Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Country at a crossroad

Victor Davis Hanson:

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.

Our terrorist enemy has no uniforms or aircraft, but nevertheless struck at the very heart of our financial and political capitals in a fashion unimaginable by Nazi Germany, Tojo's Japan, or the Soviet Union. The Islamic fascists' creed is Hitlerian, their methodology primeval. Their aim is not mere territory: They want nothing less than the destruction of Western freedom, through the takeover of the Middle East and the use of its petroleum wealth to craft a nuclear, global caliphate, Dark Aged in its values, 21st-century in its lethality.

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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.

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During his current campaign, almost every criticism Kerry has voiced against the war has been crassly opportunistic, puerile, or bordering on the unhinged. Contrary to Kerry's belief, a country that defeated Germany, Japan, and Italy with a handful of allies really can fight al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein at the same time....

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Kerry the Multilateralist has derided the current coalition of willing nations as either bought or impotent — and yet promises to bring Germany and France, both countries lacking the resolve and loyalty of our present allies, into a war that neither he nor they support. By definition, his own antiwar rhetoric promises to preclude future help and erodes the resolve of our present comrade-states in arms. He claims that we let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora (although at the time he praised the operation) — even though there has never been proof that Osama was actually trapped in Tora Bora. He repeats this canard endlessly, despite the fact that American commanders on the ground believed that the sudden influx of thousands of American troops into the high mountains of Afghanistan would not have changed the outcome of that successful campaign, and, indeed, might have impaired it.

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