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September 7, 2006
''Bush And Lincoln'' - Echoes Of The Past In Today's Strategic Mistakes
Topics: War on Terror... It's unfortunate that so many Americans fail to understand that the threat of losing millions of Americans is real.Newt Gingrich takes to task the Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont bloc of "peace at any cost" Democrats for their ignorance and the Bush Administration for their failure to excerpt the necessary will to win against the forces of Islamofascism in his must-read piece at Opinion Journal:
[...] Five years have passed since the horrific attack on our American homeland, and, still, there is one serious, undeniable fact we have yet to confront: We are, today, not where we wanted to be and nowhere near where we need to be.Continue reading "Bush and Lincoln" - Echoes of the past in today's strategic mistakes.The first and greatest lesson of the last five years parallels what Lincoln came to understand. The dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory will be substantially harder than we had expected in the early days after the initial attack. Despite how painful it would prove to be, Lincoln chose the road to victory. President Bush today finds himself in precisely the same dilemma Lincoln faced 144 years ago. With American survival at stake, he also must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.
(1) They do not define the scale of the emerging World War III, between the West and the forces of militant Islam, and so they do not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be. (2) They do not define victory in this larger war as our goal, and so the energy, resources and intensity needed to win cannot be mobilized. (3) They do not establish clear metrics of achievement and then replace leaders, bureaucrats and bureaucracies as needed to achieve those goals.
To be sure, Mr. Bush understands that we cannot ignore our enemies; they are real. He knows that an enemy who believes in religiously sanctioned suicide-bombing is an enemy who, with a nuclear or biological weapon, is a mortal threat to our survival as a free country. The analysis Mr. Bush offers the nation--before the Joint Session on Sept. 20, 2001, in his 2002 State of the Union, in his 2005 Second Inaugural--is consistently correct. On each occasion, he outlines the threat, the moral nature of the conflict and the absolute requirement for victory.
Unfortunately, the great bureaucracies Mr. Bush presides over (but does not run) have either not read his speeches or do not believe in his analysis. The result has been a national security performance gap that we must confront if we are to succeed in winning this rising World War III.
Gingrich's message is clear and carries both good and bad news that needs to be heard. The good news is, as Gingrich points out, no enemy can stand against a determined American people. The hard news is that first we must commit to victory, and that these steps are the first on a long and difficult road to victory, and are absolutely necessary to win the future.
However, the very bad news that Gingrich avoids explicitly saying is that if we don't do these things, many or most of us are at a great risk of dying or being enslaved under Islamic rule.
Hat tip - Rusty Shackleford at Jawa Report, who believes that were it not for his personal failings and the fact that everyone in the media hates him, Newt Gingrich would be a great candidate for President. I agree, but then he has those personal failings and everyone in the media hates him!!!
Posted by Richard at September 7, 2006 2:05 PM
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