Murtha's lesson

It has begun. I hate to admit it, but I think that America will lose the war in Iraq and, eventually, any war we fight from now on. This country is beaten, and its people are no longer the Americans of history.

It used to be that when the Americans showed up on the scene, the end was a foregone conclusion: America would win. Yes, there would be fighting to be done, but we would win. This nation had backbone, grit, courage, determination, and a strong sense of right and wrong. Now, it appears that we have none. Or, if some of our leaders do appear to have it, that others don’t want it demonstrated, for it shows up their own inadequacy.

Do you remember when President Bush visited the site of the World Trade Center, three days after 9/11? When someone yelled, “We can’t hear you,” he responded, “I hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon!" Do you remember how you were glad that this was the person who would be going after Al-Qaeda, and not Al Gore? And now, where are we? In four years, we have come to the place that a supposed patriot, John Murtha, says that we can’t win, it’s time to retreat. How could this come to pass?

Because we aren’t the people that used to be Americans, that’s how. As Zell Miller reminded us, last year, when Wendell Wilkie ran against Roosevelt in 1940, he did not question the war against Germany. But we have a party that is willing, with troops in the field, to do that very thing. When John Murtha called for America to cut and run, he set in motion the same thing that happened to our country during the Viet Nam war. Even though we were winning in 1967, the Communists knew that they could win because of the likes of Jane Fonda, and the anti-war movement.

In 1995, the Wall Street Journal interviewed former Colonel Bui Tin, who received the formal surrender of South Viet Nam, in 1975, and asked. “Was the American antiwar movement important to Hanoi's victory?” Colonel Tin’s answer was “It was essential to our strategy. Support of the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda, and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.”

The actions and words of John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, Howard Dean, John Kerry (big surprise!), and the National Democratic Party have fulfilled the words of Osama Bin Laden, when he was interviewed in 1998:

“As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger.” Speaking with ABC reporter John Miller, Bin Laden tells of his feelings when Clinton pulled out of Somalia: “After a few blows, ... [America] rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers.... I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim.”

And, I wonder, so was every Democrat? If we learned nothing from Viet Nam, apparently Bin Laden and the terrorists did.