July 19, 2007
Shallow analysis from anti-war "statesmen"
Tony Blankley takes issue with the cut-and-run Senators – and succinctly states the issue on which they ought to be focused.
He is, to be charitable, less than impressed with their reasons for declaring defeat and going home.
I haven't seen such uncritical thinking since I hid under my bed sheets to get away from the monsters back when I was 3 years old.
Whether they are talking about war weariness, grief over casualties, fear of their upcoming elections, disappointment with the current Iraqi government or general irritation with the incumbent president: What in the world do such misgivings of U.S. senators have to do with whether we should continue to advance our vital national security interests?
None of these senators has even addressed the question of whether the U.S. is safer if we leave Iraq than if we stay. Isn't that the key question? The question is not whether the Iraqi government deserves American sacrifice on their behalf. Our sons and daughters are not fighting, being grievously wounded and dying for Iraq — but for American vital interests. If this were just about Iraqi democracy, I might join the screaming for a quick exit.
But if al Qaeda can plausibly claim they drove America out of Iraq (just as they drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan) they will gain literally millions of new adherents in their struggle to destroy America and the West. We will then pay in blood, treasure and future wars vastly more than we are paying today to manage and eventually win our struggle in Iraq.
Our staying power, unflinching persistence in the face of adversity, muscular capacity to impose order on chaos and eventual slaughtering of terrorists who are trying to drive us out will do more to win the "hearts and minds" of potentially radical Islamists around the world than all the little sermons about our belief in Islam as the religion of peace. As Osama bin Laden once famously observed, people follow the strong horse.
We have two choices: Use our vast resources to prove we are the strong horse; or get ready to be taken to the glue factory.
When Blankley mentions Bin Laden’s “strong horse” quote, he omits the context; it was prompted by the Clinton administration’s quick exit from Somalia in the aftermath of the “Blackhawk Down” battle, wherein the U.S. Army lost less than 20 GIs.
Despite the courage of the 1st Mountain Division and men like U.S. Army Sgt. First Class Randy Shugart and Master Sgt. Gary Gordon, both of whom won the Medal of Honor, and despite the vast number of enemy killed at relatively little cost, the fact that the U.S. rapidly withdrew from the African nation led bin Laden and his terrorist jihadi cohorts to surmise that America – and Americans – didn’t have the fortitude to fight and win the long war, that despite our weaponry, wealth and size, we lacked the stamina and civilizational self-confidence to stay the course.
Bin Laden concluded that we were a paper tiger, the weak horse.
Fleeing Iraq will prove that we’ve learned nothing in the intervening years, and serve to further embolden our enemies.
Too bad our so-called statesmen are too short-sighted to see it.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 19, 2007 08:19 AM
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