History Is Unkind To Weakness

“I just voted and I’m very happy, ” Mukhalad Waleed, 35, said in the city of Ramadi, in Anbar. “We could not do the same thing the last time because of the insurgency.”

So the New York Times reported yesterday.

Saddam Hussein did not promote voting while “children played soccer on closed-off streets in a generally joyous atmosphere.” And under Saddam did “politicians anxiously [wait] to find out how many councils will change hands, and if widespread dissatisfaction voiced at religious parties will translate into fewer seats for them?” Not bloody likely. The Republican Party is exhausted by the Presidency of George W. Bush. His successes must not be jettisoned in weariness.

The joy of the man quoted voting without violence is a testament to the vision and will of President Bush and the Republican Party. The Democratic Party voted for the war in Iraq in overwhelming numbers. It proved feckless in the long haul. Whether political calculation or a default McGovernism and pacifistic weakness was the main culprit is hard to say. Either way, the Republicans must not allow the public to forget the cost of Democratic weakness.

The media overflows with paeans to the new foreign policy of Barack Obama. I wish him luck and peace in his endeavors. But recent history has not been kind to Democratic foreign policy. If the measure of American foreign policy is whether the country is geopolitically stronger or weaker, Democrats fail. Jimmy Carter watched a dozen nations fall into the Communist or enemy sphere on his watch, and the Soviet Union was emboldened to invade a non-Eastern European nation for the first time since 1945. The Presidencies of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the integration of the Warsaw Pact into the Free World. President Clinton, handed an unprecedented unipolar world, let the terrorist threat grow unanswered, and emboldened Osama in Somalia. He allowed North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons. He dithered in Rwanda and stumbled into preventable wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.

George W. Bush leaves the Presidency with two of our worst foes from the 90’s, Saddam and the Taliban, dispatched and replaced by friendly governments. He leaves our relations with the world’s largest democracy, India, at unprecedented levels of cooperation. Japan and Australia grew closer to the United States and, it is also worth mentioning that our relations with China did not deteriorate even as we opposed it in Darfur, the Sudan, and all around the globe.

The Left will try and solidify its narrative of foreign policy error, but the Republicans have to strike back again and again. Fecklessness and a failure to defend the United States is the key weakness of Democratic foreign policy. Obama’s abject interview with Arab T.V. where he agreed with the premise that America is responsible for bad relations with Arab states starts this pattern again. The Republican Party must repeat: America is not what’s wrong with the world and weakness is provocative.