The Only Issue This Election Day

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 5:13 pm by Neal

Rush Limbaugh is talking today about Orson Scott Card’s essay, “The Only Issue This Election Day”, published yesterday in Real Clear Politics. Wow. Don’t miss it.

A science fiction writer, and former Democrat, Card correctly identifies the War on Terror as the central, critical issue of this election and our time. As Card writes, “But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war.” He begins with this introduction:

There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that’s the War on Terror.

And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election.

If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one.

Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case — if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.

But at least there will be a chance.

I say this as a Democrat, for whom the Republican domination of government threatens many values that I hold to be important to America’s role as a light among nations.

But there are no values that matter to me that will not be gravely endangered if we lose this war. And since the Democratic Party seems hellbent on losing it — and in the most damaging possible way — I have no choice but to advocate that my party be kept from getting its hands on the reins of national power, until it proves itself once again to be capable of recognizing our core national interests instead of its own temporary partisan advantages.

To all intents and purposes, when the Democratic Party jettisoned Joseph Lieberman over the issue of his support of this war, they kicked me out as well. The party of Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan — the party I joined back in the 1970s — is dead. Of suicide.

The rest of the essay analyzes this War from all the various angles we’ve heard so much about, but Card (unlike the MSM) keeps it real. Here are a few excerpts from some of the categories:

On The “War on Terror”

I recently read an opinion piece in which the author ridiculed the very concept of a “war on terror,” saying that it makes as much sense as if, after Pearl Harbor, FDR had declared a “war on aviation.”

Without belaboring the obvious shortcomings of the analogy, I will agree with the central premise. The name “war on terror” clearly conceals the fact that we are really at war with specific groups and specific nations; we can no more make war on a methodology than we can make war on nitrogen.

However, there are several excellent reasons why “War on Terror” is the only possible name for this war.

1. This is not a war that can be named for any particular nation or region. To call it “The Iraq War” or the “Afghanistan War” would lead to the horrible mistake of thinking that victory would consist of toppling certain governments and then going home.

In fact, it is precisely the name “War in Iraq” that is leading to the deep misconceptions that drive the Democratic position on the war.

On “Nation Building”

Another charge against the Bush administration’s conduct of the war is that they are engaged in the hopeless task of “nation-building.” And this is true — except for the word “hopeless.”

But what is the alternative? I’ve heard several, each more disastrous and impossible and even shameful than the one before.

In the New Testament, Jesus once used the analogy of a person who was possessed by a devil. When you cast out the devil, don’t you leave an empty house, swept clean, to which seven devils will now come to live, making things worse than ever?

No matter which miserable dictatorship we moved against after the Taliban — and we had no choice but to keep moving on if we were to eradicate the grave danger we faced (and face) — we would have faced the same problem in Syria or Iraq or Sudan that we had in Afghanistan: We had to establish order in a nation that had never actually become a nation.

On “Democracy — the Other Hope”

Wherever Islamicism has been tried, the result has been identical to Communism’s miserable track record. The people are oppressed; the worst sort of vigilantes and thugs terrorize the population; the new power elite, regardless of their supposed piety and dedication to a holy cause, is quickly corrupted and comes to love the wealth and privileges of power.

When there is no hope of deliverance, the people have no choice but to bow under the tyrant’s lash, pretending to be true believers while yearning for relief. In Russia it came … after more than seventy years. China and Cuba are still waiting — but then, they started later.

So it would be in the Muslim world — if Islamicism were ever able to come to seem inevitable and irresistible.

You know: If America withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan and exposed everyone who had cooperated with us to reprisals.

As happened in South Vietnam.

So … which America is operating now in the Muslim world?

In Iraq and Afghanistan — but especially Iraq — President Bush is behaving according to America’s best and most honorable tradition. We did not come to destroy, we came to liberate and rescue, he says — by word and deed. We bring freedom and opportunity. Our money will help rebuild your devastated (or never built-up) economies; our expertise will help train your most talented people to be ready for prosperity and self-government; and our military will keep enemies from overwhelming you as you reinvent yourselves.

Instead of leaving an empty house, swept clean but unprotected, waiting for the devils of Islamic puritanism to come take over, President Bush has sworn that America will bring democracy, and that American soldiers will do their best to protect the decent, ordinary people until they are able to protect themselves.

On “The Competing Stories”

In other words, through nation-building, through the promise of democracy, Bush has created a rallying point with far stronger resonance than anything the Islamic puritans have to offer.

What is their program, after all? We’ll take your sons and get them to blow themselves up in order to murder westerners! Forget the rhetoric — Muslim parents are human beings, and there is nothing more devastating than to lose a child. The only consolation is when it seems to be in a noble cause. But because of President Bush’s promise of democracy, the Muslim puritan cause does not seem noble to more and more Muslims.

Even if they live in countries (or neighborhoods) where they dare not speak up — yet — they do not want any of their children to die just so that the rest of them can live and suffer in slavery to a privileged, selfish class of elitist tyrants.

President Bush’s story offers the common people hope of living decent lives and seeing their children live to adulthood, to grow old surrounded by grandchildren.

The Al-Qaeda, Ayatollah story promises them dead children and the lash.

On “Americans Won’t Stay”

But they also tell the story, over and over: “America will never stick it out. We’ll keep killing Americans till they give up and go away, and then you will answer to us!

Until they believe that the Islamofascists are never coming into power, many people will remain afraid to commit themselves to democracy.

Every Congressman who says “We must set a timetable for departure” is providing ammunition to the tyrants in their campaign of terror.

There is so much more that Card addresses, and it is all excellent, spot-on and highly recommended reading! I hope this has sufficiently enticed you to read the entire essay. One thing’s for sure: you won’t hear any of this from the MSM. Like Victor Davis Hanson, Card has summed-up the reasons why our strategy in The War on Terror (including Iraq) is the correct and noble course that we must continue patiently to pursue.

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