Asian Conservatives

You just can’t win with these BDS sufferers.

On the Middle East crisis, his double standard was in full display.

Bush said he remained an opponent of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which has been invaded by Israel. He found only the firing of rockets by Hamas unacceptable, but expressed no sympathy for the Palestinians who are suffering heavy Israeli bombardment with American-supplied weapons.

Bush told the news conference: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He did not say the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. He also said the Gazans have to stop smuggling arms. But he said nothing about the tons of arms we have supplied Israel.

As for the global economic meltdown, the president admitted he had to abandon his free-market principles and approve of massive government intervention in the economy. He said this switcheroo was required in order to save the free market system. The logic evoked the Vietnam era when we had to destroy a village in order to save it.

Come on, Helen. Of course the Palestinians have the right to defend themselves, but the fact remains that Hamas provoked Israel by lobbing rockets across the border, striking fear and killing innocent Jews in the border towns. Also, sending bomb-strapped crazies into crowded Israeli markets doesn’t sound like a defensive maneuver to me, either. Do you condone the horrible terrorist acts of Hamas?

I’m all for liberation, too, but are the people of Iraq truly free? Is there really a vibrant democracy there? And in Afghanistan, what of the ongoing war and instability there? It’s not enough just to believe in your own high-falutin’ rhetoric of freedom and democracy. It’s not enough just to say that there have been such accomplishments, such historic progress. There’s the not-so-little matter of the facts on the ground to consider, and the facts don’t really back him up, do they? And what Cheney does not consider is not just those facts but that his own policies — or, rather, Bush’s — have hindered progress in both Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as elsewhere, including in Iran, in North Korea, and with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). Even granting him that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do — which, in retrospect, I’m not about to do — what about what came after the invasion? So too in Afghanistan. What about what came after the overthrow of the Taliban, specifically the immediate turn to Iraq and the failure to go after al Qaeda with full determination? And then, what about the gross mismanagement of the war in Iraq, and how Iraq turned into a cesspool of terrorism and sectarianism?

So give it a rest. Iraq is much, much better without the psychotic tyrant Saddam Hussein. Absorb that fact. Learn to live with it. Bush and Cheney did the right thing.