Useful Idiots

‘In any conflict, there will be those who support you, those who oppose you, and the useful idiots that support you simply by existing.’ -Vladimir Illych Ulyanov

In many ways, the above quote may be one of the most important, and cynically manipulative observations of human psychology in the Twentieth Century. In short, it states that in any conflict there will be ‘opposition’ of your enemies who you can take advantage of via propaganda and the ‘court of world opinion’ especially in democratic societies. This is exactly what we have going on in the United States today.

Ted Kennedy recently gave a speech in which he compared the ‘quagmire in Iraq’ to Vietnam. He postulated that our military and the current administration have no real goals, understanding of the situation, or exit strategy in the face of the latest round of insurgency. Others have been quick to latch onto the censorship of a paper as evidence of the wrongdoing of BushCo and their ‘inept, two-faced, dishonest’ policy toward the people of Iraq.

It seems that if you say a thing enough times, regardless of any evidence, it must be true.

Let’s break down what has happened over the past two weeks. A paper controlled by Muqtada al’Sadr openly called for violence against coalition forces in Iraq. Now I don’t know about you, but where I come from, incitement is not protected speech under our constitution. Further, Mr. Sadr has openly praised Hizbollah – identifying himself and his followers as an arm of said organization in Iraq. Finally, instead of submitting to an arrest warrant for is alleged involvement in the murder of Imam Koei, he started a campaign of violent resistance throughout south and central Iraq.

This is Mr. Kennedy’s ‘Quagmire’: a thug trying to evade arrest for murder and incitement to violence using his deluded followers to mask his evasion attempts by launching a campaign of violence.

And naturally, Al’Jazerha, the voice of Islamic Totalitarianism everywhere, is confabulating, expounding, and in short trying to portray everything in the worst light possible.

Mr. Kennedy (along with the 'Arab street') is like usual playing along. You can hear them coming out of the woodwork – our useful idiots – holding the current events up as proof of our perfidious and duplicitous nature. We never intended to ‘free’ Iraq. It was hopeless to go there in the first place. Bring democracy to the Middle East? These ‘people’ obviously aren’t ready for any such thing.

Well, I disagree on these points. And Mr. Kennedy, V.I.Lenin would be happy right now were he an Islamist today. Perhaps we should create a ‘Walter Duranty’ prize and award it to Mr. Kennedy for his lifetime of achievement.

Our best course at this point is not to raise the fallacious specter of Vietnam, but rather to stay the course and do our best. Perhaps there will be a second Fall of Saigon. But I think we owe it to the people of Iraq and ourselves to demonstrate that we learned the right lessons from Vietnam and defeat the Islamo-fascists, instead of pulling yet another ‘Beirut’ in the face of resistance.

Or perhaps I’m wrong, and we should fall back to our frontiers, put up the razor-wire and minefields on the borders, and expel all of the ‘brown Muslim people’. Personally, I think such a course of action would be the single greatest mistake we could make. I believe that our current forward engagement strategy against the fanatics is the only reasonable way of maybe, just maybe, changing the current middle eastern status-quo away from the current repressive, despotic model..

Quite frankly, that is something we should all be hoping for, regardless of whichever side of the domestic isle we most closely identify.