Excerpts from the latest Victor Davis Hanson Article.
Country at a Crossroads
November 2 will say a lot about the American people, and our future
Had Lincoln lost the 1864 vote, a victorious General McClellan would have settled for an American continent divided, with slavery intact. Without Woodrow Wilson's reelection in 1916 — opposed by the isolationists — Western Europe would have lost millions only to be trampled by Prussian militarism. Franklin Roosevelt's interventionism saved liberal democracy. And without the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and his unpopular agenda for remaking the military, the Soviet Union might still be subsidizing global murder.
This election marks a similar crossroads in our history. We are presented with two radically different candidates with profound disagreements about how to conduct a historic worldwide war. We should remember that all our victorious past presidents were, at the moments of their crises, deeply unpopular precisely because they chose the difficult, long-term sacrifice for victory over the expedient and convenient pleas for accommodation (if not outright capitulation). We are faced with just such an option today: a choice between a president whose call for patience and sacrifice promises victory, and a pessimist stirring the people with the assurances that we should not have fought, and now cannot win, the present war in Iraq. [...]
Later in the article, Victor Davis Hanson explains why a Kerry Presidency would be so disastrous:
WHAT KERRY PORTENDS
A Kerry presidency would not be a setback for our present winning strategy; it would be an unmitigated disaster. Why such a pessimistic appraisal? First, Kerry's own rhetoric has been abjectly defeatist, if not Orwellian. He promises to bring allies into a war he smears as having been waged in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He broadcasts in advance a timetable for withdrawal. His present positions are at odds with his own past votes to support the Iraq operation, which he has alternately praised and demeaned depending on the ephemeral news from the battlefield and its immediate impact on polling.
Senator Kerry also has a disturbing record of opposing America's past armed struggles, as both a soldier and a senator, in the midst of hostilities. He returned from Vietnam to allege war atrocities against his fellow soldiers in the field, and met with enemy North Vietnamese representatives in Paris. During the first Gulf War, he voted against authorization even as troops were mobilizing in the desert sands to expel Saddam Hussein. Had Kerry's position won out, Saddam would now have nuclear weapons and over 20 percent of the world's oil reserves, and be idolized as the legendary Saladin come alive to the Arab Street. Even as we witness the first national vote in Afghanistan in 5,000 years, a brave Prime Minister Allawi steering his country toward elections, and unyielding Australians reelecting their war president in a landslide vote, a President Kerry would revert to his default of opposing further military efforts even as they are nearing victory.
Third, John Kerry has a telltale record of voting against most of the major weapons systems — bombers, tanks, and missiles — that are presently critical to the American military. Had his naïve visions trumped Ronald Reagan's realism, the United States would not have had the military wherewithal to convince Mikhail Gorbachev that further armed Soviet resistance was futile and suicidal, and we could have won neither the first Gulf War nor the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. [...]
The article concludes:
In sum, a Kerry presidency will lack either the vision or the resolve to finish the war, resulting in a defeat for the United States in Iraq — with calamitous consequences for the brave reformers there, an end to liberal momentum in the Middle East, a reversal in the conduct of Libya, Pakistan, and the Gulf, and assurance to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran that the United States is conducting not war but a criminal investigation akin to efforts against gambling or prostitution. Chamberlain-like, we will return to the complacency of the pre-9/11 days, regarding the telltale signs of the destruction to come as mere "nuisances." All the hysterical invective of John Kerry's surrogates — like George Soros, Michael Moore, Terry McAuliffe, and Teresa Heinz Kerry — cannot change that bleak and depressing fact.
Read Victor Davis Hanson's article in its entirety here.