[Dean's World] Dave Price: Perspective on Victory and Defeat

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Posted by Dave Price:
Perspective on Victory and Defeat
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1144330960.shtml


   From the incomparable Victor Davis Hanson:

     [W]e wonât know the ultimate judgment of costs and benefits in Iraq
     until its parliament convenes and the executive government is
     formed and operates. If we leave now and a Lebanon follows, then,
     of course, the invasion was a costly mistake. If we secure the
     country for a constitutional government that brings freedom, order,
     and prosperity to its long-suffering people, then it will be the
     most welcomed global development since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
     Had the British and Americans quit in 1943 â after Pearl Harbor,
     the fall of Singapore and the Philippines, the Kasserine Pass,
     Tobruk, and other assorted disasters â then the carnage of 1939 to
     1943 would have properly been seen as a tragedy that led not to
     emergence of a free Europe and a reborn Japan, but as needless
     sacrifice against the unstoppable juggernaut of Asian and German
     fascism.
     ...
     There remains this last unknown â how well can a liberal democracy,
     in its greatest age of affluence, leisure, and self-critical
     reflection, still fight a distant war against emissaries of the
     Dark Ages who seek to behead apostates, blow up democrats, and
     silence with death writers, journalists, and cartoonists. It is not
     just our democratic values versus their IEDs, but whether our
     idealism still has the resilience to defeat their nihilism.
     Or put more directly: Can Western enlightenment and power, embedded
     in deep cynicism, still prevail over ignorance and self-inflicted
     pathology energized by fanaticism?

   That's really the only unanswered question.
   As they say, read the [1]whole thing.

References

   1. http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson033106.html