| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Louis Owen" |
| Date: |
16 Dec 2003 07:04:21 PM |
| Object: |
War, hate and fear |
AT WAR
The Campaign of Hate and Fear
Some of my fellow Democrats are unpatriotic.
BY ORSON SCOTT CARD
Tuesday, December 16, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
In one of Patrick O'Brian's novels about the British navy during the
Napoleonic wars, he dismisses a particularly foolish politician by saying
that his political platform was "death to the Whigs." Watching the primary
campaigns among this year's pathetic crop of Democratic candidates, I can't
help but think that their campaigns would be vastly improved if they would
only rise to the level of "Death to the Republicans."
Instead, their platforms range from Howard Dean's "Bush is the devil" to
everybody else's "I'll make you rich, and Bush is quite similar to the
devil." Since President Bush is quite plainly not the devil, one wonders why
anyone in the Democratic Party thinks this ploy will play with the general
public.
There are Democrats, like me, who think it will not play, and should not
play, and who are waiting in the wings until after the coming electoral
debacle in order to try to remake the party into something more resembling
America.
But then I watch the steady campaign of the national news media to try to
win this for the Democrats, and I wonder. Could this insane,
self-destructive, extremist-dominated party actually win the presidency? It
might--because the media are trying as hard as they can to pound home the
message that the Bush presidency is a failure--even though by every rational
measure it is not.
And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the
terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him--which means that
if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the
anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement
to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning
that lies ahead of us.
Osama bin Laden's military strategy is: If you make a war cost enough,
Americans will give up and go home. Now, bin Laden isn't actually all that
bright; his campaign to make us go home is in fact what brought us into
Afghanistan and Iraq. But he's still telling his followers: Keep killing
Americans and eventually, antigovernment factions within the United States
will choose to give up the struggle.
It's what happened in Somalia, isn't it? And it's what happened in Vietnam,
too.
Reuters recently ran a feature that trumpeted the "fact" that U.S.
casualties in Iraq have now surpassed U.S. casualties in the first three
years of the Vietnam War. Never mind that this is a specious distortion of
the facts, which depends on the ignorance of American readers. The fact is
that during the first three years of the war in Vietnam, dating from the
official "beginning" of the war in 1961, American casualties were low
because (a) we had fewer than 20,000 soldiers there, (b) most of them were
advisers, deliberately trying to avoid a direct combat role, (c) our few
combat troops were special forces, who generally get to pick and choose the
time and place of their combat, and (d) because our presence was so much
smaller, there were fewer American targets than in Iraq today.
Compare our casualties in Iraq with our casualties in Vietnam when we had a
comparable number of troops, and by every rational measure--casualties per
thousand troops, casualties per year, or absolute number of
casualties--you'll find that the Iraq campaign is far, far less costly than
Vietnam. But the media want Americans to think that Iraq is like Vietnam--or
rather, that Iraq is like the story that the Left likes to tell about
Vietnam.
Vietnam was a quagmire only because we fought it that way. If we had closed
North Vietnam's ports and carried the war to the enemy, victory could have
been relatively quick. However, the risk of Chinese involvement was too
great. Memories of Korea were fresh in everyone's minds, and so Vietnam was
fought in such a way as to avoid "another Korea." That's why Vietnam became,
well, Vietnam.
But Iraq is not Vietnam. Nor is the Iraq campaign even the whole war. Of
course there's still fighting going on. Our war is against
terrorist-sponsoring states, and just because we toppled the governments of
two of them doesn't mean that the others aren't still sponsoring terrorism.
Also, there is a substantial region in Iraq where Saddam's forces are still
finding support for a diehard guerrilla campaign.
In other words, the Iraq campaign isn't over--and President Bush has
explicitly said so all along. So the continuation of combat and casualties
isn't a "failure" or a "quagmire," it's a "war." And during a war, patriotic
Americans don't blame the deaths on our government. We blame them on the
enemy that persists in trying to kill our soldiers.
Am I saying that critics of the war aren't patriotic?
Not at all--I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that
those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush
picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to
gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic.
They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the
national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked
Americans abroad and on American soil.
Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their
personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and
say they "support our troops" all they like--but it doesn't change the fact
that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for
their temporary political advantage.
Think what it will mean if we elect a Democratic candidate who has committed
himself to an antiwar posture in order to get his party's nomination.
Our enemies will be certain that they are winning the war on the
battleground that matters--American public opinion. So they will continue to
kill Americans wherever and whenever they can, because it works.
Our soldiers will lose heart, because they will know that their commander in
chief is a man who is not committed to winning the war they have risked
death in order to fight. When the commander in chief is willing to call
victory defeat in order to win an election, his soldiers can only assume
that their lives will be thrown away for nothing. That's when an army,
filled with despair, becomes beatable even by inferior forces.
When did we lose the Vietnam War? Not in 1968, when we held an election that
hinged on the war. None of the three candidates (Humphrey, Nixon, Wallace)
were committed to unilateral withdrawal. Not during Nixon's "Vietnamization"
program, in which more and more of the war effort was turned over to
Vietnamese troops. In fact, Vietnamization, by all measures I know about,
worked.
We lost the war when the Democrat-controlled Congress specifically banned
all military aid to South Vietnam, and a beleaguered Republican president
signed it into law. With Russia and China massively supplying North Vietnam,
and Saigon forced to buy pathetic quantities of ammunition and spare parts
on the open market because America had cut off all aid, the imbalance doomed
them, and they knew it.
The South Vietnamese people were subjected to a murderous totalitarian
government (and the Hmong people of the Vietnamese mountains were victims of
near-genocide) because the U.S. Congress deliberately cut off military
aid--even after almost all our soldiers were home and the Vietnamese were
doing the fighting themselves.
That wasn't about "peace," that was about political posturing and an
indecent lack of honor. Is that where we're headed again?
This time an enemy attacked civilian targets on our soil. The enemy--a
conspiracy of terrorists sponsored by a dozen or so nations and unable to
function without their aid--was hard to attack directly; so the only
feasible strategy was to remove, by force if necessary, the governments that
sheltered and sponsored terrorism.
I would not have chosen Afghanistan and Iraq to start with; Syria, Iran,
Sudan and Libya were much more culpable and militarily more important to
neutralize as sponsors of terror. (They say that Libya and Sudan have
changed their tune lately, but I have my doubts.)
But once we chose Afghanistan and Iraq, once we began a serious campaign, we
must continue the war until we achieve our objective, which is to remove all
the governments that sponsor terror, or convince the remaining sponsors of
terror to absolutely, thoroughly, and completely reverse their policy and
actively seek out and destroy all terrorists that once had safe harbor
within their borders. Anything less, and all our effort--all those American
lives--were wasted.
And in the midst of this global struggle, when both parties should have
united, disagreeing at times about methods and priorities, but never about
the steadfast will of the American people to see the war through to a
successful conclusion, we find that the candidates of the party out of power
are attacking the president for fighting the war at all, and are calling the
war itself a "failure" even though there is no rational measure by which it
can be said to have failed--especially since we're still fighting it.
In a war, the enemy probes for weaknesses, and always finds some. When they
find a weakness in your positions, they teach you where it is by attacking
there; then you learn, and strengthen that point or avoid that mistake.
Meanwhile, you constantly probe the enemy for weakness. The result is that
even when you are overwhelmingly victorious, the enemy still finds ways to
inflict damage along the way.
The goal of our troops in Iraq is not to protect themselves so completely
that none of our soldiers die. The goal of our troops is to destroy the
enemy, some of whom you do not find except when they emerge to attack our
forces and, yes, sometimes inflict casualties.
Our national media are covering this war as if we were "losing the
peace"--even though we are not at peace and we are not losing. Why are they
doing this? Because they are desperate to spin the world situation in such a
way as to bring down President Bush.
It's not just the war, of course. Notice that even though our recent
recession began under President Clinton, the media invariably refer to it as
if Mr. Bush had caused it; and even though by every measure, the recession
is over, they still cover it as if the American economy were in desperate
shape.
This is the same trick they played on the first President Bush, for his
recession was also over before the election--but the media worked very hard
to conceal it from the American public. They did it as they're doing it now,
with yes-but coverage: Yes, the economy is growing again, but there aren't
any new jobs. Yes, there are new jobs now, but they're not good jobs.
And that's how they're covering the war. Yes, the Taliban were toppled, but
there are still guerrillas fighting against us in various regions of
Afghanistan. (As if anyone ever expected anything else.) Yes, Saddam was
driven out of power incredibly quickly and with scant loss of life on either
side, but our forces were not adequately prepared to do all the nonmilitary
jobs that devolved on them as an occupying army.
Ultimately, the outcome of this war is going to depend more on the American
people than anything that happens on the battlefield. Are we going to be
suckered again the way we were in 1992, when we allowed ourselves to be
deceived about our own recent history and current events?
We are being lied to and "spun," and not in a trivial way. The kind of
dishonest vitriolic hate campaign that in 2000 was conducted only before
black audiences is now being played on the national stage; and the national
media, instead of holding the liars' and haters' feet to the fire (as they
do when the liars and haters are Republicans or conservatives), are
cooperating in building up a false image of a failing economy and a lost
war, when the truth is more nearly the exact opposite.
And in all the campaign rhetoric, I keep looking, as a Democrat, for a
single candidate who is actually offering a significant improvement over the
Republican policies that in fact don't work, while supporting or improving
upon the American policies that will help make us and our children secure
against terrorists.
We have enemies that have earned our hatred, and whom we should fear. They
are fanatical terrorists who seek opportunities to kill American civilians
here and Israeli civilians in Israel. But right now, our national media and
the Democratic Party are trying to get us to believe that the people we
should hate and fear are George W. Bush and the Republicans.
I can think of many, many reasons why the Republicans should not control
both houses of Congress and the White House. But right now, if the
alternative is the Democratic Party as led in Congress and as exemplified by
the current candidates for the Democratic nomination, then I can't be the
only Democrat who will, with great reluctance, vote not just for George W.
Bush, but also for every other candidate of the only party that seems
committed to fighting abroad to destroy the enemies that seek to kill us and
our friends at home.
And if we elect a government that subverts or weakens or ends our war
against terrorism, we can count on this: We will soon face enemies that will
make 9/11 look like stubbing our toe, and they will attack us with the
confidence and determination that come from knowing that we don't have the
will to sustain a war all the way to the end.
Mr. Card is a science fiction writer. This article first appeared in the
Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, N.C.
.
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