"Don't Tread on Me" . . . Does It Still Mean Anything to America?

Investor's Business Daily raises the question whether America is really the same nation it used to be when it comes to its own self-defense in Go Right Ahead -- Tread on Us.  Here's an excerpt:

When a secretary of defense gets confirmed 95-2 apparently because he says we are not winning a war, you know Uncle Sam must have a sign on his back that says "kick me."

We've come a long way from that day in April 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered Operation El Dorado Canyon, an air strike on Libya by two dozen F-111F fighter bombers in retaliation for a terrorist blast at a West Berlin disco that injured 200 people, including 63 U.S. soldiers, killing two.

Back then we took the fight to our enemies.

Now not even the prospect of a nuclear Iran gets our dander up. Back then we didn't wait for the U.N to pass a resolution. America was feared.

Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who held Americans hostage for 444 days, released them 20 minutes after Reagan's inaugural address.

We bled the Soviet empire dry, supporting communism's opponents around the globe from Afghanistan to Nicaragua.

Occasionally we would take matters into our own hands, as when we thwarted the attempt to turn Grenada into a communist beachhead.

The enemies of our enemies were our friends, and our enemies were just that. We didn't depend on the advice of a former secretary of state who channels Joan Rivers and says to those who would gladly see us disappear, "Can we talk?"

We didn't fear an arms race, we planned on winning it. When we talked to our enemies, it was to tell them things like, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall."

When a runt with delusions of grandeur kicked sand on our feet, we would tell our pilots to kick the tires and light the fires.

Now we find ourselves sitting impotently while Iran's maniacal little smurf, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, builds nukes to wipe Israel off the map while he writes love letters to the American people telling us why we must change our policies.

We wait while the U.N. thinks about talking about imposing sanctions, instead of making a list of targets.

A nation that defeated Nazism, Fascism and Communism sees its generals testifying before Congress on why we can't handle the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr.

They talk about stability and not victory. So does our incoming secretary of defense who says all options are on the table. Once the only option was winning.

You would do well to read it all.

Of course, flexing military might for its own sake means nothing.  But by the same token, losing a war has consequences, and some of them can be severe. 

We all know too well by now that jihadists are not picky.  They will never run out of new and creative ways to deliver death and destruction.  They will wait patiently to pick their enemies off one by one, like the freelance jihadist busted by the FBI as he planned to bomb a busy Chicago-area mall, and they will try to wipe out entire nations, as Iran seems to be preparing to do.  We may not be at war with Iran, but Iran is at war with us.

Forbearance is a virtue.  Blessed are the peacemakers.

But how long to forbear?  Which insults from jihadists are petty and fit to ignore, and which of their schemes have the potential to threaten our very existence, remote though that possibility seems?

Patience is indeed a virtue.  But if the West is patient and passive, even out of the finest of motives, while jihadist nations and groups are also patient but vocal in their hatred and busy arming themselves with enough weapons to wipe us out, time is no longer on our side.  While we test our resolve, and find it weakening, they grow stronger. 

Powers rise and powers fall; what of it?  The difference between us and them is all the difference.  The difference is that we believe in, and live in, human freedom.  Not only do they oppress their own mercilessly, but they bear us extreme malice.  Their utopia includes our eradication. 

Patience is a virtue unless it merely delays the inevitable battle while malicious forces gather their strength.  There may come an hour when our patience brings our own destruction.

Comments

[DemocracyRules]

HEY, DON’T FORGET ABOUT CONTAINMENT!
For you horribly disabled non-statisticians out there (lawyers, for example), here is a key fact: If all countries were placed on a bell-curve of nastiness, most would clump in the middle, with Iran North Korea, and a few others, on the tail, as the most nasty. Over time, a powerful phenomenon called “regression towards the mean” occurs, and they tend to drift back toward the average, or mean. All else being equal, random events conspire to create “average nastiness”. Tyrants lose power, or they run out of the money they need to do bad things, they get assassinated, their people rise up, etc. Honestly, this really happens. Examples: Nicaragua, ALL of South America (compared to 1965), Panama, Libya, and of course, the Soviet Union (remember them?). Ergo, if the democracies simply CONTAIN Iran, it will likely improve over time, on its own. Condi recently pointed out that Iran’s economy is fragile (still much weaker than 1979), people are getting very tired of poverty, the isolation, and their obviously emotionally disturbed president. Hate is also very disabling to Iran. Many people in the Middle East cling to hate as an addiction, passing it on to their children, cherishing it inside themselves, using it as the centerpiece of their lives. For Iran, hate is an enormous waste of time and energy. Finally, we probably have time on the nuclear issue. There are only two ways to make nuclear weapons, Plutonium - 238, or enriched uranium. Key points: (1) North Korea has no usable weapons; their "fizzle" shot occurred because they only have REACTOR grade plutonium (80% pure or less), which can only be refined to weapons grade at enormous cost, and they don't have significant usable enriched uranium; (2) Most Russian nukes are mothballed and have degraded to an unusable state, and (3) Iran has no idea what they're doing. Contrary to web chit-chat, building reliable, weapons-usable and deliverable nuclear weapons is very hard, and Iran would only get one shot at an attack. Russia has never perfected stable, reliable weapons where you could just push a button and get a reliable bomb blast of a certain size in a certain exact place on the other side of the world. (Remember these people are still driving Lada’s.) Given these facts, are these Iranian fanatics (who could not even build a Lada without help), a clear and present danger to the US? Russia seems to be playing Iran along to take their money. Iran apparently tried for a North Korean nuke, but now realize that huge, ship-sized nukes that only fizzle are useless. They probably planned to hit a coastal city, like Tel Aviv. Right now, we (democracies) just have to keep up the pressure, and focus on containment If the democracies have to bomb Iran as a kind of last-minute thing, we will. Astonishingly, even liberals will support war if the enemy is at the gates.