The American Spectator

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When the Going Gets Rough

12.11.06 @ 12:01AM

RUNNING SCARED
Re: Lawrence Henry's Victory, Yes, But ...

What is it about so many columns posted today where the writers have run up the white flag regarding Iraq? Baker/Hamilton and every other "has been" screw up must be breaking arms patting themselves on the back. The same goes for the vocal Bush haters, the NYT leading parade of "MSM," etc. They're congratulating themselves on still being "relevant" and calling the shots. Hmmmmm...even at the Spectator the beat goes on.

You scaredy cats from the D.C. area and along the Northeast section of this great country should really spend time in the West where the buffalo still roam and cowboys actually still ride the range. Many of us who live here still think a code of ethics is appropriate. Perhaps your frustration with our current President who seems to honor these, is that he has them at all. The sniping continues about his speech patterns and his "mental capacities". Gosh, a President who says exactly what he means....think of that! A regional comment is "aw shucks, don't that beat all?" Yup it sure does in the long run. Even the negatives coming out of the Spectator.
-- Edda Gahm
Diamond Bar, California

As you say, Mr. Henry, he (the President) is just not a talker. The one thing we need is the one thing we do not have. The press, however, especially the NYT, is full of talkers. As the comedian Henny Youngman might have said, "Take Frank Rich -- -- please!" Mr. Rich may be the least evolved lump of protoplasm on the planet, but he's a talker. His latest, "We have lost in Iraq." Whether we have or haven't, how would Frank Rich know? Sure, he WANTS us to LOSE, but that doesn't make it so. On the other hand, for those of us who want to WIN, saying so won't make it so either. So, where does that leave us?

The President has the one pulpit from which not only SAYING SOMETHING, but DOING SOMETHING, makes a difference. He could, for example, SAY that he's taken the Iraq Study Poop's report under advisement and is considering the next best course of action. Then, he could DO SOMETHING, like order special forces to neutralize Muqtada al-Sadr by helping him accidentally slip in the shower (if he ever takes one), send 50,000 more troops in to quell the insurgency and secure Baghdad, have some B2s begin circling daily over Tehran just out of range of those nifty new defense missiles our friends in Russia recently provided, and send a message to Assad that it might be prudent for him to consider riding on a bicycle, instead of in a car, for the next several months.

What, pray tell, does the President really have to lose politically? We've already lost the Congress. His legacy? What kind of legacy is LOSING?
-- Mike Showalter
Austin, Texas

Lawrence Henry does a great job collating the best recent articles on the present situation in Iraq. But I suggest the major point is missed. The fundamental mistake was the unforgivable hubris of assuming that a Middle Eastern nation should be rebuilt in the political image and likeness of the United States of America and that nothing else would do.

The United States was built by a group of White Anglo Saxon Protestant males, and please note this is a Mediterranean Catholic writing [and in grateful thanks]. The reason why it is called the "Protestant Work Ethic" and not Catholic, or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist, or Communist, or Socialist, is because the Protestants of that era had the exactly right combination of respect for their Creator, and respect for their own initiative and constructive accomplishments. It is not a coincidence that the Rio Grande marks the boundary where everyone, white and brown, prefer to live. I love my God, and I love my Church, but the fact is my Church has always been more comfortable with absolutely everyone in a state of abysmal poverty than any effort extended toward the generation (not theft or confiscation!) of wealth, and the promise of nothing in this world and everything in the next world simply fails to motivate people in this world. Much the same can be said of Islam, the only religion in living memory that promises ultimate reward in the next world in recompense for mass murder in this world. That is also why, as Victor Davis Hanson and other great writers have noted, Muslim mass murders are reduced to using tools and weapons created and manufactured by "infidels" to serve the demands of their concept of Allah.

If there is one absolute and unavoidable law of history, it must be George Santayana's "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Mark Moyar's Triumph Forsaken: the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 serves to remind all of us how when we cannot remember the past, we will always repeat it (well, not exactly, but as another historian has noted, history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes with itself). Iraq is not Vietnam, at least not in the sense that the Left would like to think, but it is Vietnam in the sense that almost identical political mistakes have been made, perhaps with the same fatal consequences. Most importantly, Moyar paints a picture of Ngo Dinh Diem, a man who unfortunately for all of us has no Iraqi equivalent, who was an ardent, incorruptible, extraordinarily savvy nationalist, who was ultimately murdered, and with him the future of South Vietnam, literally by the hands of his own people, but also thanks to the duplicity and hubris of almost every American of any influence. Moyar also paints a picture of an institution dedicated to the propagation of its own ideology and never the facts in context, the New York Times. And ultimately Moyar paints a picture of an America determined to mold South Vietnam in America's own political image and likeness, even though everyone with any knowledge in-theater, whether Vietnamese or American, knew that to be a fatal mistake.

Read Moyar and weep. Weep for the mistakes of four decades ago. And weep for the repetition of the same mistakes in Iraq today. And shame on every American who blindly attempts to force liberal "democracy" on lands with no history of the rule of law, no history of a religious base that balances this life with the next, and no history of peaceful internal industry of its own people.
-- Frank Natoli
Newton, New Jersey

I am continually amazed at the change of perception in American minds. I read Lawrence Henry's article this morning, after a long seven hour trip home to East Texas after caring for my mother, who broke her hip this week. It may seem rather churlish of me, and I ask forgiveness to TAS for even writing this letter, but I must ask, what do you think about sending our sons and daughters to fight for our freedoms when, we are feckless, ungrateful, most of all, easily surrender when things get tough? I knew in 2002 that when we began the war that if we didn't get it done thoroughly and completely, using great force and rendering many lives, that the likelihood would be giving up too soon because we are an instant society. And pardon me if no one believe me, that is why we will fall in less than 18 months, if we don't buck up and let the fighting me fight the battle and keep Washington congressmen, MSM, and other idiots babbling like mouthing monkeys, tell the military what to do.

As for this mother of a son who returns to his sp ops duties just before Christmas.... I am very angry. I am angry at an ungrateful nation. I am angry that we are foolish enough to not realize our enemies are within our borders, and angry that we are wimping out at every turn. And perhaps we deserve to fail....if we can't muster enough resolve to say as a generation, as a country, we will not fail, we will not FALL, on our watch, then unlike the greatest generation, we will be determined to have been.....the failure generation. We thrived on loving failure, hating ourselves, our freedoms, our great country and a great GOD. We bred the generation of Vietnam veteran haters, who when given leadership later, turned our country over to the enemy who would kill and subdue us. Such has happened countless times in ancient histories, when countries became indolent, living in luxury and self absorbed and sex absorbed.

So, excuse me while I prepare to ready for the final assault on family....that of a feckless country sending my son to a war that it has already decided to lose.
-- Beverly Gunn
East Texas Rancher
Once Proud American, still a proud mother of serving pilot

Lawrence Henry's agonizing observations and conclusions come close on the heels of his recent prissy indictment of speech habits of the Great Unwashed in America. It is clear that Mr. Henry believes if only George Bush spoke half as well as Henry's son, Bud, he could communicate to the asleep-at-the-switch nation, who seem to have forgotten Bush's one eloquent moment as he stood amid the rubble of WTC, embracing a wizened, weary firefighter. In fact, have forgotten the little we knew of the event itself -- having had most of the horror of it sanitized for television viewing.

Wake up, Mr. Henry - -the audience has changed. If Franklin Roosevelt rose from the grave for a fireside chat and appeared opposite American Idol, I would put my money on American Idol for ratings. The oratory of Lincoln lives, but if Bush made a stirring speech today, it would be distorted by the press and parodied on late night TV. We have no honest reporters and few unbiased opinion columnists. One thing that never seems to change, though, is the carrion crow "journalist" who sits on a wire, waiting patiently for his "road-kill" story. Never has to actually work at his trade.

Letter to the Editor

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