Defeatist media, politicians danger with Iran
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
Any president who asks Congress to move against a nuclear-obsessed Iran had better seek extraordinary war powers of censorship and sedition enforcement on the home front – or skip the whole thing.
We’d say Americans are tired of watching politicians and the media stealing victories from soldiers and Marines and handing them to ragtag bands of insurgents.
It started in Vietnam and could continue in Iraq, although this week seems much the better with the capture of Zarqawi and President Bush’s lightning trip to Baghdad.
In Vietnam, America was all-victorious on the battlefield. Our only loss – unfortunately the decisive one – came at home.
In Iraq, America and its allies drove to Baghdad in only a little more time than a taxi driver could have driven the route.
Syria, Libya, the Saudis, even Iran seemed poised to give us a blank check, so fearsome were we in deposing Saddam Hussein. Actually, Libya did turn over its nuclear weapons, apparently out of fear that after Iraq, they might be next.
But then it happened – the “peace crusade.”
First came the attack against the war from the radical left, followed soon by the extreme wing of the Democratic Party, then by the Democrat party leaders, then by a sprinkling of self-styled “we can’t win” Republicans.
Until the post-John F. Kennedy days of Vietnam, America never had to question the patriotism of our newspapers, broadcast media and Hollywood movie-makers. The opinion molders of that increasingly quaint era knew instinctively that you didn’t offer aid and comfort to the enemy. Wars were hell but the idea, once in them, was to win.
It’s very post-modern that much of this country’s media and some reporters function as propaganda arms of our enemies.
By the mid-1970s, the dictators of North Vietnam were getting better press than President Johnson and our fighting men and women. Things haven’t moved that far in Iraq, but no thanks to such as Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats’ most recent candidate for president, who called this week for the U.S. to set a date certain to get out of Iraq.
President Bush’s initiative to democratize Iraq will pay dividends. But we need to remember that in ridding the world of Saddam the U.S. and its allies did what Winston Churchill wanted to do with Adolf Hitler but could not because of the politicians of his day – namely go after a homicidal maniac while there was still time.
No matter that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were not built yet – or more likely not found yet. Like Hitler, he would get them. At the beginning of the war, Saddam had far, far more military power at his disposal than Hitler at a comparable time in the run up to World War II (See Tony Blankley’s column atop page 13 this week and see our Web site, www.mbj.com in the Editorials Section for more on our views about stopping nutty dictators while there is still time).
It’s difficult in modern America to even talk about stopping mad dictators. For all the billions we spend on education, two, going on three, generations seem to never have cracked a history book.
The ultimate put-down once was that the teens and twenty-somethings didn’t know the dates of World War II.
Now, a sizeable percentage of young people not only do not know the dates but think Germany and Japan were our allies, according to a recent national poll quoted on Fox News Channel and elsewhere.
June 2006
