Counsels of Cowardice and Defeat

Counsels of Cowardice and Defeat

David Horowitz
Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004

A political ad was placed in the New York Times by the radical organization MoveOn.org, a group that has provided a platform for attacks on the Bush Administration by Howard Dean, Al Gore and members of the Kerry-Edwards campaign. The ad was an open letter purportedly from college students and began: “President Bush Will You Call On Us To Die?”

This was not really criticism of the President’s policy choices or of America’s war to liberate Iraq, but rather a frontal attack on both. In addition to its blunt and unwarranted assertion that service to one’s country was equivalent to a death sentence, it falsely insinuated that the President was planning a military draft, which would make the service as involuntary as ... well ... a death sentence would be. Finally, it demanded that the President provide “a plan to end the war,” and did so without expressing the slightest concern about the war’s outcome.

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In other words, in the midst of America’s armed conflict with a terrifying enemy the MoveOn.org ad was an incitement to self-interest, cowardice and defeat. The ad ended with a rephrasing of John Kerry’s famous question about Vietnam – a war he first abandoned and then turned against: “Most importantly, when will we know that the last of our friends has died?”

What has happened to the moral fiber of this country that a group as close to the center of American political life as MoveOn.org would counsel cowardice, selfishness and defeat in the midst of a war with an enemy as ruthless and determined as the terrorists in Iraq?

The war in Iraq was authorized in congressional resolution by both political parties. It is a war to enforce a unanimous Security Council ultimatum, and sixteen ignored Security Council ultimatums before that. It is a war to depose one of the worst tyrants of the modern world, whose removal is a policy requested by two successive American presidents, again representing both political parties. It is a war in which every enemy of the United States is ranged on the other side.

What has happened to the moral fiber of this country that an organization like MoveOn.org – along with many leaders of the Democratic Party – should actively seek to sabotage this war by turning America’s youth against it and demanding a retreat from the field of battle without condition?

The retreat from Vietnam and Cambodia that Mr. Kerry did so much to encourage thirty years ago had an unhappy ending that critics of this war seem eager to forget. That retreat resulted in the deaths of two-and-half million Indo-Chinese peasants whom the Communists slaughtered when they came to power. This is the infamous bloodbath whose prospect John Kerry dismissed as a possibility when he debated Swift Boat vet John O’Neill on the Dick Cavett show in 1971. John Kerry proved wrong then. What if the proponents of retreat from Iraq prove wrong this time?

If the United States were to lose the battle for Iraq (and a retreat without condition would ensure that), there would be a similar bloodbath. Every Iraqi who has fought for their freedom, every ally of America in Iraq will be put to the sword by Zarqawi and his terrorist cohorts – many quite literally. The terrorist government of Iran, whose jihadists are now engaged in fighting our troops alongside the agents of Saddam Hussein, will emerge from our retreat as the dominant force in a radicalized Middle East. Revenge against the crusaders will be high on its agenda.

It is time for us to take the counsels of doom in our midst seriously. The threat we face is not only external. American troops can army in the field of battle. What America cannot do is win the war on terror if the forces of selfishness and cowardice and defeatism divide us at home.

David Horowitz is the author of "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left," published by Regnery.