29 posts tagged “iraq”

National Review Online has a tremendous piece by Frederick W. Kagan on Iraq.  Specifically, the common myths associated with the war that many on the left side of the spectrum continually cite as reasons we have lost, will lose, or must withdraw from the present conflict.
Do the nattering nabobs really know the counterpoint to their arguments?  I would think not.  So often I see a parroted claim about the war that can be no more supported than the rantings of a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  Conservatives who have conviction but not the knowledge to back it up must educate themselves so as to better exploit this weakness.  Liberals who wish to better defend themselves may also find the article useful.

Let's just ignore for now the sobering fact that no amount of information will make any of us actually change our minds, and just enjoy the opportunity to learn.

The article's long, as something like this would have to be, but it's not overlong.  Five years of the left pulling out every conceivable objection to the war have left Kagan a big job.  He tackles it handily and you should read the whole thing.  However, I provide a snippet to draw you in:

The War Costs Too Much
An increasingly popular talking point of the antiwar party is that the war simply costs too much and that we must end it and refocus on domestic priorities. This talking point has a number of variants:

The “$3 trillion war.” Simplistic economic analysis declares that the war has cost the taxpayers $3 trillion since its inception, implying that this is a $3 trillion dead loss to the economy — a price too high to pay.

• Modern economics has long understood that the notion of a one-for-one guns-versus-butter trade-off is simply wrong. A high proportion of money spent on defense goes back into the U.S. economy in the form of salaries paid to the more than 5 million Americans employed directly or indirectly by the Defense Department, and payments to the defense industry and the long and complex supply chains from which they draw their raw materials. Military spending has traditionally been a form of economic stimulus, and wars more commonly end recessions or depressions than start them. That’s not a good reason to start a war, but neither is it a good reason to lose one. The impact of the current war on the U.S. economy, finally, is far smaller than the impact of previous major conflicts. Military spending in World War II ranged from 17.8 percent of GDP to 37.5 percent; in Korea from 5.0 percent (in 1950 — 7.4 percent in 1951) to 14.2 percent; in Vietnam from 7.4 percent to 9.4 percent. Current expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars bring total defense expenditures to something well below 5 percent of GDP. Even granting the simplistic and misleading $3 trillion figure, $3 trillion is about 5 percent of the nearly $60 trillion American GDP over the five years of the war.

John McCain made a stop in Norfolk, VA today to discuss foreign policy issues and receive some glowing praise from a number of his colleagues.  Always keen to learn more about international relations and, well, see famous people, I managed to weasel my way in and was treated to a sensible, realistic acknowledgment of the threat of radical Islam.  This is from some of the most knowledgeable authorities on national security in Congress. 
Chief among these in my eyes was John Warner.  A Southern gentleman in the truest sense, Senator Warner has been a strong advocate for the military and if he believes that John McCain will do well as the President then I am prepared to believe him.
The major point today was that we absolutely must confront radical, militant Islam.  I agree with that sentiment 100%.  Senator Sam Brownback made some very excellent statements, bringing the focus onto Africa where a significant amount of Muslim extremism is fomented.  Brownback is also extremely prominent in the pro-life community.  His endorsement of McCain puts any doubts about McCain's pro-life credits to rest.
In addition to these two men, the endorsement of former Secretaries of the Navy William Ball and John Lehman spoke volumes about their beliefs in McCain's strong military stance.  Rebuilding the military is key, as the Clinton years saw too much military reduction.  Rumsfeld made an error before Iraq and Afghanistan by not focusing more effort on building up force levels to avoid long, repeated deployments.  But another point made today was that we must maintain the All Volunteer Force by increasing recruitment and increasing opportunities for soldiers.  As McCain said, there is a market out there and young people have to know their needs will be met should they choose military service.

It is well within the interests of my region of Virginia to elect a man like John McCain. 

McCain is strong on the social issues.  Period.  McCain is obviously strong on foreign policy (his strong language regarding Iran was particularly impressive), though conservatives still need more assurance about the illegal immigration issue.  When I informed my good friend W that I was in attendance, he cut to the heart of the matter quite succinctly:  "...if they serve lunch order the enchiladas.  I hear they taste really good with a side of amnesty."  No lunch, but it is important to keep from getting star-struck.  Thanks W!
On a side note, I just saw myself on TV.  Some guy blocked my handshake with McCain and the annoyance on my face is pretty obvious.  I wish I had a picture.  It's ok, because I did get to shake Sam Brownback's hand and let him know I appreciate his pro-life stance.  He said we've got to push harder on that issue.  Agreed.
I got a picture of McCain answering questions from the press, which I have provided.  Forgive the quality.  I didn't think I'd actually be allowed inside and neglected to bring a camera!  If I can locate a bit of that video with my handshake fiasco, I'll post that too.  UPDATE:  Here's that video...Note the disappointed looking young man at 56 seconds in.  That old guy in front of me was such a fanboy, he jostled me out of the way just to tell McCain something the man wouldn't remember in 10 seconds anyway.

McCain!

I defy anyone to argue with Mark Steyn.  The man is simply a genius.  He makes me depressed by exposing how utterly screwed up the West's collective head is.  Is it any wonder that an Islamic group in Canada was trying to have him muzzled?

At some point conservatives will have to abandon the polite tolerance we've had for liberal inanities and fulfill their expectations by calling out the militia and rounding them up, Planet of the Apes style.  Har Har, of course I'm joking.  Or am I?  I've been accused of worse while arguing about less important things.

What's at issue here is that the absurdity of this generation's anti-war stance is without bounds.  Steyn drags it out into the light and clubs it like a baby seal.

UnphenomenalTimes
Fake but ... fake.

By Mark Steyn

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”

No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage. As Iowahawk’s one-man investigative unit wondered: “Unrelated incidents, or mounting evidence that America’s newsrooms have become a breeding ground for murderous, drunk, gun-wielding child molesters?”

Why would the Times run such a series? My columnar confrere Clifford May connected it to a notorious anniversary: Seventy-five years ago, in February 1933, the Oxford Union passed a famous resolution, by an overwhelming margin, that “this House would under no circumstances fight for its King and country.” The Union was the world’s most famous debating society, in a great university of the dominant global power; its presidents have gone on to serve as Prime Ministers at home and overseas, from Gladstone in the 19th century all the way to Benazir Bhutto in the 1990s.

So the debate and its resolution sent a message to Britain’s enemies: As Churchill saw it, the vote was a “disgusting symptom” of the enervation of the ruling elites. Clifford May sees that same syndrome today around the western world, but, in fact, it’s worse than that.

The Oxford debate took place a decade and a half after the worst carnage in human history. The First World War cost the lives of some 20 million people. Do you remember back in 2004 when Ted Koppel devoted one episode of Nightline to reading out the names of everyone killed in combat in Iraq? If he’d attempted a similar task with the British Empire’s war dead in 1919, the half-hour episode of Nightline would have had to be extended to ten months — or longer if Ted took bathroom breaks, or indeed pauses for breath. The war reached into the smallest English hamlet and culled a generation of young men. It swept through the glittering palaces, too: The brother of Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the present queen) was killed on the western front in 1915. It would be a statistical improbability to have been at that Oxford Union debate and have come from a home in which on some mantle or bureau there was not a photograph of a son or uncle or fiancé forever young.It would be as if millions upon millions had been slaughtered in the first Gulf war, and 15 years later Harvard or Yale were debating whether we should do it all over again.

In other words, we don’t have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking timebombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.

A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: in 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the US military. That’s 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over ten times the estimates even of hardcore antiwar left-wing groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren’t there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?

Because it’s fake. It didn’t happen.

Yet it’s indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our “mentally wounded” troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians. In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with an historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who’s really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?

Victor Davis Hanson is one smart cookie.  Here I will present an interview conducted by the Hoover Institute's Peter Robinson, and available at National Review Online.  VDH, as he is known, is a strong voice for victory in the Middle East.  In this video segment he discusses the initial victory in Iraq, the Surge, and the crap in between.  Around 2:30 in, it gets really good.

VDH:  ..the Sunni insurgents had to show the world they were not the cowards or the incompetents that surrendered in three weeks; that they were going to win, and they were going to defeat the Americans, and now that they have established a reputation that they didn't give up, they have restored their pride...and they lost...
PR:  So this is a parallel to the argument that Sadat had to invade and lose, but he had to invade before he could make peace at Camp David.

Iran apparently stopped their nuclear weapons program as of 2003, a new report says.  This is the same nuclear program we have been a touch concerned about ever since Moudy Ahmahdinejad started talking about wiping Israel from the face of the earth. 
What this means for U.S. foreign policy remains to be seen.  Iran is still a troublesome factor in Middle Eastern politics.  And, let us be frank, the report does not say, "Iran has no potential to develop the bomb, and has no intentions of the same."  It merely says that they did in fact halt their program in 2003.  They are still enriching uranium, so much so that they may have enough to build a bomb within two years should their program resume now. 
The report concludes with an estimate that Iran has the potential to develop a nuclear weapon by the middle of next decade.  That is, if they do not begin building one sooner. 

At least the news is good in Iraq.  I heard Matt Lauer (of all people) challenging John Edwards this morning on Edwards' refusal to see anything good in Iraq. 

Here is an older clip from C-Span about Democrats and fiscal responsibility.  I feel sorry for the George Wendt-looking feller.

Where’s the War?
The placidity of the domestic front.

By Mark Steyn

Oh, it’s a long, long while from September to September. This year, the anniversary falls, for the first time, on a Tuesday morning, and perhaps some or other cable network will re-present the events in real time — the first vague breaking news in an otherwise routine morning show, the follow-up item on the second plane, and the realization that something bigger was underway. If you make it vivid enough, the JFK/Princess Di factor will kick in: You’ll remember “where you were” when you “heard the news.” But it’s harder to recreate the peculiar mood at the end of the day, when the citizens of the superpower went to bed not knowing what they’d wake up to the following morning.

 

Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they’ll wake up to in the morning: There’ll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other — last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon — in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA’s 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person’s assassination or that a couple of gran’mas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping centre. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a “war on terror,” there has been in America no terrorism.

In theory, the administration ought to derive a political benefit from this: The president has “kept America safe.” But, in practice, the placidity of the domestic front diminishes the chosen rationale of the conflict: If a “war on terror” has no terror, who says there’s a war at all? That’s the argument of the Left — that it’s all a racket cooked up by the Bushitlerburton fascists to impose on America a permanent national-security state in which, for dark sinister reasons of his own, Dick Cheney is free to monitor your out-of-state phone calls all day long. Judging from the blithe expressions of commuters doing the shoeless shuffle through the security line at LAX and O’Hare, most Americans seem relatively content with a permanent national-security state. It’s a curious paradox: airports on permanent Orange Alert, and a citizenry on permanent …well, I’m not sure there’s a homeland-security color code for “Gaily Insouciant,” but, if there is, it’s probably a bland limpid pastel of some kind. Of course, if tomorrow there’s a big smoking hole where the Empire State Building used to be, we’ll be back to: “The president should have known! This proves the failure of his policies over the last six years! We need another all-star Commission filled with retired grandees!”

And that would be the relatively sane reaction. Have you seen that bumper sticker “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB”? If you haven’t, go to a college town and cruise Main Street for a couple of minutes. It seems odd that a fascist regime which thinks nothing of killing thousands of people in a big landmark building in the center of the city hasn’t quietly offed some of these dissident professors — or at least the guy with the sticker-printing contract. Fearlessly, Robert Fisk of Britain’s Independent, the alleged dean of Middle East correspondents, has now crossed over to the truther side and written a piece headlined, “Even I Question The ‘Truth’ About 9/11.” According to a poll in May, 35 percent of Democrats believe that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. Did Rumsfeld also know? Almost certainly. That’s why he went to his office as normal that today, because he knew in advance that the plane would slice through the Pentagon but come to a halt on the far side of the photocopier. That’s how well-planned it was, unlike Iraq.

Apparently, 39 percent of Democrats still believe Bush didn’t know in advance — or, at any rate, so they said in May. But I’m confident half of them will have joined Rosie O’Donnell on the melted steely knoll before the Iowa caucuses. If Iraq is another Vietnam, 9/11 is another Kennedy assassination. Were Bali, Madrid, and London also inside jobs by the Bush Gang? If so, it’s no wonder federal spending’s out of control.

And what of those for whom the events of six years ago were more than just conspiracy fodder? Last week the New York Times carried a story about the current state of the 9/11 lawsuits. Relatives of 42 of the dead are suing various parties for compensation, on the grounds that what happened that Tuesday morning should have been anticipated. The law firm Motley Rice, diversifying from its traditional lucrative class-action hunting grounds of tobacco, asbestos and lead paint, is promising to put on the witness stand everybody who “allowed the events of 9/11 to happen”. And they mean everybody — American Airlines, United, Boeing, the airport authorities, the security firms — everybody, that is, except the guys who did it.

According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one’s death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they’re after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they’ll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen. But that’s the American way: Almost every news story boils down to somebody standing in front of a microphone and announcing that he’s retained counsel. Last week, it was Larry Craig. Next week, it’ll be the survivors of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear test in Westchester County. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out, a legalistic culture invariably misses the forest for the trees. Senator Craig should know that what matters is not whether an artful lawyer can get him off on a technicality but whether the public thinks he trawls for anonymous sex in public bathrooms. Likewise, those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child’s death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth.

In his pugnacious new book, Norman Podhoretz calls for redesignating this conflict as World War IV. Certainly, it would have been easier politically to frame the Iraq campaign as being a front in a fourth world war than as a necessary measure in an anti-terrorist campaign. Yet who knows? Perhaps we would still have mired ourselves in legalisms and conspiracies and the dismal curdled relativism of the Flight 93 memorial’s “crescent of embrace.” In the end, as Podhoretz says, if the war is to be fought at all, it will “have to be fought by the kind of people Americans now are.” On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all.

— Mark Steyn is the author of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

Ways to Win the War

According to the transcript, bin Laden says there are two ways to end the war:

"The first is from our side, and it is to continue to escalate the killing and fighting against you."

The second is to do away with the American democratic system of government.  "It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interests of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations."

Ok...So anyone else still think that these people are motivated only by a desire to expel foreign influence?  As has been said over and over and over, they despise our very civilization and our most cherished liberties. 
Additionally, if America was a democracy I would agree with bin Laden that it had to go.  Lucky for us it's a Republic.

Dems already discount war report

By S.A. Miller
September 6, 2007

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, talked with reporters yesterday in Washington. "We know what is going to be in it," he said of the Iraq war report next week. "I expect the Bush report to say, 'The surge is working. Let's have more of the same.' "

---

Congressional Democrats are trying to undermine U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus' credibility before he delivers a report on the Iraq war next week, saying the general is a mouthpiece for President Bush and his findings can't be trusted.

"The Bush report?" Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin said when asked about the upcoming report from Gen. Petraeus, U.S. commander in Iraq.
I like the scorn and contempt here:
"We know what is going to be in it. It's clear. I think the president's trip over to Iraq makes it very obvious," the Illinois Democrat said. "I expect the Bush report to say, 'The surge is working. Let's have more of the same.' "

The top Democrats — Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California — also referred to the general's briefing as the "Bush report."

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said Gen. Petraeus' report was potentially compromised by the White House's involvement in drafting it.

"If the same people who were so wrong about this war from the start are writing substantial portions of this report, that raises credibility questions," he said.
Does it now, sparky?  Then why didn't you say something when you agreed to hear what Petraeus had to say?
Republicans bristled at the pre-emptive strike against the report.

"Are these leaders asking the American people to believe that the testimony of a commanding four-star general in the U.S. Army should be discarded before it's even delivered?" said Brian Kennedy, spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican.

"If so, these statements completely ignore what's truly at stake in this war and suggest that neither the commander in chief nor our chief commander on the ground have any regard for the lives of the men and women fighting for this country," he said. "It's appallng, and I think the American people — rightfully — will continue to stick by the decisions of our commanders and troops on the ground when it comes to what is best for their safety and security."

Mr. Bush's surprise visit Monday to Iraq's Anbar province showcased success in the one-time al Qaeda stronghold where Sunni tribal leaders teamed with U.S. troops to drive out the terrorists and rapidly improve security.
Even Katie Couric was saying this!  What is the problem?
Despite continued bloodshed in Iraq, the president's visit was one of several recent signs of U.S. military success in Iraq that blunted antiwar momentum leading up to the September progress report.

The congressionally mandated report from the administration, which will be delivered in two parts by Gen. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker, is expected to show some U.S. military advances, but limited progress from the fledgling Iraqi government toward ending sectarian fighting.
A fair assessment, but not the death knell the Democrats were hoping for.  Assholes!
Democrats said they put more faith in a report Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office that showed Iraq failed to meet 11 of 18 political and security benchmarks set by Congress.
Cherry-picking assholes.
They also favored an analysis due today
by Gen. James L. Jones, former U.S. commander in Europe, that is expected to say security gains have been "uneven" and Iraqi security forces are ill-prepared to stand alone, according to a CNN report.
What do they want?  It's been 4 years, and those years have been full of conflict here and in Iraq.  Not much has been done since 2006, either.
"We will see what the Bush report will be at the end of next week," Mrs. Pelosi said. "The facts are self-evident that the progress is not being made. They might want to find one or two places where there has been progress but the plural of anecdote is not data."
The plural of anecdote is indeed not data, Madame.  But the measure of progress is not to be compared to a standard of immediacy which seems to pervade our thinking in all things.
She said Democrats were determined to uncover "the ground truth in Iraq."

Ask a marine!

Do you hear that sound?  It’s the other shoe dropping.
A report from the Washington Times confirmed what everyone already knew was going to happen.  The Democrats have decided that the report from General David Petraeus doesn’t actually mean anything to the debate on Iraq.  From what I am able to gather from the article, top Democrat leaders scoff at the report for the contributions made by the ever-evil Bush Administration -- that same Bush Administration which is responsible for the entire world’s ills!  Those same masters of Machiavellian machination, purveyors of perfidy, truculent trolls and dim-witted divisive dicks.  Oh!  Shall I list their many vile deeds?  I daresay the reader has not the time to devote to such an undertaking, nor the author a desire to make it his noble life's work!
Discounting the fact that these reports contain reams of paper chock full of details that someone like Petraeus would be better served to have provided to them, it’s still asinine for the Democrats to do this.
May I be frank?  May I be utterly clear about my feelings?  For the Democrats to come out before the deadline to which they agreed and say that nothing in the report will change their views is the height of arrogance, stupidity and hypocrisy.  For months the talk has been, “Wait and see about Petraeus…then we’ll proceed.”  But the cynical among us never had much hope that would be the case.  No, as in most everything the decision has been made and those who are inclined one way or the other shall not move.
Whatever your views on Iraq, for anyone to view this as anything better than “politics as usual” would be jarringly naïve.  If I am not mistaken, Mme. Pelosi and her ilk came to power with many long-winded speeches about Republican duplicity and how there would be a new dawn of openness in government from that point.  It would appear that openness is understood to mean broadcasting the fact that you have made up your mind before hearing the report made by the one man who just might be able to give us a straight answer.

Cowardice is:

cow·ard·ice       (kou'ər-dĭs)  Pronunciation Key 
n.   Ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.

[Middle English cowardise, from Old French couardise, alteration of couardie, from couard, coward; see coward.]

Cowardice is:

cow·ard·ice      /ˈkaʊərdɪs/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[kou-er-dis] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation

–noun

lack of courage to face danger, difficulty, opposition, pain, etc.

---

[Origin: 1250–1300; ME cowardise < OF co(u)ardise, equiv. to co(u)art cowardly (see coward) + -ise -ice]

—Synonyms pusillanimity, timidity.

—Antonyms bravery.

Cowardice is:

To Scio, Scio, cowardice is inaction where action is necessary. 

Europe.  The U.S. Congress.  Mayhap even the President now, though if we're talking about the war he's the only one who seems to grasp that problems like this don't resolve themselves through diplomacy alone.

What is your definition of cowardice?  I might include in mine anyone who doesn't fight against a culture that allows honor killing, terrorist attacks and the oppression of women.  I might include anyone who is so apathetic that they support an end to hostilities against people who have vowed to exterminate our way of life.

I might also include people who believe that our enemies could win if all things were equal...people who devalue our Western traditions of human rights and the delineation of Church and State, of progress and the building up of the person.  They rail against our vices and failings, using them to argue that we do not have cultural superiority over the barbarous practices of our enemy.  These civilizational suicides fail to recognize the subtle and insidious nature of their choices.  Victory against radical Islam is within us, but men fail to see it.  It won't be the effort of a season's worth of television.  It will take years and years of hard work and harder sacrifice.  But the alternative is abandonment of reason, intellect and ability to preserve our way of life.  Death, in other words.

So it behooves us to recognize cowardice, and shame it.

Coward: