Entries for December 05, 2006

Karl Rove on Iraq: Last night I attended Hillsdale College's annual Churchill dinner at the Mayflower Hotel. Karl Rove was the main speaker. Usually in his public speeches, Rove talks mainly about domestic issues and politics. But last night he talked primarily about our "new enemy": "transnational terrorism." In terms similar to those his boss, George W. Bush, has used of late (as noted in my U.S. News column this week), Rove declared that defeat in Iraq would be "the beginning of the beginning"–a terrible setback for the United States. He noted that Islamic terrorists trained tens of thousands of fighters in the 1990s "with little or no response" from the United States, and he asked, "What if we gave them a terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East?"