The Art of War (Sun Tzu):
Therefore One hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful.It's freedom versus tyranny. Tyranny comes in several flavors, including Communist Russia and China, Islamo-Fascism, and the Leftist Liberals that infiltrate most of our schools, governments, media, international organizations (U.N., World Bank, ...) and special interest groups (labor, environmentalists, feminists, civil rights, ...). They share a common enemy - us.
The power of Russia is rising again, as raw materials such as oil and minerals, as well as the weapons of war, rise in value. And that power clearly remains on the side of tyranny.
China already holds a big chunk of our Treasury Notes.
The Islamo-Fascists hold much of our oil supply, receiving trillions of dollars from us for it, which they use to fund Islamic tyranny on every country in the world. With their allies in the environmental movement, the Russians and Islamo-Fascists have insured that we don't drill for much oil in free lands.
Yes - Iraq is in part about oil. Not about us stealing the oil, but about us keeping the forces of tyranny from stealing it. And it is about fighting Islamo-Fascists there instead of here, and about surrounding and containing Iran, so that they neither wipe out Israel, nor invade and conquer Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the key source of the oil that is the essential fuel of our economic engine.
But our biggest battle is right here at home, with the Left. The Left won two Presidential elections by supporting Perot as a third party candidate, and they are well along toward winning two more by supporting RINO's such as McCain, and when he fell behind, Giuliani, who will dampen the enthusiasm of the conservative base, which is critical to holding majorities in the House and Senate, as well as gaining the White House.
If we loose further ground to the Left here at home, then we cannot stand up to the forces of tyranny abroad. If we grow stronger at home, including gaining greater energy independence (that means domestic drilling, coal and nuclear, not windmills or solar panels or destroying our industrial base) then none can defeat us abroad.
Tyranny is part of human nature. So I don't know if we "defeated" the "forces of tyranny".
We sure as hell, however, defeated the USSR.
I'm starting to think that many of us in the West have forgotten what it means to defeat someone in warfare (cold or otherwise). All the discussions of the Iraq war the past few years are another symptom of this. Someone bombs a market somewhere and we decide it means we "lost" the Iraq war. Bizarre.
Apparently we've become so good at winning wars that we've started to think that the purpose of all wars we get into is to "defeat the forces of tyranny" once and for all (as if that were possible).