Allow me to second Powerline’s opinion that today’s most important article is Amir Taheri’s “The Last Helicopter,” which appears in the Wall Street Journal:
“Hassan Abbasi has a dream–a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the ‘fleeing Americans,’ forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by ‘the Army of Muhammad.’ Presented by his friends as ‘The Dr. Kissinger of Islam,’ Mr. Abbasi is ‘professor of strategy’ at the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new radical administration….
“…To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of ‘the last helicopter.’ It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein’s generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton’s helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.”
Tahiri thinks, by the way, that Mr. Abassi might be misunderestimating George W. Bush–let’s hope he’s right.