HunterByrd

Hold fast...these are dire times

This from Victor Davis Hanson:

There is a logic to Senator Kerry's flip-flopping that transcends his political opportunism: He is simply a captive of the pulse of the battlefield, without any steady vision or historical sense that might put the carnage of the day into some larger tactical, strategic, or political framework. As was true over a decade ago during Gulf War I, he contradicts himself when good news from the front makes his prior antiwar stance look either timid or foolhardy. But when the casualty rate rises or CNN is particularly vivid in airing the latest beheading or car bomb he returns to his shrill pessimism and denounces the war.

So much for Kerry on Iraq. It's the same old progressive line: celebrate when things go wrong, get down in the dumps when things go well for the US on the foreign front.

The problem with Mr. Kerry's understandable mutability, however, is that real leaders are supposed to some degree to expect and then endure these bouts of public skepticism as the inevitable wage of seeing their vision through. Thucydides' famous encomium of Pericles centered on his ability to withstand the fury of the people — and through forbearance, unshakeable will, and patience allow his constituents to return to their senses.

The same steadfastness seems to have been central to Lincoln's and Churchill's successes. Neither blinked after disasters such as Antietam, the Wilderness, and Cold Harbor, or descended into panic or depression following news of horrific losses at Singapore and Dunkirk. Pericles was fined; Lincoln faced defeat in 1864; and Churchill, after staving off early censure, was finally removed from office — but only after it was clear that his leadership had assured victory.

By contrast, Nicias, McClellan, and Chamberlain were slaves to public opinion. What vision they had was cobbled together from a sense of what the people wished in any given week — and thus constantly subject to modification and contradiction as the collective mood soared or plummeted, predicated on the people sensing that things were either going well or worsening. Such leaders are flip-floppers not simply because the god of public opinion is volatile, but because in war the battlefield itself is unpredictable and unfathomable — if one examines it in terms of hours, days, or weeks rather than months or years.

Yep, that sums it up. "Americans simply have never voted for leaders who insult their allies on the battlefield, claim that their soldiers are losing, and shrug that the war is about lost. And they surely won't this time either."