The Enemy Without and Within

The Football Fans for Truth hit a home run:

In the war on terror, the West has its hands full challenging psychotic Islamism. Multinational forces battle remnant Taliban in Afghanistan while the United States, Britain and others try to mold a cohesive, functioning Iraqi society amidst constant terror by disaffected Sunnis and imported jihadists. While it can be fun to identify the buffoons who characterize all attempts to fight terror abroad as mere smokescreens for the Bush Reich, the undeserved attention on a Michael Moore, Al Gore or George Galloway tends to obscure the fact that there are true villains during this time, and they are men of consequence.

I nominate four.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero: After 9/11 and before London came Madrid. Hundreds massacred on Spain's rail lines, followed by a direct note of extortion from al Qaeda - get out of Iraq or we'll keep killing you. Zapatero, newly elected as prime minister in part because of his predecessor's shifty handling of the bombings, promptly supplicated himself to the Islamofascists. "Wars such as that which has occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate," Zapatero lectured. To be fair, Zapatero ran on a promise to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. Nonetheless, by promptly capitulating to terror (two months later, Spain was out of Iraq), Zapatero instituted protection payments as national policy and paved the way for 7/7 in London.

Kofi Annan: Not because of his duplicity during the U.N. resolution process or because of his scummy involvement in the Oil-for-Food program, but for his cowardly leadership in the early days of the Iraqi occupation, especially after the bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Approximateley 600 U.N. employees were stationed in Iraq before 2003 bombing of the U.N.'s Baghdad office, which killed 22 people, including the chief UN envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Did the U.N.'s flag still stand tall, uncowed by the brutal attack of a suicide bomber? Within a month, U.N. personnel staff totalled a few dozen. The U.N. turned tail and ran.

Ted Kennedy: His partisanship was so rank that it paved the way for the excesses of his party, from the drumbeat of "Bush lied" to Michael Moore sitting next to Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention to the entire Democratic leadership treating Abu Ghraib as akin to beheadings to Kennedy's colleague, Senator Dick Durbin, likening American forces' handling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the atrocities of Pol Pot.
Kennedy's calumnies are worth repeating:

* "This [the war] was made up in Texas, announced in January [2003] to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud."

* "The trumped up reasons for going to war have collapsed."

* "The President's war has been revealed as mindless, needless, senseless, and reckless."

* "Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management."

Kennedy's attacks, which are really no more than a reprise of his vicious excesses during the Vietnam war, underscore that at its heart, the American left is more comfortable waging war on its political opposition than on the likes of al Qaeda and Saddam.

John Kerry: He matters little now, but as the standardbearer for the opposition party in the last presidential election, Senator Kerry had an opportunity to offer a cohesive and responsible anti-terror and Iraq opposition policy. Instead, Kerry was either incoherent or destructive, communicating to Iraqis, the Middle East, and allies a significant fissure in American resolve. For example, prior to the war, Kerry voted for its authorization, wisely stating "We are facing a very different world today than we have ever faced before. September 11 changed a lot . . . We are living in an age where the dangers are different and they require a different response, different thinking, and different approaches than we have applied in the past."

Kerry added "It would be naive to the point of grave danger not to believe that, left to his own devices, Saddam Hussein will provoke, misjudge, or stumble into a future, more dangerous confrontation with the civilized world. He has as much as promised it. He has already created a stunning track record of miscalculation. He miscalculated an 8-year war with Iran. He miscalculated the invasion of Kuwait. He miscalculated America's responses to it. He miscalculated the result of setting oil rigs on fire. He miscalculated the impact of sending Scuds into Israel. He miscalculated his own military might. He miscalculated the Arab world's response to his plight. He miscalculated in attempting an assassination of a former President of the United States. And he is miscalculating now America's judgments about his miscalculations."

But in fighting off a challenge from the left during the Democratic primaries, Kerry disavowed his intelligent pre-war stand. In its place? A haphazard, desperate and shrill attack masquerading as policy. Kerry voted against funding the troops. He called the war he voted to authorize a "colossal error in judgment." He accused the president of lying to him personally. He degraded the particpation of other nations in Iraq as a "coalition of the bribed." Kerry's spokesman even called the Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi a "puppet," adding "and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips."

Kerry could have beaten Howard Dean, who ended up being a self-destructive paper tiger, by taking an approach that did not rupture bipartisanship on at least the basics, as opposed to the prosecution, of the war. Instead, Kerry panicked, and the effect (coupled with the contributions of his party's leadership) metastasized the malignancy in the Democratic party. Under the Kerry campaign, the Iraq war became no more than a tool to demolish the administration.

Zapatero and Annan demonstrated that swift kicks to the soft underbelly of a coalition member and the world's premier international organization would result in an immediate retreat. In short, if the terrorists struck, Spain and the U.N. would cave to their demands come hell, high water, greater goal, or the needs of the newly liberated Iraqi people.

Kennedy made the entire endeavor political, thereby ever-cheapening American efforts, which soon degenerated to the gutter. As Kennedy charged on the Senate floor after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we became Saddam. Last month, Senator Durbin informed us that we became worse than Saddam, an amlagamation of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot.

Kerry institutionalized Kennedy's defamation. What should have been rejected as bizarre and dangerous was embraced as mainstream.

All four men have done incalculable damage to the fight against terror, the efforts to stabilize Iraq and the image of the West in this fight against al Qaeda.