focal point

I understand Linda’s rage at the now-deservedly-dead Muslim fiends who murdered the pregnant Israeli mother and her four daughters yesterday in Gaza. Indeed there is a part of me that is sorry the two terrorists were not gut-shot and left to die slowly in screaming agony, for it is obvious the lesson of maximum suffering is the only kind of lesson these people understand. Which is of course why I am so angry over the fact that – thanks to an absolute failure of leadership – we have now frittered away our advantages at Fallujah so thoroughly, the mainstream media is reporting that the key terrorist leaders, smug at having shamed the “Great Satan” once again, have withdrawn from the city and escaped through the strong but nevertheless undermanned Marine blockade. There is a staggering quantity of payback coming due in Fallujah, Big Time, and I can only hope the Marines will yet have adequate opportunity to mete it out as deserved.

Meanwhile, again thanks to National Review Online, here is more utterly damning analysis of what has gone wrong in Iraq and what might yet be done to salvage the situation. However, before I type out these hyperlinks, I think it needs to be stressed that the Charley Foxtrot in Iraq is all at the level of the civilian administrator and above – that the performance of the troops and their commanders is as fine as anything ever witnessed in modern warfare and may in some instances be without peer. I say this because at least one person with whom I regularly exchange e-mails mistakenly believed I was criticizing the military effort – something I most assuredly have not done (and would not think of doing) simply because I am not there on the ground in Iraq, have no access to the operations order and its intelligence annex, and in any case have no current knowledge of Army or Marine tactical doctrine. The small-unit tactics with which I am familiar are those of another era: the era of the U.S. Rifle Caliber .30 M-1, the Browning Automatic Rifle and the .45ACP caliber M1911A1 Colt, with the 12-gauge M1897 Winchester trench gun as the favored close-quarters weapon. Moreover I am told on good authority that a five-man fire team today has many times more firepower than the eleven-man infantry squad of my youth, which in its heyday was itself considered more formidable than any comparable formation on earth. In any case, my point here is that – especially since I was once a soldier myself – I would not presume to criticize the brave and long-suffering people who are actually doing the fighting or leading the fighters. If I have given any impression to the contrary, I can only apologize and take full blame for not expressing myself with sufficient clarity. That said, here are the NRO links: The first, by Michael Rubin, adds important details to the emerging portrait of a State Department that is (once again) so out of control it is brazenly sabotaging the President’s intent. The second, from David Frum’s blog, adds additional dimensions to our understanding of the crisis. Bottom line, President Bush may well have been hornswoggled by his advisors, quite possibly by Secretary of State Colin Powell himself.

One more point before I shut this machine off and go to bed: another frequent e-mail correspondent wrote to me yesterday morning that she thought I had given up on Iraq – that I had concluded our cause there was lost. This is surely not true, and I carefully re-read everything I posted here yesterday to see if I could find the source of her misconception. I could not, but at the same time I could see my words left an overall impression of angry negativity, and again I have to accept the fault is mine for not making it clear I believe we can still prevail in Iraq – that indeed I am certain we dare not fail, lest our failure drag all of the world into darkness. That my correspondent thought I believed otherwise was all the more worrisome because she is such a perceptive and talented writer. She is certainly not one of the knee-jerk, Bush-can-do-no-wrong cheerleaders who decry any criticism of the President as High Treason and – by their attempts to censor the flow of ideas – are the very people who contribute most to the unspeakable possibility we might fail. What we need now is precisely the conservative criticism the cheer-leaders would silence. To paraphrase the old-time Southern radio preachers of my youth, it is the duty of all of us “out here in Internet-land” to respond accordingly -- even if that response is merely e-mailing hyperlinks to one another with a “you gotta read this” memo attached. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of American liberty and Western Civilization.