Investor's Business Daily, September 4th, 2007
Politics: Not every Democrat concedes that the surge is working. In her radio response to President Bush, a member of the opposing party tells us what she did on her summer vacation.
Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who recently visited Iraq while Congress was on vacation, was selected by Democrats to give their response to President Bush's weekly radio address.
Chosen to rebut President Bush's justified optimism on the war and to blunt the expected positive report to Congress by surge architect Gen. David Petraeus, she didn't bother to even concede, as Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin did, that "more American troops have brought more peace to more parts of Iraq."
They have brought more peace, and an increased prospect of victory. As a result of the surge, the Iraqi people saw American troops stick around and not return to base after each battle. The increased trust of the Iraqi people, which was hard-earned, has resulted, for example, in Sunni and Shiite tribes uniting against al-Qaida in Iraq and the beginnings of political reconciliation.
USA Today has reported a halving of "truck bombs and other al-Qaida style attacks" since the surge began in February. In Ramadi, such episodes have plummeted from as many as 180 a week a year ago to three the week of Aug. 6. The Pentagon reports that Iraqis are volunteering 23,000 monthly tips on jihadists and their plans -- quadruple the number a year ago.
Still, channeling John Murtha and Nancy Pelosi, Schakowsky proclaimed: "The president's surge has failed, and there is no end in sight for the war in Iraq. This is what I learned on my summer visit to that ravaged country."
She complained that "while dining on lobster tortellini in the air-conditioned elegance of Ambassador Ryan Crocker's home in the Green Zone," she saw nothing in a presentation by Gen. Petraeus "that measured the more than 3,700 of our troops that have been killed and the more than 27,600 wounded, many profoundly and for life."
Gen. Petraeus, like President Bush, is well aware of the cost of this war in terms of blood and treasure. Both are also aware of the dire consequences for our national security in losing this war, not on the battlefield, but in the halls of Congress.
If casualties and uncertain prospects for success are the benchmark for giving up the struggle for democracy and freedom, Roosevelt and Churchill might have given up after Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor and the Bataan death march.
Lincoln, from Schakowsky's Illinois, might have given up after Antietam, where 3,650 died on both sides on Sept. 17, 1862, with 22,700 injured or missing. That didn't occur over a four-year period, but on a single day.
Would Schakowsky have wanted Lincoln to give up? After all, a quick victory was expected. After the outbreak of hostilities, the Chicago Tribune predicted victory "within two or three months at the furthest."
By the summer of 1864, despite success at Gettysburg, the Union's future, and Lincoln's, were very much in doubt, with no end to the war in sight.
In the end, more than 620,000 lives were lost in a nation of 31 million. A war of equal magnitude today would have resulted in the deaths of six million Americans. Was the war to free the slaves and preserve the Union worth it, Rep. Schakowsky?
If Schakowsky and her ilk want to count anything, let it be the millions liberated from oppression and tyranny. And let her count the number of Americans killed on American soil in the war on terror since 9/11 -- zero.
Lincoln fought to preserve mankind's last best hope for peace and freedom against self-destruction. We are fighting for our survival and that of civilization itself against a nihilistic enemy so that freedom, and this nation, shall not perish from the earth.
