Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald, ever ready to be helpful, offers a State of the Union Speech to the President, should he decide to reconfigure America’s military posture to bring it more into line with the realities of the global jihad:
Leaving Iraq does not have to be accompanied by defeatist rhetoric, or by any language that will give the jihadists grounds to claim victory in the words of the President himself. Let’s put it into a State of the Union Speech:
“Today is an important day in the history of America’s war to make the world safer for freedom. In Iraq, the American people can be proud of their soldiers. In three weeks they took down a tyrant who had murdered hundreds of thousands of his fellow Iraqis, a man who had been in power for a quarter-century, and whose regime seemed prepared to rule for another quarter-century. And we did far more than remove a regime. Our soldiers built schools and hospitals. They helped build water-treatment plants, and build or rebuild electricity grids. We cleared, with our allies the British, Iraq’s port of Umm Qasr. We did this, we did that. Here is the list of just some of the things our soldiers and civilians in Iraq managed to do (here the President can fill out his speech with some more details about American accomplishments in Iraq, ad libitum).
“And we did more. We trained, to Western standards, from a standing start, the new ‘Iraqi’ forces, the army and the police. And we realize now that not only are the Iraqis ready to stand on their own, but that — every opinion poll tells us– they want to stand on their own. From the support offered by the Iraqi delegation at the Arab League, to every opinion poll among Iraqi Arabs, it is clear that it makes sense for us to leave now. No matter how much we have accomplished, we are still seen, in a sense, as outsiders, and we must be sensitive to local opinion. For if we are not, we would risk, the Iraqis would risk, undoing all that has been done. We entered Iraq in order to enable the ‘Iraqis’ to stand on their own feet. It is time now for them to do so.
“All of us can agree that it makes far more sense, now that the second set of elections is complete, to allow the ‘Iraqis’ to arrive at the compromises among themselves that only they can make. Of course we wish them well, and of course we hope now that their fellow Arab and Muslim countries will certainly cancel whatever remaining debt is owed to them, and certainly lend them money against future oil revenues, given all that those Arab and Muslim states have. We have done what we can. We can do no more. Our presence, we conclude, might now lead to the very reverse of what we hope the Iraqis themselves will have the good sense to achieve — a stable ‘Iraq,’ in which the compromises that make democracies work will take place.
“Oh, there are the nay-sayers. There are those who keep telling us that Islam and democracy, Islam and respect for minorities, Islam and respect for women and non-Muslims, cannot coexist. Well, we know that isn’t true. We know that the ‘Iraqi people’ will prove that to be untrue. We have great faith in the ‘Iraqi people.’ We are sure that they are ready to stand on their own, and to defeat the terrorists who would deny them their chance at democracy. From those blue thumbs held proudly in the air last January, to all the careful effort that went into crafting, and then holding a referendum to approve, a Constitution, right to the December elections held just a month ago, Iraq has defied the nay-sayers.
“Well, obviously we have been there a long time. For some of us, far too long. No doubt there are some ‘Iraqis’ who would wish us to stay for much longer. But we cannot. It isn’t good for them, and it isn’t good for us. That is why, in my State of the Union message today, I am announcing the withdrawal, by August 1, 2006, of all American troops, and in collaboration with our Coalition allies, of all other foreign troops as well from Iraq. Should a need arise, in a particular region, for special assistance, and such assistance is deemed in the national interest of the United States, requests for such aid will be carefully considered. But we removed a tyrant, and the tyrant’s regime — and he sits now in Baghdad, tried by his fellow Iraqis. It is a splendid moment for democracy, for the United States and for Iraq.
“Goodnight, and God Bless America.”
Something like that. The speech above took about 2 minutes to compose. With a staff of ten presidential speechwriters, it shouldn’t take the White House more than a week.