America's Real Quagmire

NOTE: This is an essay I wrote in 2004.

AMERICA’S REAL QUAGMIRE

America is in a quagmire– but it is not in Iraq, it is right here at home. The American Heritage Dictionary defines quagmire as a difficult or precarious situation. We are in the fight of our lives, our very survival depends on our success – but the liberals have learned a lesson from Vietnam and are determined to continue repeating it.

On November 8, 2001, Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the Times Union that “[t]he United States is not headed into a quagmire; it's already in one. The United States is not losing the first round against the Taliban; it has already lost it”. This was in response to our campaign in Afghanistan which began on October 7, 2001, just one month earlier.

Quagmire is the word liberals use to compare any war campaign to Vietnam, in hopes of convincing the American public that we are in a war that we can’t win. The Vietnam War was a battle in the Cold War. It was a campaign that the liberals failed to see the significance of. Communist expansionism was a serious threat to the United States.
The communists had already taken over China, Czechoslovakia, East Berlin, Hungary, Cuba, Albania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania by the time we fought the Vietnam War and they had tried to place nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Our shame in Vietnam isn’t that we fought the war, but that we entered into a war without the will to win it at any cost. Conceding in that war gave the world the impetus to ridicule American power, and it demoralized the country. Vietnam changed everything. Experts began predicting that the Soviet’s would win the Cold War and there was nothing America could do about it.

After World War II ended, Allied troops continued to be attacked by rebel soldiers for three years. But liberals are trying to convince us that we are losing in Iraq because we are still being attacked a year after the conflict began. Liberal apologists see any conflict we enter as a flexing of American muscle in a show of arrogance. They complain that President Bush wasn’t preemptive before 9/11 using the intelligence available at the time, yet decry the fact that he acted on the best intelligence available to preempt Iraq from selling or using weapons of mass destruction.
So where is our quagmire? Our quagmire exists right here in the homeland. It is between those who would lay the blame of all the world’s ills at the feet of America and thus on her people, and those who believe this country, with all of her faults, is still the greatest country on the face of the earth. It is between those who are willing to sit back and do nothing in order to make the world like us and those who believe that doing nothing is dangerous and self-defeating. The course we determine now will affect future generations of Americans. Do we have the will to win or will we give the world another reason to laugh at us?
In the July 2, 1776 General Orders to the Continental Army, George Washington wrote:
“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore to resolve to conquer or die. Our own Country's Honor, all call upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions--The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty…is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth”