The Post-Mortem To End All Post-Mortems

To be honest, I haven't read many of the post-election analyses of why things went so badly for the GOP last Tuesday. First, because they were all going to say more or less the same things, and second because those that included some form or other of criticism of the Iraq project would still be missing what I consider to be the tell-tale tipping point that produced a turn to the party of surrender in the middle of a war.

If it weren't for the war, I would have been predicting a bigger Donk blowout than what actually transpired. Though I got sick of reading and listening to the carping from our side of the aisle about how Republicans were spending too much and had grown inured to the trappings of power they once decried and weren't doing much, if anything, with the big majorities they were given in 2004, I never denied the truth of these things. I just did not believe that voters would elevate these issues above the overarching imperative of keeping the conduct of the war in the hands of the party that actually took national security seriously.

Even on the issue of getting judges confirmed, which had fueled GOP victories in '02 and '04, the Republicans failed miserably (Justices Roberts and Alito not withstanding). John McCain's cabal of RINO insurgents (including the infamous Mike DeWine, who paid the price for that perfidy) pissed away the best opportunity we'll probably ever again have to sweep away Democrat obstructionism and make dramatic progress in cleaning left-wing oligarchists out of the appellate judiciary and replacing them with constitutionalists who actually take the founding documents, and their responsibility to preserve them rather than re-write them, seriously. But even that, it seemed to me, would be subordinated to this little matter of national survival against a band of mass-murderous theocratic fanatics who will not rest until either they've destroyed us or we've annihilated them. After all, it had been the last two cycles; so it would be this time as well.

In sum, while Republicans richly deserved to be cashiered, the Democrats were even more undeserving of benefitting from it. And 9/11 should still have been fresh enough in the public psyche to keep the status quo at least nominally in place.

But it didn't happen. The Democrats - unabashedly and militantly pacifist, committed to American defeat and destruction, neoBolshevik in a lot more than just name, maniacally intent on a civil war against their diminished and retreating political foes, and unchanged from the mentality that got three thousand Americans killed just five years ago - swept to power in both houses of Congress, with the not unreasonable expectation that completing the table-running with the White House in two years is a mere formality.

So, the question: How in the blue hell could the American electorate have made such a disastrous mistake? There is, it seems to me, only one possible answer: the American people are no longer convinced that we are at war.

Throughout American history there have been numerous wars of varying degrees of intensity. Leaving aside the Revolutionary War (since we weren't yet a nation until after it was won), there is at least one common thread extending through all of them: none, with one enormously notable exception, lasted longer than four years.

***War of 1812 - a year and a half

***Mexican War - a few months

***Civil War - four years

***Spanish-American War - three weeks

***World War I - a year and a half

***World War II - three years & eight months

***Korean War - three years

***Gulf War I - six weeks

***Kosovo - eleven weeks

The conflict so conspicuous by its absence, Vietnam, lasted eleven years from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the last chopper fleeing Saigon, and it resulted, of course, in self- (or, rather, Democrat-) inflicted defeat. Although it is worth pointing out that the public worm didn’t turn on the war in southeast Asia until the Tet Offensive, which was a huge U.S. victory successfully sold by the Enemy Media to the American public as a massive defeat. Tet happened in…1968, right as the war was approaching its four-year mark. So by this measure it is reasonable to suppose that public support for the war effort would have turned sour anyway, Tet or no Tet.

We’ve been in Iraq for three and a half years, and we’re five years into the overall GWOT. Historically speaking, to succeed – to win – we should already have defeated all our enemies by now. But we haven’t; we’re still flailing away in Iraq where Iran and Syria continue to wage asymmetrical war against us, and we remain, of our own choosing, on the defensive.

I’ve said ever since President Bush’s May 2003 carrier landing photo op that Iraq could not be the final military campaign; that we had to keep the tanks and Bradleys rolling right across the border into Syria and Iran and finish the war once and for all. You cannot win a war by only fighting half of it, and limiting ourselves to just Iraq constituted just that. For all the inspiring purple fingers and the democratic accomplishments and the vast progress that we’ve made at re-building Iraq into a free, prosperous, non-enemy state, it amounted, and amounts, to nothing more than a big, fat target for our remaining, undefeated Middle East enemies to destroy at their leisure, and made our big, fat achilles heel – the four year time limit – our most visible liability. Like the VietCong before them, the mullahs and their jihadi minions did not have to defeat us on the battlefield; all they had to do was wait, and we’d run away of our own foolish, short-sighted accord.

That’s what they were banking on, and as of last Tuesday, that’s what we - or, rather, those who voted Democrat - have given them.

Now that the Dems are back in the saddle, the Iraqi project will have the plug pulled on it, our forces will be "strategically redeployed" (to Greenland, perhaps?), Iran will conquer Iraq, the pressure on Israel will magnify even more, a nuclear exchange in the Middle East will become even more inevitable, and the war will return to our shores.

We’ve forgotten the lesson of 9/11. We’ve forgotten the warning of President Bush in its immediate wake that this will be a "long war" in which much of the fighting will not be in the headlines, but in the shadows (the New York Times not withstanding). That grievous error will exact an even larger price in American civilian blood in order for the lesson to be refreshed.

The questions after the next Islamist-inflicted disaster will be (1) whether we will finally take it seriously enough to fight the whole war to a swift and vengeful finish, or even acknowledge it at all; (2) whether voters will apply the lesson by undoing the huge misjudgment they just made; and (3) whether Republicans will even be willing or able to put themselves in a position to regain the power they squandered.

There is an old saying: in a democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve. It is then far from ironic that the thousands upon thousands of Americans now guaranteed to perish someday in the not too distant future will, to a very real extent, ultimately have nobody to blame but themselves.

Those of us that did not vote for national suicide will have them to blame as well.

You can count on it.