time’s a-wastin’, but the title is currently up
for grabs. Send in your comments and emails.

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