On this website we have maintained from Day One that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by the US Government and its forces were a legitimate and wholly appropriate response to the attacks of 9/11. We do not regard the war that the US and its allies are engaged in as “Bush’s War” or “Blair’s war”, but our people’s war against a deadly enemy who declared war on us and continues to scheme our destruction. Those who do not recognise this are fools and those who are willing to undercut the war effort for short-term political self interest are worse than fools, they are saboteurs.
I have never yet heard any of the war’s ‘peace’ critics put forward a credible alternative response to 9/11 nor heard those who criticise the main strategy, suggest anything that isn’t Monday morning quarterbacking/hindsight. This is not to say that the conduct of the war has been above criticism. Some of the failings must be attributed to US military leaders and some to public servants and Bush advisers. President Bush himself has failed to lead the Nation with political energy, especially given that the Media Class, its Leftist Allies and the Democrat Party have carried out a sustained and increasingly effective campaign to bring about US defeat.
On this website we have criticized the President for failing to recognize the need to defend the war continuously and with every means a President has. We argued that he should have visited Iraq and Afghanistan frequently in support of the troops and addressed the US public from there. He should have repeatedly, and in the harshest language, denounced those who undermine the war. If he ever believed that internal political oppponents on the Left could be placated or won over by ‘reaching out’, he is naive and a liability. Having sent the troops to war, it was and is his highest duty to denounce, and act against, all those whose actions give comfort to the enemy.
If this is a real and justifiable war that we are in (and the President has claimed that it is), internal opponents who help the enemy cause must be exposed for what they are and censored. In the Second World War, defeatists in the UK were treated as beyond the pale and some were imprisoned. Free speech in wartime should carry a price when it aids the enemy.
I find it obscene that our young men and women are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan while life goes on as normal for the rest of us. When a country is at war, life for all should require sacrifice. One of the first things that should be sacrificed, is the freedom to be able to oppose the war by word and deed without penalty. Almost as obscene is the fact that apart from our soldiers, we can all carry on our lives as though our safety comes without a price. I always felt revulsion whenever I read accounts of the First World War (in which some of my relatives died in the trenches) that revealed that Army Generals were wining and dining behind the lines. Surely, in a war, all should be prepared to suffer some inconvenience and all have to make some sacrifice.
When this war against the Islamic Imperialists began, I said to my friends that I thought we should all be called upon to guard reservoirs, power stations etc through some kind of Home Guard. In my view the whole population of the US should have been mobilised not just for clear military reasons, but in order to make sure that all knew that fighting a deadly enemy was a common duty.
It might be argued that if President Bush had required us all to make some active sacrifice, the war would have been even more unpopular and he would not have been re-elected, but that would have been democracy in action and a Nation that would send young men to die but not share even a modest sacrifice, would have soon learned a lesson. For there would have been more 9/11’s and the people of the US would have discovered that ‘peace’ and an unwillingness to sacrifice has a price, too.
I have recently met and talked to two fathers whose sons are now serving in Iraq. I felt bad that we were talking about trivial issues and feeling completely safe and untroubled, whilst their sons are risking all.
I suppose it is all too late now to jolt this Nation out of its growing comfortable Media-induced defeatism. Probably only another terrorist attack here in the USA will do that. I have given up hope that the man in the White House will behave like a real wartime leader and I often wonder what he is doing with his time, for precious little of it is spent mobilizing our people behind the troops and rebuffing the defeatists in our midst.
Those who now jostle for his job are mostly much much worse. I suppose we have to hope that cometh the hour, cometh the man; but where is there a Washington, a Churchill, a Reagan or even a Thatcher?