Bush to Critics: Put Up or Shut Up

Bush Lashes Out at Opponents on Iraq Plan

President Bush fought back at lawmakers opposing his new plan for Iraq today, charging that simply being against the strategy without suggesting alternatives was “irresponsible.” He challenged them to come up with a better plan.

Bush has finally responded to those who have been whining and complaining from the cheap seats. It’s easy to say, “That’s wrong, fix it!” and a lot harder to consider the consequences of failure and to come up with a solution.

As to the loss of troops – each one is a tragedy and I don’t have to meet Nancy Pelosi’s apparent requirement of a family member on active duty to comment on this. Here’s “speaking truth to power,” Ms. Pelosi:

Yes, three thousand American soldiers have lost their lives. Compare that to the 16,885 people in the U.S. who died in alcohol-related motor vehicle crashes just in 2005. Does that mean the loss of the our troops is not a tragedy? Of course it doesn’t, but let’s keep it in perspective. It’s perfectly normal that soldiers in a war zone are killed. The oddity, and the miracle, is that so few have died. The Korean War, which lasted only three years, cost 54,246 service members their lives. We should be celebrating that only three thousand troops have died. For pity’s sake, New Orleans has a higher death rate than Iraq!

and

The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are. I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil. Nor am I greatly moved by the fact that many of the individuals we strike down in war are innocent. […] The question is whether war is the greatest evil in the world, so that any state of affairs which might result from submission is certainly preferable. And I do not see any really cogent arguments for that view.
C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory

Yes, our soldiers die, but their deaths do mean something, whether or not you personally agree with this war. The “state of affairs which might result from submission” is NOT preferable, and we refuse it. Our soldiers refuse it. And even though you would accept it on our behalf, we won’t let you. That’s truth. Choke on it.

Ms. Pelosi and the rest of the anti-war crowd had better consider the full picture. Did the Congress who cut off funding to South Vietnam really consider the repercussions of that act? Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese were sent to reeducation camps or killed. Are we more likely to see “reeducation camps” in Iraq, or mass graves? Does it behoove us to prove Osama bin Laden correct when he called us “paper tigers” and to validate Nasrallah’s statement to Muslims that we will abandon them, just like we abandoned the Vietnamese? It’s time for the so-called “reality-based” community to live up to its name. Whether or not they agree with how we got to Iraq, or whether they think we should be in Iraq, simply leaving has consequences that must be taken into account. This is too important an issue to allow it to be driven by polls, especially when the poll respondents are informed by a media with a clear anti-war agenda.

If Pelosi and the rest of them, including some Republicans, insist on re-creating Vietnam, they had better be prepared to take the consequences. This time, we’re not all dependent on Walter Cronkite for information. It’s not going to take decades to learn that we could have won, that the Tet Offensive was a U.S. military victory and an enemy propaganda victory. It’s not going to take decades to hear from enemy commanders like N. Vietnamese General Tran Do that they knew they were militarily beaten and that they relied upon our media to drive us from the battlefield. And that is a factor that the politicians should take into account.

I seldom agree with John McCain. I’m not sure whether Congress has the right, under the current circumstances, to cut funding for the war. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when he said, “I also believe that if that vote [to cut funding to the war in Iraq] is successful, then those who were the proponents of it then assume the consequences of failure.“

Update:
More on the “put up or shut up” theme from The Anchoress:

And what, then, is the solution for dealing with worldwide terror? Until someone can tell me what is the workable alternative to war, can tell me how to keep our children from having to live in a world where free speech is lost to intimidation, cathedral crosses are replaced with minarets, women are stoned to death for the crime of being raped, gays are hung for being gay and jews are simply left for slaughter, I simply can’t find the answer.

Note: a “workable alternative” includes taking the Islamists at their word, particularly what they say in their own language, to their own people, which is normally very different from the taqiyaa served up to the Western media. See MEMRI for literally thousands of examples.

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