Total Victory Means Total Warriors . . . .

Which We Are Not

by Diana West - September 1st, 2007 - Townhall.com

President Bush, addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, recently made a case -- a flawed case -- for a kind of core continuity linking these disparate conflicts [. . . wars in Japan, the Koreas, Vietnam and Iraq]. It's not that he didn't admit there are many differences among them ("There are many differences" among them, he said). But he mostly argued that American involvement over time across the Far East had ushered in post-war peace and prosperity, and that this demonstrated "a precedent for the hard and necessary work we're doing" in Iraq.

Sheesh. How do you equate total victory in Japan with bloody stalemate in Korea with congressionally mandated defeat in Vietnam ... and Iraq? Of course, it was the invocation of Vietnam -- the president offered a cautionary tale against withdrawal from Iraq by pointing to the ghastly fate of millions of South Vietnamese and other U.S. allies on our abandonment of them in 1975 -- that triggered media distress, with the liberal-elite-complex going dyspeptic over the implication that its beloved antiwar movement was culpable in the humanitarian disaster visited on anti-communists in Southeast Asia.

One of the dearest people in my life is a liberal who became fixed in their political views during the 60s. Three years ago we had a discussion of the war in Vietnam and its aftermath. It was during this discussion that something really strange occurred. For the first time in our lives that I can remember this friend rejected reality and truth. Though we often disagreed about the results of history and the way to move forward, one of the major reasons we had been able to remain close friends was we were able to agree on facts and truth.

This ended. My friend adamantly rejected the possibility that there had been any humanitarian disaster after our retreat from Vietnam. When I pushed the issue they exploded and stopped the discussion. I was called a liar and told that I should not believe the lies being spread about the "good people" of Vietnam. America and only America was to blame for everything that happened there. After the war the peaceful people of Vietnam simply rebuilt. There were no slave labor camps. There were no political persecutions. The hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees that poured out of that country were simply the rich who were fleeing justice from decades of abuse of the poor in their collusion with evil capitalist America.

There is simply no way to get any agreement on what actually happened in Vietnam or its aftermath. Truth is "relative". President Bush is getting the same reaction that I got. "There was no humanitarian disaster in Vietnam!" End of discussion. Stop your lies. Move on.

That is one of the primary reasons that the war in Iraq is causing so much trouble here in America today. We are dealing with an amazing spectacle of mass delusion. People on the left have accepted a "truth" that is a pack of lies. Nothing said about Iraq matters when to the anti-war left we need merely recreate the solution in Vietnam. Just leave. The left is convinced that it worked then, that it was not a humanitarian disaster, that only the evil rich were punished, that with our departure a great peace descended on Vietnam and everyone lived happily ever after.

This delusion is tied up with the delusion on the left that socialism has never been tried. That its failure in country after country is not the failure of socialism but the evil result of capitalism subverting the superior and "good" socialism. By a rejection that the Soviet Union was defeated by Ronald Reagan leading America to stand tall, the left has morphed into a belief that America subverted the better socialist nation and ruined its superior system by corrupt means. It is all America's fault. End of discussion.

The solution (as far as the left is concerned) is to destroy both; the war making power of America . . . . which the left sees as our strength, and our economic system of free enterprise . . . which the left sees as evil. It is the reason the left has become anti-war (only so far as America is concerned) and anti-capitalism (since they continue their belief it is the source of economic injustice in the world).

Recognizing this false foundation of the left, I have become passionate about the need to attack the left (and democrats) over their tolerance for the evil of socialism. Their pretense at being anti-war (when they are anti-war only so far as America is concerned) must also be pointed out. Any political discussion that does not start with a demand that the left's delusions about history must be rejected and the evil of socialism pointed out will simply waste time. It will also assure the left wins.

We are at war. The success of America in earlier wars was based on our acceptance of the superiority of the freedom our nation provides. It was the reason we could wage TOTAL WAR and not lose sight of the goal by agonizing over the consequences for some innocent bystanders of winning a war that others had started. Total war ended the conflict sooner and allowed us to return to peace with our side the victor.

I repeat, we are at war. However as in Vietnam we refuse to wage total war. George W. Bush wants to fight the war quietly and without asking for commitment or sacrifice from the American people. We are at war and the truly great young people of our nation are winning on the battlefield (that is an amazing story we really must not forget). We are not at total war though . . . . and politicians are plotting the same ignominious abandonment of victory that was practiced in Vietnam. Civilians here at home are being deluded by the left.

Total victory means total war and that means we must be total warriors. Today we are not. The absolute belief in our being the good guys has been subverted by socialists who insist we are the bad guys. We no longer believe freedom is better than socialism. We no longer believe that winning is fair. We no longer believe in anything total. We see everything as relative. That is a weakness that will lose us the freedom that is the basis of our nation.

George W. Bush does not have the willingness to ask for a commitment to total war to defeat the Islamofascists. He cannot even call them Islamofascists. He calls the war against them the war on "terror", whatever that means. He is right about many things but he is losing this war because he cannot accept that the left does not even agree with him about the history of Vietnam or the evils of socialism. He allows the left to muddle the issues because he cannot see them or their beliefs clearly. I am not sure Bush even understands the history. So he muddles along while America suffers from the confusion of the issues by the left.

We must return to our belief in the freedom of America as an absolute superior form of government. We must become once again . . .FREEDOM WARRIORS! As long as we are no longer total warriors for freedom . . . we are headed for total defeat.