Why Democrats Want America To Lose the War

[John317]

Original: http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-democrats-want-to-lose-war.html

Why Democrats want to lose the war

Andrew McCarthy looks at Party of Defeat.

...

As David Horowitz and Ben Johnson recount in their bracing new book, Party of Defeat, Democrats and their favorite Nobel laureates (Jimmy Carter having earned that distinction before Gore) certainly have been prepared to go to the limit on Iraq — that is, the outer limit of shame, and shamelessness.

By the next year, before a throng of MoveOn.org activists, an audience today’s predominantly antiwar Democrats are more comfortable addressing, Gore railed that President Bush had “engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology” — knowing full well, the authors observe, that the term is resonant of fascism, Nazism and Communism. Indeed, Gore’s volte face ultimately included the assertion that “[h]istory will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy a fragile and unstable nation that did not attack us and posed no threat to us as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd.”

This from the second-highest official of an administration which had repeatedly saber-rattled and fired missiles at Iraq — the same Clinton administration which had made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. The administration whose top national-security officials told the 9/11 Commission as late as in 2004 — that is, even as Gore’s 180-degree turn was in mid-swirl — that its 1998 bombing of the al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was the right thing to do: After all, reliable intelligence showed the plant was a chemical-weapons venture jointly run by Sudan, Iraq, and al-Qaeda.

So why the treacherous flip-flop? In an ad horrendum indictment that piles fact onto sordid fact, Messrs. Horowitz and Johnson convincingly demonstrate that the modern Democrat leadership is singularly dedicated to delegitimizing and thus destroying the Bush presidency. Having calculated this political strategy, they are heedless of the fact that their tireless opposition, distortion, and propaganda can only lead to the defeat of the United States in what the authors aptly call the war with Islamofascism. In fact, many in the hard Left desire just that outcome. With both Bush and the America that he symbolizes as their targets, no betrayal is off the table.

David Horowitz, of course, is among the most gifted and consequential writers in the conservative movement — particularly insightful when diagnosing the Left’s bare-knuckles, will-to-power arsenal because he came of age in the radical orb. Ben Johnson is the managing editor of the feisty Frontpage Magazine, which is published online daily by Horowitz’s Freedom Center. In Party of Defeat, they recount “unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress.” Describing and documenting the thrall in which the radical Left now holds the Democratic Party, the authors forcefully argue that the resulting “house divided” may lack the unity of national purpose necessary to defeat the perilous threat of jihadism.

The descent of a great political party — one whose determined patriotism was critical to the nation’s victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — has been as predictable as it is disheartening. Many of today’s prominent Leftists were, in the sixties and seventies, heavily influenced by Soviet practices. The authors note that Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest Soviet intelligence official to defect to the West, has explained that “owing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks” of his office. A president cannot rally the public to any great national cause if he becomes the object of distrust and ridicule. Propaganda campaigns toward that end were a Soviet priority.

...

... the objection to force is primarily to its employment in the service of American national interests. Clinton, the most instinctively anti-military of presidents, routinely dispatched the American armed forces to carry out this or that “humanitarian” mission — even as he delegated to Gore the task of gutting our defense and intelligence services under the guise of “reinventing government.” Beyond this internationalism, the Left’s program, reaffirming the McGovern/Carter tradition, is that American national interests must be subordinated because America is the problem in the world, the “imperial oppressor of the weak and the poor.” Thus, it follows, the just solution to global conflict is to appease America’s enemies since surely they must have a point.

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In sum, the relentless assault on the justness of the cause and the honor with which it has been pursued, coupled with the remorseless determination to suppress any shred of positive news — the wild success of the surge, the rout of al-Qaeda (that would be the al-Qaeda Nancy Pelosi insists was never in Iraq before and would voluntarily leave if our forces did), the overriding reality that 26 million trapped in a hopeless, torturous dictatorship have been given the opportunity to live free — forms, according to the authors, a recipe for only one outcome: Defeat.

Defeat, of course, could also be framed as “victory” of a different kind. The fifth column operatives working toward America’s failure in Iraq seek not only to wrest power from Republicans — whom they limn as a threat markedly greater than radical Islam. They seek to wield power in a direction that is post-American. They are offended not merely by the national interests but by the very idea of America — free, self-determining, exceptional, and self-assured. That America denies their post-sovereign vision just as it thwarts bin Laden’s global caliphate.

[Bravus]

I'm sure some do want the US to lose the war as some kind of lesson, but many others, like me, instead said: "This is a war you cannot win" before the war started. Predicting that the war would be lost - an dyes, the odd very small bit of saying "I did tell you this before", is not the same thing as wanting America to lose. What most Democrats want is a time machine so that America never went into this misbegotten war in the first place.

[John317]

I understand that and agree with you that there are those who feel as you do and have the same reason, which is totally legitimate, of course. But there are also many, especially on the far Left, as you know, who have wanted the US to lose simply because they dislike (hate?) Bush and they frankly dislike their own country because they have been led to believe that it is evil. You see it on places like Moveon.org where lots of people make no secret of the fact that they simply "want to see the US defeated and defeated badly," as one socialist told me in 2003. As the article shows, this attitude has grown and spread throughout the Democratic party.

But my question is whether Obama and the Democrats, if they win the White House and control Congress, are going to want to go down in the history books as the party that made the decision to pull American troops out so that America loses a war it could have won. I believe the evidence shows that to pull all troops out prematurely at this juncture would cause us to lose everything Americans have fought and died for in Iraq and possibly in Afghanistan as well during the last 6 years.

Americans want an end to the war, true, but most American want to win if possible. (By "win," I mean bring peace and prosperity to Iraq.) I believe the evidence shows we are doing that. I don't think the Democrats will deliberately choose to pull the plug on all chances of victory in Iraq.

[Dr. Shane]

At this point it appears America is going to win the war. We are about to bring home more troops again.

[carolaa]

I find the whole discourse of win/lose to be quite perplexing. Exactly what constitutes a win or a loss? How do we know if we have won or lost? It seems to be totally up to interpretation.

[Jeannieb43]

I find the whole discourse of win/lose to be quite perplexing. Exactly what constitutes a win or a loss? How do we know if we have won or lost? It seems to be totally up to interpretation.

Agreed.

There's been no Declaration of War. This invasion was totally unilateral by a president with a Napoleon Complex who wanted to appear macho. There are no declared enemies. How will anybody even know when this "war" is over?? Or who has "won"??

The "war games" being played out in the Middle East are just stupid. The sooner we get out the better. But nobody will ever be able to say it's been "won."

[Woody]

I think that Saddam might have a different view if he was alive.

[jasd]

QR frame:

Win? Lose? --what's the goal? --what's the objective? underlying or not...

Almost everyone says that we lost the war in Vietnam. Let's look at one aspect of it...

Before the other signatories to the SEATO Treaty (UN auspices) demanded the USofA honor its commitment to the terms of the treaty - the French franc was the dominant currency in Indonesia (not the nation...). When we left,

the g'awful American greenback dollar was the prevailing currency.

Did we win or did we lose? Depends...,

on how one calculates the costs and benefits.

[carolaa]

I think that Saddam might have a different view if he was alive.

So was that the goal - to kill Saddam? If so, then why are we still there? We've won. Bring home the troops.

[jasd]

We could have made Mossad an offer too good to refuse - to nail Saddam; instead,

we now have bases ALL OVER Iraq and the -stans!

Where our treasure is - there is our heart also.

If we brought our troops home, who would man our bases in Iraq and all those -stans?

[Anderoo]

Jack Van Impe likes what's going on. Now we just have to figure out a way to bring China and Russia into it! Throw in a revived Roman Empire, two shakes of salt, and voilla! Armageddon!

[jasd]

>>Jack Van Impe likes what's going on. Now we just have to figure out a way to bring China and Russia into it! Throw in a revived Roman Empire, two shakes of salt, and voilla! Armageddon!<<

I’ve listened to a bit of Van Impe. I particularly appreciate the newsclips portion.

Per ‘China and Russia’: methinks, they’re already in “it” – and have been – alls the while we’ve been slapping ourselves on our collective back for being ‘the world’s only superEmpire’. Tchah! how might we have been the purported superEmpire with a military decimated (by close to 45%) by a Clinton Admin (read: Dem’crat Admin). (This was the military that Reagan secured for us – by am enormous increase in the natl debt.) The postClinton military now experiences difficulty replacing even the equipment being lost through attrition because, a segment of our population is, like, so-o-o whining about ‘costs’ (we have so-o-o many social needs!). Never mind the fact that

we haven’t had a merchant navy for practically as long as I’ve lived.

The whole world is arming – ‘cepting us.

Moreover, does it contribute to our superEmpire status to have the Fed (owned by a consortium of international money syndicates) conspiring to bankrupt us? Yes, mebbe not THE Armageddon of Revelation, but definitely,

an Armageddon of sorts, in the form of some rough Beast, is slouching – in our direction: the salt-shaker emptied...

[jasd]

>>(Been walking through the pasture, need to scrape something off my boots)<<

Mebbe, you better start saving those scrapings, y’know, for necessaries and such; like, a Victory garden...?

Who knows but what they'lls soon enough be more valuable than gold!