But much like the "Coexist" stickers on their Volvo and Prius bumpers, their intended target for the message isn't riding behind them on the way to the Whole Foods Market. Our Left may have had enough war, but our enemies have not tired of trying to kill us despite the beat down we've inflicted on them:
Just days before the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. counterterrorism officials were chasing a credible but unconfirmed al-Qaida threat to use a car bomb on bridges or tunnels in New York City or Washington. It was the first "active plot" timed to coincide with the somber commemoration of the terror group's 9/11 attacks a decade ago that killed nearly 3,000 people.
I mean, really, we haven't even learned all we need to know about the 9/11 attacks themselves let alone chased them down in Afghanistan and Pakistan to end their sanctuaries.
But no, according the the Left we've "over-reacted" to the attacks. A decade of stopping any more big attacks has led too many Americans to conclude that this means that there is no threat rather than that vigorously waging war in the open and in the shadows has so far stopped attacks from getting through. Krauthammer has it exactly right:
The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11 — al-Qaeda turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack — thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale and sending us into national decline.
The secretary of defense says that al-Qaeda is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaeda did not spontaneously combust. Yet, in a decade Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam, jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world — to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.
What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American war on terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency and lethality — now so cheaply denigrated as an “overreaction.”
And if we've over-reacted, just where are the camps? After a decade of so-called "over-reacting" in a war that the Left insists is a war on Islam, American Moslems are doing pretty well, think they are doing alright, and increasingly reject terrorism. If we had over-reacted--or if Moslems even thought we had over-reacted--wouldn't polling data show an increasingly isolated and angry Moslem population in America? As I've noted before, one of the sights that I enjoy the most is seeing a head-scarved Moslem woman driving her mini-van around town. This simple act of living a life in America going shopping and picking up the children from school is a dagger aimed at the heart of the jihadi view of how the world should be. The only "over-reacting" is being done by the Left that insists that any measure to defend ourselves from jihadis--or indeed any effort to defend our society's right to defend ourselves--is "anti-Islamic."
Don't buy this whole line of rot from the same crowd that is weepy about our Cold War united front now. Back then, they tried to end the Cold War to live with the Soviet Union and, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, argued that the collapse proved that the Cold War was unnecessary, as if winning proved that the long effort to win was pointless. These people are simply clueless on military and foreign policy matters.
Have we had enough war? Yeah. We've had more than enough. I'd love to end this war. I'd be happy if young men and women didn't come back in caskets or crippled in body or mind because they defend us. But it isn't up to us to decide that, now is it? We can pretend it is--for a while. But if we retreat before we've won, our enemies will follow us home--again.
What the Left knows about foreign policy can fit on a bumper sticker. And that knowledge can't withstand a 5 mile per hour impact with reality. Fight this war. Win it. That's when it will be enough.
