National / World Politics 21 Apr 2007 11:09 am
Reid, Democrats and Defeat
Harry Reid, Loser
Updated 04/20/2007 ET
The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, believes the war in Iraq is lost. There is nothing about that conclusion that bothers Reid: He is as blasé as he is certain, as resolute in pursuit of defeat as Churchill was in pursuit of victory.
Last November, the Democrats seized control of Congress on the pretense that they wanted to change our policy regarding Iraq but not — as they, to a man (and a woman) insisted — to merely cut and run. We knew they weren’t being truthful then, but too many people were taken in. Now all pretense is dispensed with: we can see the man behind the curtain.
First, Reid and his ilk do not support the troops. When Reid says the war is lost, the troops hear. They understand that they are still risking their lives every day for a war the Democrats are content to lose. There can be no more destructive assault on their morale. It is only because of their inherent quality — much higher than the draftees of Vietnam — that they don’t abandon the field.
On April 23, 1971 John Kerry told a Senate Committee, “We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” In those years, the morale of our troops was destroyed piecemeal by Kerry and his cohorts. Reid is merely a new manifestation of the Democrats’ pathology. He, like the rest, don’t give a damn about our troops. They care only about their path to greater political power.
Harry Reid’s statement compels one more conclusion: that the Democrats are incapable of leading this nation to victory against this existential threat.
Conservatives have begun to think that the import of the 2008 presidential election is that the winner will decide how the Supreme Court’s balance will tilt for the next two decades. True enough. But more important, by far, is how the next president will prosecute the war.
The fate of democracy in Iraq will not be determinative of victory or defeat in the larger, long war. Will some Republican pursue real victory? Or will the Democrats just declare defeat and come home, bringing defeat with them?
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