A Memorial Day Reality Check

In the battle for Iraq, America is winning. While we picnic on this spring day at home, we owe a mighty thank you to all those on the front lines, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in places less visible, and in wars gone before.

For anyone fed up with the doom-saying of too much MSM reporting on Iraq, here is a link to reality: The Iraq Status Report (launched recently — in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of War, and the Long War Journal — by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, with which I am affiliated).

But in the Long War for Freedom, far too much remains in the balance. In Washington, our diplomats keep taking the achievements earned with blood and sweat in the triple-digit temperatures of the battlefield and trading them away for meaningless words from our enemies on other fronts. In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers die fighting for freedom — not only for the freedom of people in far-off lands, but to defend America’s freedom against enemies who aspire to destroy our way of life. Meanwhile, from inside a Washington thus protected by real courage and sacrifice, bevies of “threat management” experts, consultants, diplomats and politicians are constructing a parallel world of peace on paper — built on false promises from North Korea; false hopes of diplomatically containing Iran; the latest false peace in Lebanon/Hezbollahstan; the downplaying of threats posed by such enemy regimes as those of Syria and Venezuela; and of course the endless unrolling of the Palestinian “roadmap” which has already led to the establishment in Gaza of terrorist Hamastan.

These are American policies which Russia and China, in charting their own maps of the world’s future, must be watching with interest (Russia, as in Polonium 210; and China as in the recent announcement from Chengdu authorities, reported by the Associated Press, that families who have suffered a child killed or badly crippled in the recent earthquake “could get a certificate allowing them to have another child”).

America deserves better than to be re-styled as a sort of new-age negotiator, denigrating our own strength and values in the hope that dignifying our enemies with handshakes and concessions will buy us safety — at least for another Memorial Day, or maybe two, at least until sometime in the next administration. If it’s “change” we’re after, how about the kind of change that Winston Churchill believed in when in April of 1941 he told his embattled countrymen : “In the long run — believe me, for I know — the action of the United States will be dictated not by methodical calculations of profit and loss, but by moral sentiment, and by that gleaming flash of resolve which lifts the hearts of men and nations, and springs from the spiritual foundations of life itself.” … All the better if it does not require yet another Pearl Harbor before America, again, awakes.