The Choice: Victory or Depravity

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge -- and more.-- John F. Kennedy: Inaugural Address

Last Sunday, while Iraq joined the Free World, Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid proclaimed "We need an exit strategy so that we know what victory is and how we can get there. ... Iraq is clearly important, but there are so many bigger threats to our national security..."

Last Sunday, around the time Reid was speaking, a mortar was aimed at a polling station in Iraq. It went astray, fell into the village, and killed a young woman on her way to vote. The men who fired the shell were pleased. If they did not kill a voting station, they at least killed a voter. One shell, one voter -- the unashamed arithmetic of terrorism. Indeed, the killers were just voting too. In their way. In Iraq they get to vote like this every day. If there were nobody around to stop them, they would vote like this house to house, person to person, day after day, with the gun and the grenade, with the knife and the axe. Many of them label themselves "The Party of Return" -- that is of return to the rape-rooms, the shredders, the mass graves, and the absolute power to anything to anyone at anytime.

Last Sunday, American reporter Geraldo Rivera gazed at the young woman's shattered body under a filthy cloth in the back of a pick-up truck and asked: "What's the point of this insurgency? What are they fighting for? To kill an innocent woman who wants to go vote? What's the point of this? What are these "heroes" after? This makes any civilized person absolutely sick" -- *

Does it?

Last Sunday, Harry Reid proclaimed "We need an exit strategy so that we know what victory is and how we can get there..."

Last Sunday Reid's friend and fellow Democrat John Kerry proclaimed, "It's hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can't and doesn't vote."

Last Sunday,the self-appointed representatives of the "whole portion of the country that can't and doesn't vote" voted in their daily manner of voting with a new, innovative form of their depravity, they used a boy with Down Syndrome and the mind of a four year old to deliver their "vote:"

Amar Ahmed Mohammed was 19 years old. But the fact that he had the mind of a four-year-old did not stop the insurgency's hard men as they strapped explosives to his chest and guided him to a voting centre in suburban Al-Askan.

Before dawn yesterday in Baghdad, his parents strapped his broken remains to the roof of a taxi to lead a sorrowful procession to the holy city of Najaf. There, they gave him a ceremonial wash and shrouded him in white cotton before burying him in the shadow of the shrine of Imam Ali, the sainted founder of their Shiite creed.

Unlike the hundreds of others in the region who knowingly volunteered for an explosive death, Amar died because he did not know. He had Down syndrome.

Last Sunday, Teddy Kennedy proclaimed "The best way to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that we have no long-term designs on their country is for the Administration to withdraw some troops now..."

Last Sunday, as Iraq became a member of the Free World, the man who bears the name "Kennedy" in the Senate looked for the means to cut the price, drop the burden, ease the hardship, betray the friend, reward the foe, and assure the survival and success of tyranny. This much he pledged and more.

Last Sunday, the man who wished to be the leader of the Free World looked for the means to discredit the bravery and the thirst for freedom millions expressed by walking miles through a gauntlet of death in Iraq to place a ballot in a box and have their finger stained with ink.

Last Sunday, Henry Reid, the leader of the Congressional Democrats, once the Party of Freedom, summed up their "Foreign Policy" when he proclaimed, "We need an exit strategy so that we know what victory is and how we can get there..."

In the core of this statement, we hear the bass drum mantra of the dissolving Democrats. It has been rising in frequency over the last few weeks and we can expect to hear it increase in tempo as time goes by: "Exit strategy, exit strategy, boom, boom, boom." Steel yourself to it, because it will be all that you hear from the Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media.

But what struck me as odd in Reid's statement was the riff that followed his drum solo, "....so that we know what victory is and how we get there..."

What victory is?

Clearly, Mr. Reid and his fellow travelers have been without victory for so long that they have forgotten it. Let me remind them.

n. vic-to-ry
n. pl. vic - to - ries
1. Defeat of an enemy or opponent.
2. Success in a struggle against difficulties or an obstacle.
3. The state of having triumphed.
[Middle English, from Old French victorie, from Latin victria, from victor, victor; see victor.]

Synonyms: victory, conquest, triumph These nouns denote winning a war, struggle, or competition.

Victory refers especially to the final defeat of an enemy or opponent: "Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be." -- Winston S. Churchill.

Conquest connotes subduing, subjugating, or achieving control over: "Conquest of illiteracy comes first." -- John Kenneth Galbraith.

Triumph denotes a victory or success that is especially noteworthy because it is decisive, significant, or spectacular: preaching the eventual triumph of good over evil.

What "victory" is is so clear and so present and so deeply and widely known to all people of common sense, that it is little wonder the Reids of our realm neither know what it is nor see its shape. It would not be the first time in the recent dishonorable history of the Reids that ideology and political ambition clouds the mind, blinds the eye, stunts the intellect and kills the soul. Like the pious and pure reformed or newly rich they pander to, the Reids of our realm are very different from you and I.

It seems to me that the Reids of our realm have pasted in their precious memory scrapbooks an image of "victory" that was spawned at the Fall of Saigon. Instead of the ignominy of defeat that it encapsulated, instead of the death camps and killing fields that it spawned in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia, the Fall of Saigon is the Reid-Kerry-Kennedy's "finest hour." For them it embodies the victory of their ideology over traditional America. And they look for the now fading frisson of this moment to be reenacted in Iraq; to give them again that long lost thrill of their youth. For the Reid-Kerry-Kennedys this memory of their youth has become the guiding fantasy of their dotage; that America once again be brought low, that that which America has helped build be destroyed, and that America be humbled and returned to that status trumpeted at the end of Vietnam -- "a pitiful, helpless giant."

Of course, an "exit strategy" (a la Vietnam) is not a victory, nor will the price paid in needless deaths, civil war and genocide be paid, this time, overseas alone but here at home as well. To endeavor hide this reality by making the phrase "Exit Strategy" into a synonym for "Victory" is the worst kind of "Newspeak" -- something at which the Reid-Kerry-Kennedys and their cohort excel at.

But victory is not something declared over your shoulder as you hurriedly depart the flanks of your friends at the height of the battle. Victory is the end-state of war, achieved when your enemy is not only defeated, but recognizes that he has been defeated. To answer Mr. Reid's question, victory is the utter defeat by force of arms of your enemy. It is not a hearty handshake and a cheerful "Goodbye and thanks for the fish," as soon as can be managed. Victory, above all, means -- as every schoolboy knows -- you won, they lost. They lost by surrendering, by running away, or by becoming dead. War is not a game you win by leaving it. War is a game of last man standing. And in this war in Iraq, where the deepest depravity of our enemy is made visible every day, where our enemy has told us again and again, in word and deed, that only our death will satisfy him, winning it matters very much, now and in the future that is unfolding before us.

In Vietnam, it became risible to say "If we don't fight them in Vietnam, they will kill us in New York." In this war, they have already killed us in New York and in our capitol. Is it still the advice of the Reids that we not fight them in Iraq and Afghanistan and wherever else they may be? Having had our citizens slaughtered at their desks, is it not the most moral of obligations of the government, the military and the citizens of these states to seek out and destroy those who would repeat and repeat this act; to become, in the end utterly and completely victorious with no equivocation of any kind?

Last Sunday, to judge by their repeated words and stated positions, the necessity of victory is not something these leaders of the Democratic party see as a needful thing. In the moral swamp of the Reid-Kerry-Kennedys it doesn't matter if evil men and tyrannical systems win as long as America is made to lose. Sunk in the minor depravities of frustrated political ambitions, they cannot see -- they cannot allow themselves or their supporters to see -- the deep and abiding depravity of those who kidnap, execute, behead, blow-up, and otherwise destroy men, women, and children en masse in search of a return to absolute power. With their gaze fixed firmly inward on their own stunted egos, the Reid-Kerry-Kennedys cannot catch a glimpse of the depravity that would strap explosives to the body of a retarded child and send him out to do their killing.

And yet the depravity of this is clearly visible to those with eyes to see, ears to hear and souls alive. Are we then to conclude that the politics represented by Reid-Kerry-Kennedy is blind, deaf and soulless? While such was once unthinkable when it came to the Democratic party, it is, of late, becoming all the more a sad past, present and future reality.

Perhaps, though, we judge them too harshly. Perhaps their statements and their policies are but a nostalgic yearning among these lifelong Washingtonians for the more complex and nuanced days of yore when all was compromise, committees and conferences; when the United Nations gave great meetings and threw better parties; when the depravity of regimes a world away was but a faint and annoying buzz at the edge of the festivities, and not the rising roar of the jetliners heading towards the North Tower on a fine September Morning. Yes, that is a kinder and gentler way of thinking about the Reid-Kerry-Kennedys of our realm.

Let us see them not as aging and increasingly irrelevant politicians toying with treason, but as ladies and gentlemen sitting about in The Old Washingtonians Club with iced beverages being brought to them on demand, telling each other that 'Evil is but a misunderstanding,' 'Peace is at hand if only the bribe is large enough,' and, perhaps, 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.'

Yes, let us leave them like that. Secure in their fellowship, draped with the soft robes of privilege, and warming themselves before admiration of millions of our fellow citizens who believe they remain the Alpha and the Omega of "progressive" politics. They have all, over the years, already made their choice between victory and depravity. They have nothing to worry about. Their Old Washingtonians Club is far outside mortar range, isn't it? And, more important, children with Down Syndrome and explosives strapped on their bodies would never be allowed in, would they?

Posted by Vanderleun at February 4, 2005 8:45 AM