Back then we certainly didn't acknowledge we were at war with Islamic fascism. Or even the terrorism spawned by that ideology. Yet our enemies were at war with us all the same.
After nearly six years at war, both our Congress and the British Labour Party have tired of being at war. So they will ban the concept. Our Congress:
The House Armed Services Committee is banishing the global war on terror from the 2008 defense budget.And also the British:
This is not because the war has been won, lost or even called off, but because the committee’s Democratic leadership doesn’t like the phrase.
A memo for the committee staff, circulated March 27, says the 2008 bill and its accompanying explanatory report that will set defense policy should be specific about military operations and “avoid using colloquialisms.”
The “global war on terror,” a phrase first used by President Bush shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., should not be used, according to the memo. Also banned is the phrase the “long war,” which military officials began using last year as a way of acknowledging that military operations against terrorist states and organizations would not be wrapped up in a few years.
The British government has stopped using the phrase "war on terror" to refer to the struggle against political and religious violence, according to a Cabinet minister's prepared remarks for a Monday speech.
International Development Secretary Hilary Benn, a rising star of the governing Labour Party, says in a speech prepared for delivery in New York that the expression popularized by President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks strengthens terrorists by making them feel part of a bigger struggle.
This is just stupid. The enemy doesn't need us to make them feel like they are part of a bigger struggle! Haven't these people been paying attention? The whole point of jihadi terrorism is the bigger struggle to compel the Islamic world and the non-Moslem world to submit to their twisted form of Islam.
So our decision to call what we are in a war hasn't strengthened terrorists. Enemy successes in killing our people strengthens them and our refusal to fight the enemy before 9/11 strengthened the enemy.
A war by any other name is still a war.
We may check out of that war for a while by calling what we are doing something other than war, but it will not stop the war. It is simply not true that you need two sides to wage a war. Our enemies have long believed themselves at war with the West over the big issue of reestablishing the caliphate and then extending that caliphate as far as the sword can expand its realm. It is a mission from God, as Strategypage notes on many occasions. How much bigger can the mission get from their point of view?
Our next holiday from history won't last a decade.
UPDATE: Orson Scott Card depresses me with his article on the dissipation of honor and the price we will pay for this:
Nobody knows the problems as well as our soldiers do. But they are volunteers -- poor souls, they're the ones who still believe in duty, honor, and country. They joined up with the promise that when they were put in harm's way, it would be to accomplish something.
President Bush has kept that promise. He has used our military forces in the service of a noble and practicable cause. In the real world, democracies really have been established when they are protected, by force of arms, from enemy invasion and internal revolt.
But they have never succeeded when that protection is withdrawn. The enemies of democracy in Iraq are heavily supplied and trained from outside; what stands against them is the fledgling Iraqi defense force and the U.S. and our few remaining allies.
If we leave, Iraqis will despair. It will either be surrender or civil war. And all who have tried to make democracy work will either have to flee or be murdered. We know that our enemies there have no qualms about killing anybody they want to.
The Democratic leadership in Congress doesn't care about the lives of our allies. They're just Arabs after all, and the American elite doesn't value foreign lives or foreign freedom, if by sacrificing them they can gain a temporary political advantage here at home.
And as for our own troops, let's not kid ourselves. Right now we have the chance to win the war against Islamic Fascism while it can still be done relatively cheaply.
What about when Muslims are united against the whole world? What about when they are poised to exterminate Israel? What about when bloody war rages on the streets of Europe's cities? What about when terrorism returns to the malls and bus stations and port cities of America? What about when the nukes start blowing up on American or other free-world soil?We will fight this war, whether we like it or not. But if we don't fight it now, when it's still cheap and our enemies are still weak, then we'll fight it later, when it's on American or allied soil, and the cost in blood -- ours and theirs -- will be appallingly higher.
The Democrats in Congress are not saving American lives. They're trying to fool us into giving them American votes in exchange for a promise of peace that they cannot keep.
We are at war whether we like it or not. We not only have to win in Iraq, we have to win in Iran, and very soon, or we will truly hate the cost we pay later, as an army of draftees instead of volunteers fights under far worse circumstances against a far more powerful enemy.
Remember the name "Nancy Pelosi." It will stand someday beside the name "Neville Chamberlain" in the pantheon of deluded fools whose poll-following stupidity led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their own nation's citizens, and the deaths of millions of others who would have lived if those deluded fools had done what was necessary to preserve their national honor.
Our troops die for duty, honor, and country. Too many of our leaders find this incomprehensible. Heck, too many find it too tough to stand by the declaration of war they voted for four and a half years ago.
We can run from this war. But only for so long.
Read it all, as the saying goes.
