Title says it all.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154

Joe Gwinn

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
Title says it all.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154

Joe Gwinn

Nope, they WILL wait-out Bush. As soon as the left brings down the right,
they WILL cut and run. Surrender is the left's battle cry! Surrender to
terrorism, surrender to illegal immigration, surrender to abortion,
surrender to immorality, surrender to homosexuality, surrender to socialism,
surrender to welfare, surrender to stupidity...

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 08:33:38 -0500, Joseph Gwinn
wrote:

Title says it all.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154

Joe Gwinn


'The Last Helicopter'
Mideast dictators try to "wait Bush out." They may be miscalculating.

BY AMIR TAHERI
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Hassan Abbasi has a dream--a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy
skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of
the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of
Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr.
Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the
Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according
to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.

For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of
Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed)
officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the
stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional
policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the
whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional
allies.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could
be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It
was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald
Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian
desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers.
Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines
murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first
President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq,
with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's
generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to
fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's
helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16
American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration,"
a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a
brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American
Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there
will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House.
But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican,
will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex
situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in
Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S.
will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new
Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of
civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that
clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist
camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief
moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while
Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future
president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's
predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also notes that Iran has just "reached the
Mediterranean" thanks to its strong presence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon
and the Palestinian territories. He used that message to convince
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to adopt a defiant position vis-à-vis
the U.N. investigation of the murder of Rafiq Hariri, a former prime
minister of Lebanon. His argument was that once Mr. Bush is gone, the
U.N., too, will revert to its traditional lethargy. "They can pass
resolutions until they are blue in the face," Mr. Ahmadinejad told a
gathering of Hezbollah, Hamas and other radical Arab leaders in Tehran
last month.

According to sources in Tehran and Damascus, Mr. Assad had pondered
the option of "doing a Gadhafi" by toning down his regime's
anti-American posture. Since last February, however, he has revived
Syria's militant rhetoric and dismissed those who advocated a
rapprochement with Washington. Iran has rewarded him with a set of
cut-price oil, soft loans and grants totaling $1.2 billion. In
response Syria has increased its support for terrorists going to fight
in Iraq and revived its network of agents in Lebanon, in a bid to
frustrate that country's democratic ambitions.

It is not only in Tehran and Damascus that the game of "waiting Bush
out" is played with determination. In recent visits to several
regional capitals, this writer was struck by the popularity of this
new game from Islamabad to Rabat. The general assumption is that Mr.
Bush's plan to help democratize the heartland of Islam is fading under
an avalanche of partisan attacks inside the U.S. The effect of this
assumption can be witnessed everywhere.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf has shelved his plan, forged under
pressure from Washington, to foster a popular front to fight terrorism
by lifting restrictions against the country's major political parties
and allowing their exiled leaders to return. There is every indication
that next year's elections will be choreographed to prevent the
emergence of an effective opposition. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai,
arguably the most pro-American leader in the region, is cautiously
shaping his post-Bush strategy by courting Tehran and playing the
Pushtun ethnic card against his rivals.

In Turkey, the "moderate" Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan
is slowly but surely putting the democratization process into reverse
gear. With the post-Bush era in mind, Mr. Erdogan has started a purge
of the judiciary and a transfer of religious endowments to sections of
the private sector controlled by his party's supporters. There are
fears that next year's general election would not take place on a
level playing field.

Even in Iraq the sentiment that the U.S. will not remain as committed
as it has been under Mr. Bush is producing strange results. While
Shiite politicians are rushing to Tehran to seek a reinsurance policy,
some Sunni leaders are having second thoughts about their decision to
join the democratization process. "What happens after Bush?" demands
Salih al-Mutlak, a rising star of Iraqi Sunni leaders. The Iraqi Kurds
have clearly decided to slow down all measures that would bind them
closer to the Iraqi state. Again, they claim that they have to "take
precautions in case the Americans run away."

There are more signs that the initial excitement created by Mr. Bush's
democratization project may be on the wane. Saudi Arabia has put its
national dialogue program on hold and has decided to focus on economic
rather than political reform. In Bahrain, too, the political reform
machine has been put into rear-gear, while in Qatar all talk of a new
democratic constitution to set up a constitutional monarchy has
subsided. In Jordan the security services are making a spectacular
comeback, putting an end to a brief moment of hopes for reform. As for
Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has decided to indefinitely postpone local
elections, a clear sign that the Bush-inspired scenario is in trouble.
Tunisia and Morocco, too, have joined the game by stopping
much-advertised reform projects while Islamist radicals are regrouping
and testing the waters at all levels.

But how valid is the assumption that Mr. Bush is an aberration and
that his successor will "run away"? It was to find answers that this
writer spent several days in the U.S., especially Washington and New
York, meeting ordinary Americans and senior leaders, including
potential presidential candidates from both parties. While Mr. Bush's
approval ratings, now in free fall, and the increasingly bitter
American debate on Iraq may lend some credence to the "helicopter"
theory, I found no evidence that anyone in the American leadership
elite supported a cut-and-run strategy.

The reason was that almost all realized that the 9/11 attacks have
changed the way most Americans see the world and their own place in
it. Running away from Saigon, the Iranian desert, Beirut, Safwan and
Mogadishu was not hard to sell to the average American, because he was
sure that the story would end there; the enemies left behind would not
pursue their campaign within the U.S. itself. The enemies that America
is now facing in the jihadist archipelago, however, are dedicated to
the destruction of the U.S. as the world knows it today.

Those who have based their strategy on waiting Mr. Bush out may find
to their cost that they have, once again, misread not only American
politics but the realities of a world far more complex than it was
even a decade ago. Mr. Bush may be a uniquely decisive, some might say
reckless, leader. But a visitor to the U.S. soon finds out that he
represents the American mood much more than the polls suggest.

Mr. Taheri is author of "L'Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes" (Editions
Complexe, 2002).


"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

On Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:25:52 GMT, "Tom Gardner"
wrote:


"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
Title says it all.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154

Joe Gwinn

Nope, they WILL wait-out Bush. As soon as the left brings down the right,
they WILL cut and run. Surrender is the left's battle cry! Surrender to
terrorism, surrender to illegal immigration, surrender to abortion,
surrender to immorality, surrender to homosexuality, surrender to socialism,
surrender to welfare, surrender to stupidity...

"Liberalism: The philosophy of the stupid"

Gunner



"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them;
the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
- Proverbs 22:3

Okay, so I'm late and catching up, but "Tom Gardner"
wrote on Wed, 29 Mar 2006 15:25:52 GMT in
rec.crafts.metalworking :

"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
Title says it all.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154

Joe Gwinn

Nope, they WILL wait-out Bush. As soon as the left brings down the right,
they WILL cut and run. Surrender is the left's battle cry! Surrender to
terrorism, surrender to illegal immigration, surrender to abortion,
surrender to immorality, surrender to homosexuality, surrender to socialism,
surrender to welfare, surrender to stupidity...

Then we can round them up and surrender them to the buzzards. Or the
worms. They'll like it, being the victims and all...


pyotr



--
pyotr filipivich
Denial is not a river in Egypt, "Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme,
a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the
denying person knows the truth on some level." LTC Grossman.