Liberals Not Realistic About Iraq

In 1985, President Reagan dared the Democrats to send him a bill raising taxes. "Go ahead, make my day" he told them. The line, borrowed from the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact, drove the liberals crazy. They pounced on Reagan, saying he couldn't tell the difference between movies and real life. He was a former actor, after all, and was getting on in years. Senility must've set in already, they said. But who is it who tends to get their fantasies mixed up with reality?

These days, a lot of Americans get their news from Jon Stewart's Daily Show. They confuse the Saturday Night Live version of George W. Bush with the real thing. They believe that the war in Iraq cannot be won because Iraqi citizens will always prefer their fellow Middle Eastern Muslims to American soldiers - even if those fellow Muslims are Al Qaeda maniacs.

First things first: it's a bad idea to get your news from Comedy Central. That one's really self-evident, isn't it? You wouldn't get your comedy from the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, would you? No matter. Stewart has become one of the most influential people in America by pushing his half-baked leftist political views.

Meanwhile, SNL has long peddled the notion that President Bush is a moron. That's fine enough in itself; we expect comedians to exaggerate personality aspects of famous people for comic effect, and Bush's sometimes garbled syntax makes him easy to caricature. But we shouldn't confuse the caricature with the real thing. Bush has an MBA from Harvard University , something stupid people don't normally earn. And yet, what did John Kerry (whose grades at Yale were worse than Bush's) exclaim when the 2004 election results started pouring in? "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot!"

Kerry, like many of us, internalized the caricature.

The worst example of belief in unreality, though, may be Iraq . Many liberals consider themselves "realists" when it comes to the war there, but their views are anything but realistic. In their cartoonish version of the war, Iraqi citizens watch as Al Qaeda lunatics blow up mosques, plant bombs in crowded markets & kill innocent civilians, and murder schoolchildren... and yet side with them rather than with the Americans, because we are foreigners and infidels.

Sorry, but that's too simplistic. Yes, the fact that America is an occupying force causes problems. And most Iraqis would like us to leave... but not until they can take care of themselves.

The proof of that has become evident in recent weeks. The "troop surge" has demonstrated U.S. resolve, and tribal leaders across the country have begun to ally themselves with us. The people there are informing on the extremists, and the tide of war has swung our way - perhaps decisively this time. And it's all because the Iraqi people are real people, after all, not cartoons. They're the ones who have been living with the car bombers & head hackers, and they've decided that they prefer us to them.

Liberals here are free to disagree with that assessment, and to scream that "Bush is the real terrorist!" all they want. But in the real world, we're the ones winning the hearts and minds of the people who know who the real terrorists are.