OpinionJournal - Featured Article

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

Specifically: "We are now in a struggle with an extremism that expresses itself in the form of terror attacks, and in that we face what is probably the gravest threat to this country's institutions, if not to its physical welfare, since the Civil War. When one tries to assess people who can find it in themselves to fly airplanes into buildings and murder 3,000 of us in a single morning, whatever else you can say about such people, they are very sure that they are right; and wouldn't it be music to their ears to hear that our spirit says we're not too sure that we are right?"

This is part of what troubles me about much of the leftist rhetoric spewing forth both about the war in general, and the prison scandal in particular. Its not that we should laugh off all criticism and ignore or cover up misdeeds done by our citizens, but the "blame America" crowd takes every single misdeed and turns it into a call for globalization, U.N.-approved and administered doling out of America's resources until our standard of living is lowered to match other parts of the world. The message we have sent as a nation over the last 20 years is that we are weak, with little or no resolve to prove we are right, and little or no moral fiber.

This is why the Islamic extremists see us as targets. We are perceived as weak, and we lack the fortitude to put up a fight. We are led by men and women who don't believe in the very concepts their country was founded on, and therefore have little resolve to defend those concepts.

President Bush changed that, at least in the short term, by putting boots on the ground in Afganistan and Iraq. Not only are we keeping the terrorists occupied within their own territory (vs. fighting them on our home soil), we are showing that we won't respond to terror by shipping plane-loads of supplies in for humanitarian aid while allowing those responsible for the terror to personally profit (see the U.N. article earlier in this blog).

Now, with the loony left demanding withdrawal of our forces, we risk the very same phenomenon that our troops encountered in Viet Nam: mainly, the resistance continues, holding out hope that if they struggle long enough, we will finally lose our will to fight anymore. The same back-stabbing tactics used by John Kerry when he returned to the US after his tour of duty are being employed in an effort to get him elected Commander in Chief of our armed forces.