Posted on 06/17/2006 10:20:40 AM PDT by Lando Lincoln
With the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi a major terrorist has fallen. It will not herald the end of violence in Iraq but it will deal a blow to those who continue to besiege that nation.
Violence was Zarqawi’s trade but he and his cohorts failed to prevent any of the recent elections from taking place and most recently the three remaining security ministry cabinet positions – Minister of Defense, Minister of the Interior, and State Minister of National Security – have been filled.
But while America and its partners are on the right side of the war, public support in the U.S. has eroded. Most Americans once supported U.S. action in Iraq but an Associated Press-Ipsos poll, taken at the beginning of June, revealed that 59 percent of the American people now think the war was a mistake. They are wrong but the poll reflects the modern, and dangerous, American conviction that if something is too difficult or takes too long to accomplish one should abandon the effort. Americans no longer comprehend that while evil men can be killed, evil is perpetual and must be continually fought. Man cannot win the final war against evil, but the war must be waged.
When God gave man free will he opened the door to the possibility that evil would walk the earth, and it has in the form of known practitioners such as Hitler and Stalin. Today terrorism is the horror that confronts the world. Seemingly 59 percent of the American people believe the nation has done enough to end terrorism. But even if America stops, evil will not stop. Evil men with visions of conquest do not abandon their efforts voluntarily and should America forsake the war it will invite multiple 9/11s at home and abroad.
Americans see their nation engaged in a war for which they have no point of reference. During World War II the enemy could be located on a map and as time passed it was easy to see the battle lines move as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were pushed back. Progress was measurable.
Today America’s enemy has no homeland and swears his allegiance not to a nation or single ruler but to an ideology. Terrorists have no country; they have convictions.
As attacks in Bali, London, Madrid and America demonstrate - and with the recent terrorist arrests in Canada - the enemy is prosecuting the war on a global scale. No one can be sure where tomorrow’s battleground will be and it is understandable that such uncertainties fray the fortitude of many. Given these unknowns it is easy to see why a nation that values entertainment on demand and quick, simple answers to complex questions would lose focus. However, America’s enemy remains focused and exceedingly patient.
Some Americans are confused about who the enemy is. Upon hearing of Zarqawi’s fate, Michael Berg, an anti-war activist and congressional candidate whose son Nick was murdered in Iraq in 2004, said, “I don’t think that Zarqawi is himself responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq. I think George Bush is.”
While one must have great sympathy for the pain Mr. Berg carries due to the death of his son, the absurdity of his statement cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged.
The Bush Administration did not start the war. While it is difficult to cite a date on which this war began (September 11, 2001, is the date America became convinced it was at war) it is obvious that attacks against America persisted for years. Attacks against the USS Cole and America’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania elicited little more than several cruise missile strikes and some harsh sermons about terrorism.
It is not the Bush Administration that has adopted a policy of random killings in Iraq. Peace could erupt in Iraq tomorrow if Zarqawi’s followers stopped blowing up people and infrastructure and permitted the rebuilding of that nation. But that will not happen because the terrorist's goal is not peace. Their vision is a world that lives as they would have it live, and where those who refuse to submit meet a certain death. Zarqawi was only the most current reminder that evil still haunts the world. His absence will lessen the darkness but it will not bring the light.
America no longer understands evil; perhaps Americans no longer believe it exists (except in a Republican Oval Office). They are embarrassed when George W. Bush speaks of “evil-doers” because they do not believe sophisticated individuals use such terms. And evil rejoices.
Americans want to think that people, regardless of how profound their differences, can find common ground if not common understanding. But evil is real and it rejects those things. A man can no more diminish the reality of evil by refusing to recognize it than a madman can extinguish sunlight by writing the word “dark” on the floor of his room. Time and again man has suffered under the weight of evil, yet he consistently refuses to recognize it. And evil rejoices.
As the Bush Administration works to defeat evil some Americans insist U.S. military strategy should be assessed by how much it is restrained. For America to engage in war, liberals argue, it must express more concern about the suffering it inflicts upon the enemy than the justness of the cause and the cost of failure. And evil rejoices.
America and its allies are engaged in a difficult and unrelenting global war between freedom and tyranny; between good and evil. The nation has been there before and risen to the occasion. But to sustain the effort America must reacquaint itself with its responsibilities.
All people would enjoy liberty if they could but not everyone understands the principles and duties fundamental to liberty. In a speech in 1838, Abraham Lincoln said America’s Founders fought and sacrificed to demonstrate “a proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical, namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves.”
In his book “Making Patriots,” Georgetown University Professor Walter Berns, wrote that for Lincoln the demonstration of the ability to self-govern “depended on the perpetuation of the institutions, and this, especially when the war came, depended on a new generation of patriots. (America’s Founders) were moved to do what they did by their attachment to the abstract idea (and promise) of liberty. …but Lincoln wondered whether those who came after them were capable of that sort of attachment. More to the point – and that point was reached in 1861 – would the men of this later generation fight to preserve the institutions, founded on that principle, even as the patriots of seventy-six had fought to ‘ordain and establish’ the institutions founded on it?”
Do Americans today have the same depth of attachment to the nation’s institutions that previous generations had? Will America continue to fight to preserve those institutions and principles? Or have we decided, against all logic and evidence, that Bush is the terrorist? If Zarqawi can remind us in death of the misery and evil he unleashed in life he will have served some purpose. If we fail to learn, then evil will again rejoice. Experience is the most pitiless teacher of all.
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Joseph Bell has hosted a radio talk show and is a former editorial writer/columnist for several Connecticut newspapers. A former liberal Democrat, Bell has not been on the conservative side of the aisle for very long. He voted for Clinton/Gore in 1992. Abandoning the convictions that he had held and defended through adolescence and into adulthood was not easy. Sincere soul-searching and a commitment to distinguish fact from fiction compelled him to accept that liberal ideology was bankrupt.
No. I think.
The President does
It's party time for evil, strictly because of the stupid and the duped.
Mrs. Clinton is alive isn't she?
--Or have we decided, against all logic and evidence, that Bush is the terrorist?
I'd be finding another crowd to hang around with like the local pub if nothing else. And by that I mean the local pub not the one he's used to.
Evil exists and has many facets. Terrorism is but one of them. As for those who do not see evil, I had a friend who once put it in a humorous way to a leftist professor, "You can't see the forest because you're a tree." Geez, that was almost twenty years ago. It holds just as true today, if not more.
The left does not see true evil because they are part of it. They'll will comment on evil, but to them, evil is merely anyone who opposes them.
"All this is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing" - Edmund Burke
Excellent points.
Thanks.
You might have some interest in this paragraph from my post (# 163) here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1650622/posts?page=162
These are increasingly becoming the days Scripture speaks of when the righteous hide themselves. God have mercy on us. The MSM calls evil good and good evil. The COURTS call evil good and good evil. Hollyweed has long called evil good and good evil.
And we seem to think God doesn't notice--and that's folks calling themselves Christian! The evil no longer even believe in God--or claim they don't. A lot of them believe in Him, they just think they can get away with shaking their fists at Him because no one in authority has ever stood up to their evil.
Typo!
"All THAT is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing" - Edmund Burke
I remember reading an editorial from an early 1940's Portland, Oregon newspaper. The writer said that Goering's threat to bomb England couldn't be taken seriously, because every person had some goodness within them that would stop them from crossing that evil line. Liberalism: never discouraged by reality.
Well, he has been awfully quiet lately.
Evil exists. I don't know if we can possibly come close to eliminating it in Iraq or the rest of the Islamic world because they are so deeply indoctrinated. But, we have to try.
The problem faced by our modern American society is that it has become unfashionable and sophistic to think in terms of absolute good and evil. Instead, there is a societal predilection to think in terms of gradient values of good and evil where everything lies in lighter to darker shades of gray. One man's off white is another's medium gray. This moral equivocation is pushed in schools, universities, and the media as "acceptance" and "tolerance." It is the resultant of an unbridled liberal philosophy, has lead to a demonstrable cultural decline in values, and needs to be reigned in post haste. As Joseph Bell wrote and I agree, " experience is the most pitiless teacher of all."
>"All this is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing" - Edmund Burke<
And Satan is making hay while the sun shines as, in order to make their lives bearable, men make jokes out of their denial. No more girley-men, please!!!!! Evil is real. Good is real. It is a war of spirituality with material manisfestations. Choose sides, gentlemen. Then it is a fight to the end of life as we know it. May evil shrivel in the flames of the firey pit forever!
After all,sin is still alive and well in humanity but since our public schools, many of the Mainline churches, and a huge majority of parents do not teach their kids about this reality, it is no wonder that Kos-like morality fills the air.
BTTT
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