The first time I read Instapundit's entry on the Democrat strategy emerging to oppose the President's Iraq policy, I did a double-take. FbL beat me to the punch (scroll about half-way down) but captured my initial reaction after rereading what I thought was a joke.
No joke, apparently. And utterly vile.
The Democrats were elected, so the conventional wisdon goes (nutroots explanations excluded), not because people were against the war in principal but against the way it was being waged. Fair enough.
But what, pray tell, is the reason to withdraw from a struggle with an enemy that less than 6 years ago killed more American civilians in one day than in all our history? With an enemy that saws a person's head off with a steak knife...and films it...and broadcasts it worldwide? With an enemy that walks toward a crowd of children with 20 pounds of C4 covered with ball bearings and detonates it? With an enemy that won't allow women to see a doctor because the doctor is a male? With an enemy that drives school girls back into a burning building because they are not "modestly" covered? With an enemy that hangs teenage girls from cherry pickers in the public square because they resisted the advances...unsuccessfully...of an aggressive male? With an enemy that hangs teenage boys, in public, from cherry pickers, because they were homosexual? With an enemy that butchers three teenaged girls walking home from school because they're Christians, as happened in The Philippines?
As I see it, after 9/11, we started with Afghanistan because the chief engineer of the 2001 attack was holed up there. That's it. But this is not about geography. It's about waging war against a new kind of enemy just as hateful and depraved as Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and Kim Jong Il.
I think we're fighting him because we can. We didn't have that option, so to speak, against Stalin or Kim, but we did have the resolve and the means to resist, and resist successfully, in other ways.
And, while I know this probably had little to do with the pre-war calculus (especially if the State Department was involved) I think we, as humans, also have a duty to resist that kind of savagery whenever we can. In fact, who else will resist the depredations of the most powerful species on the planet? What these poor excuses for humans do is ALL of our mess and we have a moral obligation to clean it up. Save the whales? Screw the whales. Save the humans!
Who cares if the current battle is in Iraq? Why isn't it being waged in Iran, Syria, Indonesia, The Philippines, Pakistan and everyhwere Salafists and Wahabbis have planted their seeds of hatred and barbarism?
If the majority party does not see this as a fight against not America's enemies but civilization's enemies, we are in for a long, sh*tty war. One where millions die. The Left can screech to its heart's content about the evil of BushCo but they ain't seen nothin' yet. Everything they say they despise about Bush, "Godbags," Rethuglicans," and the rest of the Red State usual suspects is embodied in the thoughts, words and actions of the killers our troops face on the streets of Baghdad--the suppression of every right we take for granted is business as usual in every square inch of land under our enemy's control. The very act of writing and saying what they do at the Daily Kos, Pandagon, Firedoglake and in the Hollywood and Broadway salons is a tangible refutation of their theory and worldview--they would, literally, lose their heads if taking the same tack in Waziristan or any region under control of the disciples of bin Laden and al-Zawahri. God, if we could only channel the Kos-sacks' hatred against the barbarians instead of fellow Americans...but I digress.
So, when I saw the article on how the Dems were going to try to sabotage by stealth our national effort to respond to the terror masters I was morbidly fascinated. Fascinated. These folks don't even have the guts to betray the cause in the light of day. They must do it by manuever, by guile, by bleeding the US effort to the point of collapse with a thousand little cuts. This probably the most cynical attempt to undermine the interests of the United States I can remember. This is perfidy, pure and simple.
I believe this will be looked back on as a classic blunder for the Party in power and for its standard-bearer in the 2008 elections. I hope the Republican Party answers the soon-to-be released "anti-war" TV spots with something that nails that effort for what it is: a craven attempt to destroy America's will to actively resist aggression, tyranny and barbarism beyond its shores and in defense of its allies...but I don't have a lot of confidence in my Party's ability do that right now, or in 2008 for that matter.
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