There They Go Again
By Charles Cole (11/07/03)
As the Bible says, “To everything there is a season”. The Democrat presidential hopefuls seem incapable of understanding this eternal truth. At each of their debates, they try to outdo each other in their zeal to undermine President Bush in his efforts at waging the war – yes, war – on terrorism.
President Reagan would likely say to this group of naysayers and dividers, “There you go again”. At precisely the time when our nation needs to unite behind our troops in the field and come together as it did for a brief time after 9/11, these Monday morning oracles at Delphi have chosen to politicize the war effort for their own self-serving purposes. This can only give aid and comfort to the greatest threat to the civilized world since WWII – the radical terrorists who are killing our servicemen, attempting to reinstate the abominations of the Hussein regime in Iraq, and waging an ongoing guerrilla war against humanity.
Harry Truman once noted that the only thing new in this world is the history of which we are unaware. My generation is painfully aware of the historical pattern the Democrat presidential candidates would have us repeat. After Lyndon Johnson deployed hundreds of thousands of troops in Southeast Asia, he then proceeded to handcuff our military by imposing all manner of ridiculous rules of engagement rather than aggressively pursuing victory. There is no way to calculate with any precision the number of casualties needlessly caused by this mindless and shameful policy.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when America had troops in harm’s way in the field, the radical left played an important role in weakening the war effort by organizing a draft resistance movement and staging anti-war demonstrations on numerous college campuses. Such actions sent a clear message to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese: the American people do not have the resolve to persist in this war and they are not unified in their resolve. This, in turn, bolstered the enemy’s morale and helped him to persist and fight on. Eventually, America withdrew her troops and turned over to the South Vietnamese military the defense of that country.
Enter the Congressional Democrats in 1975. The North Vietnamese had boldly and openly violated the 1973 peace accord (much as Saddam Hussein did vis-à-vis the 1991 cease fire agreement and numerous subsequent U.N. resolutions on weapons of mass destruction). Washington attempted to counter by increasing its financial aid to South Vietnam’s defense efforts. Rather than combating the North Vietnamese treachery by continuing this support, in 1975 the Democrat controlled Congress voted to cut off all funding, causing the defeat of South Vietnam’s army in the field and the collapse of its government. Not surprisingly, as the early supporters of the Vietnam War had predicted, this chain of events resulted in the subsequent enslavement of millions of Vietnamese and the genocidal extermination of millions of Cambodians as the cancer of communism spread into other areas of Southeast Asia.
One wonders how many times the American people need to witness variations on this nonsensical and dangerous theme before they understand the importance of unity in support of the effort to defend this nation and western civilization against the horrendous threat posed by global terrorism. Apparently the front runners among the Democrat candidates for president will never understand the simple principle of peace and security through strength and unity. One hopes that in next year’s election the American people will emulate Ronald Reagan by saying to these extreme leftwing candidates, “There you go again”.
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