You may be familiar with "battered wife syndrome" where a woman can become convinced that the beatings she suffers at her husband's hands are her fault, that she brought them on herself.
Most liberals, too, suffer from a form of this malady. They see the United States, the most free, most selfless country in the world as the source of all the evil in the world. Indeed, we foster evil in other countries.
We see a dangerous example of this played out by retired Air Force Gen. Merrill McPeak. McPeak is Senator Barack Obama's most senior military advisor.
According to today's Washington Times,
Sen. Barack Obama's most senior military adviser says President Bush is to blame for Iran's bad behavior.
How does McPeak explain this? He says Iran, the world's biggest supporter of terrorism, doesn't like al Qaeda and didn't like the Taliban in Afghanistan. But President Bush's "tough talk" and reference to Iran as a part of the "axis of evil" after 911 somehow pushed this peace-loving country to hate us.
According to the article, McPeak supports Obama's idea of "talking to" the Iranians to see if we have "common ground."
Frankly, if we have any "common ground" with this brutal, oppressive, belligerent, bloodthirsty regime, we'd better get examine our own hearts and get ourselves right!
And "talking to" hostile nations like Iran tends to get us what Neville Chamberlain got when he "talked to" Herr Hitler: a worthless piece of paper that was figuratively burned up in the fires of war less than a year later. Appeasement does not work.
For the moment, wisdom speaks from the White House:
National security officials note that Iran's rogue behavior long predates Mr. Bush's speech. In June 2001, the Justice Department indicted 13 members of a pro-Iranian group, Saudi Hezbollah, for carrying out the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 American service members in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Hezbollah, a terrorist group, held regular meetings in Iran, the FBI said.
"With all due respect to General McPeak, what drives the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran apart — and has since 1979 — is the unwavering antipathy of the regime in Tehran towards the United States, its ally Israel, and freedom-loving, non-Islamist nations more generally," said Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon policy-maker in the Reagan administration who heads the Center for Security Policy.
Added Mr. Gaffney: "It is not simply naive, it is reckless to ignore serial statements by the mullahs and their front man, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, about a world without America, their goons parading in Iranian cities shouting 'Death to America,' their active efforts to kill and maim Americans and Iraqis in the hope of defeating the United States in Iraq, and rendering the latter an oil-rich satellite and new safe-haven for Iranian-backed terror, and accumulating evidence that Iran's Hezbollah proxies and their intelligence agents are developing cells capable of unleashing deadly violence here as well as elsewhere.
I was still in the Air Force when Gen. McPeak was Commander in Chief of the Air Force. I didn't care much for him, and no one I knew cared much for him, either.
Most military people have a good sense for detecting good qualities in their leaders, and they are also pretty reliable at sniffing out the ones that through stupidity or self-interest tend to get people killed in wartime.
This is, of course, anecdotal and intangible evidence, at best. But it does go along with this incredibly irresponsible position held by Gen. McPeak.
I haven't been a fan of John McCain since he began cultivating his liberal streak in the late 1990s. But he is infinitely preferable to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for president.
I used to think Hillary Clinton was more dangerous than Barack Obama. Given what I've seen in the past few days from Obama's church, and now this on the world stage, I'm quickly becoming convinced that he may be the most dangerous choice of all.
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