By Michael J. Smith on Thursday January 19, 2006 12:44 PM
... well, compared to your average Democrat, anyway.
The latest Osamagram, according to Reuters, apparently offers us a "truce" if we get out of Iraq:
bin Laden said al Qaeda was willing to respond to U.S. public opinion supporting an American troop pullout from Iraq. He did not specify conditions for the truce, but indicated it was linked to U.S. troops quitting Iraq.Sounds like a pretty good deal to me -- hell, I think we should get out of Iraq anyway, Osama or no Osama. Don't you? But the Reuters article goes on to quote "terrorism expert" (love these job descriptions) Daniel Benjamin warning us that this would be tantamount to "bending the knee.""We have no objection to responding to this with a long term truce based on fair conditions."
Benjamin was a National Security Council apparatchik during the Clinton Administration. He and a colleague from those palmy days, Steven Simon, have been parked in a liberal think tank since their expulsion from Eden, and have written a couple of books articulating what you might call the Kerry line -- namely, that the "war on terror" would be better run under Democratic management. Benjamin intones, ominously,
"Remember that bin Laden, in many of his pronouncements over the years, has held out the possibility of a new deal between the Muslim world and the U.S. It's just that the cost has been unbelievable, like getting out of the Middle East entirely or withdrawing support for so-called apostate regimes."Huh? Getting out of the Middle East is an "unbelievable cost"? I would have said that staying in the Middle East is going to impose some unbelievable costs. If the idea of "getting out of the Middle East" was fairly laid before the American people, I bet they'd go for it like Bill Clinton after a bosomy intern. But don't hold your breath waiting for the Democrats to embrace the idea of disentanglement, with "terrorism experts" -- not a bad description of what they do, actually -- like Benjamin and Simon waiting for another turn at the controls of the war machine.
