Say Anything Blog

The Wall Street Journal:

North Korea’s apparent test Sunday of a nuclear device raises large questions with which the United States and the world must now grapple in the months and years ahead. But it may also have finally settled the question of how much time this and future Administrations will have available to deal with genuine foreign policy crises before they become merely political. The answer, it seems, can be measured in milliseconds.

Sen. Bob Menendez was not formerly known as an expert on nuclear proliferation or the politics of Northeast Asia. But there was the New Jersey Democrat on Monday delivering the view that Kim Jong-Il’s latest demonstration of aggressive intent “illustrates just how much the Bush Administration’s incompetence has endangered our nation.” Not to be outdone, Majority Leader-in-waiting Harry Reid insisted the Administration appoint a “senior official to conduct a full review of [its] failed North Korea policy.” Mr. Reid performed the rare feat of making Nancy Pelosi sound statesmanlike. Ms. Pelosi at least acknowledged that countries such as China might have played a negative role here.

As best as we can tell, the critique of the Bush Administration boils down to three points. First, as former Sen. Sam Nunn told the New York Times, “we started at the wrong end of the ‘axis of evil,’” his point being the Administration should have somehow “dealt with” Pyongyang first and Baghdad later.

Next, say the critics, the Bush Administration has wrongly tried to engage North Korea diplomatically through the “six party” framework, when only the bilateral talks demanded by Kim Jong-Il will do. “Bush aided and abetted the outsourcing of American jobs,” says Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean in one of his cheaper jabs, “and now he’s outsourced our diplomacy as well.” Finally, the President is said to have actually provoked North Korea into building a bomb by naming it to the axis of evil.

But since when does the Democratic Party, to say nothing of Dr. Dean, advocate U.S. unilateralism when unending multilateral approaches are available? And how does Mr. Nunn’s suggestion that President Bush should have dealt with North Korea first among the axis of evil square with the idea that it was terribly bad form to describe such an “axis” in the first place?

In fact, the more closely one examines these claims the more disingenuous they become.

Read the whole thing.

I really think Americans need to take a step back and consider what the Democrat “get Bush” political machine has done to our ability to develop and execute effective foreign policy.  It used to be true that partisan politics ended at the waters edge.  In the past our leaders have put aside their bickering and stood united when dealing with aggressive enemy nations like North Korea and Iraq, but that has now changed...and not for the better either.

I’m not talking about everyone in Washington D.C. just agreeing on one foreign policy strategy and not dissenting at all.  What I’m talking about is debating foreign policy decisions, but then everyone standing behind those decisions once they’ve been made.  Consider the war in Iraq, for instance.  We made the decision to invade that country over three years ago, yet to this very day we have Democrats in this country still questioning our reasons for invading.  Now I can understand if some people opposed our invasion of Iraq, but at some point shouldn’t the Democrats recognize that we are in Iraq now and that there’s no going back in time to change that?  Shouldn’t they recognize that the national debate should be about how to win the war in Iraq, not pull out as soon as possible so that the whole thing can be labeled a failure for partisan political purposes?

People on the left tend to get really upset when it is said that Democrats want us to lose in Iraq or fail in our foreign policy, yet from looking at the things they say in do I’m not sure how anyone can reach any other conclusion.  If they supported victory in Iraq they wouldn’t be telling Americans that we can’t win and that we should re-deploy our troops to Okinawa.

The Democrats want us to lose in Iraq.  They want our war there to be “another Vietnam,” because making our foreign policy look like a failure is good for their electoral chances.  It isn’t about sound foreign policy, it’s about beating the Republicans.

That’s it.  That’s the sum total of reasoning behind Democrat opposition to the war in Iraq, and that’s also why they’re so quick to blame North Korea’s situation on Bush.