Speaking Up

I tend to avoid commentary on the daily political ups and downs; most of the peckings and squabblings that make up a given day's "Political Roundup" are so frivolous as to be unworthy of any serious person's attention, and the rest are but the punditocracy rehashing old arguments. When a decision is made, a platform revealed, or a war launched, then I pay attention. Everything else is tedious.


However, today it occurred to me that the President has dropped down to a 50% approval for the first time since he's been in office. And why? Because the folks are getting jittery about the war, and the opposition is getting noisy. I cannot remain silent.


All of this comes of people with no knowledge of history, of how wars are fought, of how guerrilas are defeated. The key idea is patience. It doesn't happen overnight. The best way to beat guerrilas is to keep them occupied while you gradually improve the administration and daily lives of the majority of the citizenry. If you can cut them off from foreign sources of supply, all the better, but showing yourself to be an improvment over the guerrilas is the key thing. We have done so. Poll after poll of Iraqis has shown that they worry more about us leaving too soon than staying too long. As long as we continue to demonstrate commitment to Iraqi independence, to training and setting up police, border guards, soldiers, and bureaucrats, we aren't going to turn the people against us.


The question for now is, are the American people going to have the stomach for that? All I can say is, We'd Better. Withdrawing from Iraq before the Iraqis are capable of governing (and defending) themselves would be a disaster beyond counting. The terrorists (Baathist or Islamic) would soon undo the fledgling Iraqi republic, and declare their movement impervious to the worst the West could do. They'd declare us weaklings and cowards, unable to maintain a sustained struggle. If you think world opinion is against us now, just wait to see what would happen then.


Now is the time to recommit ourselves to a long and difficult struggle that must be won. Now is the time to stare the enemy in the eye and say You Will Not Bury Us, and mean it. Now is the time to stop flagellating ourselves for every human misery in the world; we did not cause them. Now is the time to dedicate as much of our blood and treasure as we can to mitigating those miseries, and destroying those that propagate them.


Go ahead and hate Bush if it makes you feel better; despise him for an inarticulate, cliché-spouting scion of privelege if your sense of superiority means so much to you. But recognize that he, faults and all, is our leader in a time when leadership is what is needed. And that, if the ability to make decisions and the will to see them through is of any value, we've had worse leaders. Focus on the good that can come of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Yes, it CAN work, the people there WANT DESPERATELY for it to work; so why can't we all work towards that goal, and pay the fascists and nihilists no more heed than the scope of a rifle requires?


I used to be quite taken with the writings of Ayn Rand; her clear sense of morality and sharp criticisms of the power-lust of the Left impressed me greatly. Now I am more critical of her work: the bell-ringing monotony of her fiction, her acidic disdain for spirituality or even simple kindness, her set-piece characters. Yet Rand, through the process of her writings, did uncover a useful truth: a civilization dies when it forgets why it lives, when it no longer cares to defend itself. Those of you who would criticize the current administration, who would shriek in fear at its War on Terror, need to come up with a viable alternative. Otherwise your victory will mean that we no longer care to defend ourselves. And that will mean death, to many individually, and to our dreams, collectively.