Following are thoughts based on an email I received today which suggested that we could all get behind a “wear red on Fridays” campaign intended to indicate we support our troops – whatever our view of the decision to invade. That is, the email came with a caveat regarding supporting our troops vs. supporting the decision to invade Iraq…
Supporting our troops and supporting “the decision” can be separated in principle. That is, a principled argument can be made for it.
What cannot be countenanced is the claim that one can support the troops but not support their mission. That, unfortunately, is what the leftwing cut-and-run crowd means when they say they don’t support the decision. Without “the decision” they’d have what they want: Saddam still in power, still joining hands with an abjectly corrupt UN for a chorus or two of Kumbaya.
They want the decision reversed, the mission canceled and the United States humiliated. The latter of these items, as articulated by Michael Moore, George Soros, Cindy Sheehan and Noam Chomsky is the sine-qua-non of their political philosophy. Tony Blankley sums it up:
Now the Watergate babies have grown old — and age has not improved them. They plan to finish their careers as they started them — in defeatism, betrayal and national dishonor. Oh, that America might see the last of these fish-eyed sacks of loathsome bile and infamy: Unwholesome in their birth; repugnant and stench-forming in their decline.
The decision is made. It was made by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of apparent amnesiacs. Questioning it now, which is what the America-last revanchists are doing, cannot be reconciled with supporting the troops. Every Gutless Obtuse Party member voting to have the President “report on an exit strategy” and every Democrat hypocrite who is trying to rewrite history, are saying the decision is still in question. Mark Steyn and Michael Barone have some excellent commentary on this.
In fact, the decision is not in question except for those who opposed it originally and for those, the vast majority turncoats, who cannot abide responsibility for their own actions.
The decision is not in question; what’s in question is whether we have the will to win or whether we’ll betray the Iraqis, our troops, our objective to stop Islamist terror and our fundamental decency. What the “abandon the mission” types remember about Viet Nam is that they forced the United States to lose; and they revel in it. They also remember that they took some flak for literally spitting on Viet Nam vets. They’ve abandoned outright troop vilification, but the rest of their perfidy hasn’t changed.
I know appealing to the “mission/troops support differentiation committees” is tempting because those who respect liberty axiomatically respect people and want to appeal to their opponents’ better instincts. The problem is that these opponents don’t possess “better instincts” and do not care about liberty. What they care about is license. Worse, they confuse license with liberty because they have forgotten that liberty implies responsibility for your decisions.
Don’t give them an opening.