Courage?

Plenty of other bloggers have already pointed out the logical fallacy of columnists characterizing Chuck Hagel as “courageous” for undermining our soldiers fighting al Qaeda and other terrorists and thugs  in Iraq while  the polls show overwhelmingly escapist  sentiment at home.   The latest  Orwellian suffix to “support our troops” is “deny them reinforcements.”   What  this shares with other such feel-good manipulations is that it could never survive utterance in a roomful of actual troops and a live audio feed.  Yet it did transform Chuck Hagel from Senate nobody to the darling of  the same  news media that has been perfectly willing to  cover the war exactly  the way  al Qaeda wants it covered.

You want political courage, you say?  I would define that as standing on your principles and taking a risk for them.  Let’s say you’re the hypothetic front-runner for the presidency of the United States, and in defiance of all conventional political wisdom, you risk the ultimate political prize on the  ferocious advocacy of an unfashionable position.   Whether you like John  McCain or not,  give him the credit he has earned.  Here is a politician who  would sacrifice  his early advantage  in  the  apparent belief that the security of the nation demands it.  That is courage. 

A democracy so lacking in courage that it yields power to violence has a short shelf life. 

This comes perilously close to being an endorsement, so I’ll say here that I do not offer one.  But any politician who expects my vote in 2008 will have to do what John McCain is doing:  lead.   It means  laying out the stakes in Iraq  in a way that President Bush lacks the God-given diction skills to do,  and to challenge the escapists to answer tough questions about the consequences of  a surrender  they often won’t quite advocate.  I ask again:  do you have any idea who we are fighting there, and what our surrender would mean for them?  And for us?  Supporting our troops means what we have always known it to mean:  letting them win.