Karl Rove’s W H deputy Peter Wehner disses critics in WSJ Editorial

[rodeodance]

Think Fast

Karl Rove’s White House deputy Peter Wehner takes conservatives William F. Buckley, George Will, and Francis Fukayama to task for expressing dissention from Bush’s “freedom agenda.”
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http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008182

AT WAR

The Wrong Time to Lose Our Nerve
A response to Messrs. Buckley, Will and Fukuyama.

BY PETER WEHNER
Tuesday, April 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

A small group of current and former conservatives--including George Will, William F. Buckley Jr. and Francis Fukuyama--have become harsh critics of the Iraq war. They have declared, or clearly implied, that it is a failure and the president's effort to promote liberty in the Middle East is dead--and dead for a perfectly predictable reason: Iraq, like the Arab Middle East more broadly, lacks the democratic culture that is necessary for freedom to take root. And so for cultural reasons, this effort was flawed from the outset. Or so the argument goes.

Let me address each of these charges in turn.

The war is lost. "Our mission has failed," Mr. Buckley wrote earlier this year. "It seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly," saith the man (Mr. Fukuyama) who once declared "the end of history" and in 1998 signed a letter to congressional leaders stating, "U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place."

These critics of the war are demonstrating a peculiar eagerness to declare certain matters settled. We certainly face difficulties in Iraq--but we have seen significant progress as well. In 2005, Iraq's economy continued to recover and grow. Access to clean water and sewage-treatment facilities has increased. The Sunnis are now invested in the political process, which was not previously the case. The Iraqi security forces are far stronger than they were. Our counterinsurgency strategy is more effective than in the past. Cities like Tal Afar, which insurgents once controlled, are now back in the hands of free Iraqis. Al Qaeda's grip has been broken in Mosul and disrupted in Baghdad. We now see fissures between Iraqis and foreign terrorists. And in the aftermath of the mosque bombing in Samarra, we saw the political and religious leadership in Iraq call for an end to violence instead of stoking civil war--and on the whole, the Iraqi security forces performed well. These achievements are authentic grounds for encouragement. And to ignore or dismiss all signs of progress in Iraq, to portray things in what Norman Podhoretz has called "the blackest possible light," disfigures reality.

[RufusEarl]

1. They just want concede,

when their on heavy hitters such as Buckley & George Will say it's done you can stick a fork in it. But the WH gang just want concede, even when they know they're wrong. We just have to win in November folks, our country depends on it.

[Blue_Tires]

2. yeesh

I'd expect nothing less from the WSJ...i guess that fantasyland vision of the iraqi invasion never goes out of style