The Big Issue on the Table

By John E. Carey
January 29, 2007

I have a friend in Texas. Liberals wouldn’t like him much. Nor he them. He does not believe that the American government is here to fund and take care of every American. He believes strongly in self determination, the strength of family and many other things that are sometimes called American or family values.

He travels a lot in his business and he packs heat too. It is all legal. If his family is threatened by some mayhem or kidnapping he’ll call the police on 911 – but probably after he solves the terror.

Just the other day my friend in Texas said to me: isn’t the first role of government to defend us a nation?

He reminded me of one of the great Ronald Reagan quotes: “Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.

This discussion doesn’t come up too often. In many other nations the role of the defense organization and the military is not on the public consciousness at all. In many nations like Sweden, the Netherlands and countless others the government is seen as an organization that distributes services like health care. People in countries like Sweden and the Netherlands are decidedly proud of their nations and their governments. They talk for hours on end on how proud they are of their schools, their government funded day care system, the fact that grandfather had an operation that costs the family almost nothing.

These people: many of them Europeans, also can rant for hours about how misguided America is as a nation. They can dredge up the dirt too. I’ve heard people talk at length about all the ills of American history including slavery.

Rarely do these people stumble upon a few of the things America has done right: like bailing out a bunch of nations in World War II and then rebuilding East and West using the Marshall Plan and by building organizations like NATO and the U.N.

A liberal on an anti-American rant can always recall Hiroshima but never the liberation of Paris or Rome or other places.

I wrote about America’s role in World War II recently and one of my readers could only respond with bile and venom: to him America’s role was miniscule compared to the role of the Soviet Union and the Soviet people.

So sometimes it seems that saying something good about America is a bad thing. Why is that?

I spent a few hours today with a Lebanese-born American citizen. He came here when he was about 20 years old. He came here with virtually no money. Today he is in his seventies and still managing his 50 some stores! Many of his employees are also immigrants. They can’t stop telling people what a great place America is: the land of opportunity.

I am one of those conservatives many people in the world (including, sadly, many other Americans) really hate. I believe that America has a special place in the world. Despite our terrible failures like Vietnam, I still see America as a glass half full.

Driving past an overcrowded U.S. government office where immigrants wait sometimes for hours just to speak to a U.S. government agent about achieving the special status of “U.S. citizen,” a rather naïve passenger of mine said: why do they want to come here?

People from all over the globe have one primary goal in life: to come to America. They want to be citizens. They want the promise of a better life. For many of these people the real goal is a better life – a life filled with promise – for their children.

Many immigrants know there is a system of fairness in America. The justice system works better than most. Corruption is relatively rare. You can call the police for help and when they come they will bring help and not ask for money.

In many countries: people are afraid to call the police because the police are so terribly corrupt. A friend from Thailand talked to me about the terrible traffic congestion in Bangkok. He confessed that he himself drove “like crazy person.” I asked if he ever got a ticket. He said no: although he had been pulled over by the police dozens of time he could always avoid a citation by paying the Thai policeman a few dollars.

Here is my deepest fear: that America will end up in the next few years a beaten loser with little national stature. And that will not mean that the world will be better off. The Muslim world will still be warring against many nations. The Persian Gulf could well be closed to the U.S. No telling where oil prices will be. China could well exert its influence on the U.S. in some unhelpful way. Their booming economy will be used to expand China’s world reach and its vast military. The U.S. economy will deteriorate and the U.S. military will be demoralized and sadly in need of a rebuilding effort that may not get off the drawing board.

That immigrant that came here for a better life for his children will see the “American Dream” not just lost but turned into a nightmare.

The issue on the table that appears to be facing America, it seems to me, is this: will America continue to strive for a better situation in Iraq or will America say “it was all a mistake” and slink away.

Because that prospect will cause loud applause in a lot of places where Imams teach their young children to breed unrest and discord in the world; in Iran where the President wants to wipe Israel off the map (he said so himself), in Venezuela where a President who called the U.S. President “El Diablo” at the United Nations sits, and in a lot of European nations where people like to see America fail. When America fails, all those who hate America take great joy and then reaffirm that their positions on things are correct and justified.

And out of that applause will spring more attacks on the American homeland.

I know I am a salmon swimming up stream here: all of the polls are against me. All of the “pols” seem to be too.

Well, not all. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel, R-Kentucky, told Bob Schieffer on the CBS Sunday program “Face the Nation,” that he still supports President Bush and will work to prevent the Senate from passing any of the various resolutions which oppose the administration’s position.

“What I’ll be doing is trying to appeal to my Republican colleagues to not pass a nonbinding resolution that basically says to the troops who are going there this is a mission that doesn’t have a chance of succeeding,” Senator McConnel said.

McConnell said that Republicans would not filibuster any of the resolutions, but the minority party will ask to vote on all of the resolutions at once – meaning it will take 60 votes to pass any one of them. “I am not certain that any of these will get 60 votes,” McConnell said. “We’ll find out in the coming week or two.”

But let’s be careful that we don’t trade away what seems a terribly misguided and “no win” effort for what seductively seems like peace and fewer casualties.

Because our withdrawal from the war against terror will be seen as a white flag of surrender by millions of people who really want to see America fail.

Which reminds me of another Ronald Reagan quote: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”

Oh, and my friend in Texas has also mentioned that he believes we should string up some of the politicians that are voicing opposition to the president. But he’s a little to the right of me. And that opposition is part of the beauty of democracy.

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