We live, they die

Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson offers a unique look at the former president’s outlook on the Cold War in a piece published this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. Robinson’s story should remind Americans of lessons of the past and affirm -- if not enhance -- our resolve to win the War on Terror.

Robinson recounts the California governor’s epiphany on how to best confront the growing Soviet threat: “We win and they lose,” Reagan said in 1977. We did. They did. The rest is history.

Shouldn’t that also be America’s approach to the War on Terror? Yeah. So enough with the pandering and equivocation. Enough with the kid gloves.

America’s decades-long communist adversary sought to overwhelm the United States with superior strategic forces and a more abundant cache of weapons -- a nuclear juggernaut, if you will. Ronald Reagan defied that effort with a weapon the Soviet Union could not match: a free economy.

The president made clear in the 1980s that the driving force behind his policy chiefly benefited one goal: the demise of iron-fisted Soviet sovereignty. His economic plan fit into that scheme, and he brought to bear all of American’s warring resources, including our tenacity and patriotic spirit. And he won his war.

How quickly we forget. Only 15 years since Mr. Reagan left office, we are again debating about how to handle a growing and ominous threat. And the answer is so clear: We win and they lose. We smash them with the mighty fist of our military, and we yield to nothing, to nobody, until the homeland is safe and peace is restored.

Islamic radicals’ war on freedom knows no borders, no rules of war, no sanctity for humanity. It is without reason, without justice and without honor. And until every last one of them has been purged, we remain threatened as we live, work, eat and sleep.

Appeasers aren’t worried about this threat. They pretend it does not exist, that we need not live under a cloak of American protection. They say 9/11 was a fluke, and some even say it was our fault. They’re wrong.

And unless wiser thought prevails, they could be dead wrong.

That’s the dimension of this conflict critics fail to consider. There is but one course of action: We win and they lose, lest they live and we die.