Where we stand in the War on Terror

Year Three - Victor Davis Hanson - Where do we stand in this disorienting war?

Excellent column at NRO (thanks, LGF) that breaks down where we've been, where we are, and hopefully where we're going - if we can keep the bloodthirsty jackals of the Old Media in their cages long enough to acheive victory.

Hanson writes:

But if the pulse of the strategic, tactical, and ideological theaters suggests we can win this war, the home front is not so bright. The few hundred American lunatics who tried to explain away 9/11 (or apologize for it) turned into thousands a few weeks later who swore we either would or should lose in Afghanistan. Now they are millions who see our ongoing struggle in Iraq as either immoral or inept. George Bush did not create this cascading antiwar movement. It was rather fueled by the blood and treasure spent to eliminate the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, together with a has-been '60s generation that felt there was still one more creaky return to the barricades left in them.

Right after 9/11, some of us thought it was impossible for leftist critics to undermine a war against fascists who were sexist, fundamentalist, homophobic, racist, ethnocentric, intolerant of diversity, mass murderers of Kurds and Arabs, and who had the blood of 3,000 Americans on their hands. We were dead wrong. In fact, they did just that. Abu Ghraib is on the front pages daily. Stories of thousands of American soldiers in combat against terrorist killers from the Hindu Kush to Fallujah do not merit the D section. Senator Kennedy's two years of insane outbursts should have earned him formal censure rather than a commemoration from the Democratic establishment.

What a litany of distractions! Words - "preemption," "unilateralism," "hegemony," - whiz by and lose all meaning. Names - "Halliburton," "Chalabi," "INC" - become little more than red meat. Vocabulary is turned upside down: "Contractors," who at great risk restore power and water to the poor, are now little more than "profiteers" and "opportunists"; killers are not even "terrorists" but mere "militants." "Neo-cons" are wild-eyed extremists; "realists" are no longer cynics - inclined to let thousands die abroad unless the chaos interrupts transit of oil or food - but rather "sober" and "circumspect," and more likely Kerry supporters.

A depressing array of transitory personalities parades before our screen, entering stage left to grab 15 minutes of notoriety for their scripted invective, only to exit on the right into oblivion. Who can remember all these one-tell-all-book, one-weekend-on-the-Sunday-news-programs personalities - a Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Paul O'Neil, Joe Wilson, Richard Clark, or Richard ben Veniste? In between their appearances on Sunday morning television or 60 Minutes, a few D.C. functionaries are carted out for periodic shouting - an unhinged Al Gore, a puffed-up Ted Kennedy, a faux-serious Bob Kerry, and occasionally a Senator Byrd or Hollings. And since the very day after 9/11 we've gotten the Vietnam-era retreads - a Peter Arnett, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Robert Scheer, John Dean, or Seymour Hersh - tottering out with the latest conspiracies about the old bogeymen and "higher-ups."

The article covers more than simply the turncoats on the homefront and is well worth a full read.