southchild

Syndicated talk-radio host Neal Boortz is notorious for decrying the harm of “negativism” in one’s life. He goes so far as to say that an individual should disassociate himself from people in his life who are a “negative influence” because their attitude rubs off and brings him down merely by its presence.

This week’s essay by Victory Davis Hanson, Our Not-So-Wise Experts itemizes a litany of the negative consequences perpetrated by wrongheaded, so-called “experts” whose pessimism about our policies in the Middle East would be laughable if it didn’t have such real, negative effects on issues of extreme importance. Some of his observations:

Brent Scowcroft … once assured us that Iraq “could become a Vietnam in a way that the Vietnam war never did.” Did he mean perhaps worse than ten years of war and over 50,000 American dead, with the Cambodian holocaust next door?
…
Madeleine Albright, while abroad, summed up the present American foreign policy: “It’s difficult to be in France and criticize my government. But I’m doing so because Bush and the people working for him have a foreign policy that is not good for America, not good for the world.” Elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, troops out of Saudi Arabia, democratic demonstrations in Lebanon, West Bank voting, promises of change in Egypt — all that and more is “not good for the world”?

Hanson then details the four, failed policies in the Middle East:

• Policy #1: Realism
• Policy #2: Punitivism
• Policy #3: Bribery
• Policy #4: “Let Them Be”

Where these have failed miserably, our current stance, “Policy #5: The New Americanism” which Hanson has advocated since before our actions in Iraq, is our “last, best hope” for meaningful and lasting change in the Middle East. But, like poison, perennial negativism is making us sick:

If the American public has to hear another sermon from a Brent Scowcroft — “Sharon just has him [President Bush] wrapped around his little finger. I think the president is mesmerized” — or Madeline Albright — “Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?” — about what we are now doing wrong in the Middle East, I think it will collectively heave.

It should be clear that, with respect to the pessimistic pontificators representing 40 years of misguided status quo, free people are not served by listening to the naysayers who ignore real progress while focusing on negative minutiae. For too long these people have had their chance, and their assessments contradict what most people learn through their own effort: “It cannot be done” is the mantra of a quitter and a loser. As Boortz says, it’s time to ignore the doom-and-gloom. Now more than ever, we must focus on the good that is being done in the Middle East so that this noble mission can, with our support, succeed. Nothing less than “World Peace” depends on it.

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!”
— Samuel Adams

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 17th, 2005 at 12:22 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.