Quagmire

With the American death toll in the Iraq war reaching 2000, the stories about another Vietnam (where nearly 60,000 Americans died) are sprouting like black poppies. In Newsweek’s Oct. 31 issue, Anna Quindlen wonders if she will still be around in 2063 or so when the body count reaches Vietnam levels. Will she be a 115 year old peacenik?

Of course, there are only two valid parallels with Vietnam. The main stream media have been beating the anti-war drum and disseminating only bad news since before we invaded Iraq. And the anti-war-at-any-price leftists born in the Vietnam era are singing the same dismal tune. Anna Quindlen is one of the most melodious.

“The policy became a moving target: weapons of mass destruction; links to the 9/11 terrorists; removal of Saddam Hussein; bringing freedom to the Iraqi people. Once again we were destroying the village in order to save it.”

One can quibble about the policy, but all those objectives are noble and in America’s best interests. And they are subsumed by the big enchilada which is fighting the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them in Palos Verdes, CA. and Rochester, NY.

Unlike the North Vietnamese, these Islamic bad guys have demonstrated a fanatical desire and uncanny ability to strike at the heart of America. The last time it was 3000 dead in NYC and Washington. The next time it could be millions.

The most unattractive feature of leftist ideologues is the way their weak arguments rapidly give way to personal attacks. Quindlen credits Lyndon Johnson for having “the good sense to be heartbroken by the body bags. Bush appears merely peevish at being criticized.” And then there is her ultimate cheap shot: “America's sons and daughters are dying to protect the egos of those whose own children are safe at home.”

Such rhetoric can only come from an elite intellectual who has never had a meaningful interaction with an American soldier. How is she to know how proud they are to be fighting for our country and for her safety? Has she forgotten that this is an all-volunteer army, and that the re-enlistment rate among the troops who have actually served in Iraq is remarkably high?

Quindlen’s leftist bona fides shine most brightly when she bashes her own country: “The most unattractive trait of the American empire is American arrogance, which the president embodies and which this war elevated. It is not simply that we have a good system. It is the system everyone else should have. It is the best system, and we are the best people.”

Compared to the European, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese empire builders America was and is a colonialist piker. Only one who knows nothing of history can talk of an American empire. Is she referring to the Western states, to Alaska, Hawaii? Or to the fact that we have maintained American soldiers in South Korea, in NATO and elsewhere to help protect our allies?

Quindlen says it is unattractive arrogance to believe that American democracy is the best political system. How about the fact that ours is the oldest democracy in the world and the most free? France is in their Fifth Republic and they still haven’t got it right, and Britain does not have our Bill of Rights.

Yet we don’t go around the world trying to impose our system on others as Quindlen would have you believe. The Iraqi’s are creating their own political system the democratic way using ballots instead of bullets.

President Bush realized that spreading freedom to oppressed peoples is the best way, perhaps the only way, to win this battle against the oppressors who would spread their evil throughout the world in the name of Allah.

We have the leadership and the military to do the job as long as Quindlen and her ilk do not sap our spirit. We must not let it happen; the stakes are so much higher than in Vietnam.