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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 pointlessness 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 undertaking. 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 administration 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 sacrifices 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, understanding 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.
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