The Party of Defeat

I have consistently argued that the War in Iraq is a just and necessary war that liberated 25 million and smashed one of the greatest obstacles to international security. I say we should stay the course until the job is done and General Petraeus is the best one to make that assessment. However in our fashionable milieu where perception equals reality, facts on the ground, rational arguments and truth have given way to the charges “that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.” In late 2005, Norman Podhoretz wrote an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal faithfully attempting to overturn the campaign of distortion and set the record straight on exactly who is responsible for the deception.

Then there was the discovery of 500 chemical munitions by coalition forces in Iraq in June 2006, reports on the use of chemical weapons against our troops, as well as the seizure by Jordanian security of 20 tons of WMD stockpiles originating in Iraq to be used by al Qaeda operatives trained in pre-war Iraq in a planned detonation that would have killed an estimated 80,000 people. Not even such facts on the ground made a difference in penetrating the barrage of deception.

Recently David Horowitz and Ben Johnson co-authored the book, The Party of Defeat, which exposes the prime point of deception, which occurred three months after the invasion of Iraq, when the Democrat Party changed their strategy from support of the war having voted to authorize military force, to a propaganda campaign of deceit and lies to undermine the war and President Bush. I wrote a review for FrontPage Magazine adapted from the introduction to the book and the enlightening essay "Hope for Iraq’s Meanest City" by Michael Totten in City Journal. I hope you find these arguments compelling:

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At no other time in our nation’s history, other than the period of the Civil War when Democrats supported secession and slavery and Republicans championed freedom, have we been so politically divided. Political unity in wartime has always been an article of faith as rival political parties during the Cold War era upheld the axiom “politics stops at the water’s edge.” Bipartisan unity prevailed even during the Vietnam War as both parties supported the war effort for over a decade and were in accord on military withdrawal when victory seemed no longer possible. Whether we are for the war or against it, we can all agree that it should not be used as a political football for the advantage of one political party over another.

Yet for the first time, opposition to the War in Iraq has become an obsessive partisan effort to lose the war and discredit our Commander in Chief. Wartime bipartisanship has been thrown under the bus. The Democratic Party leadership has crossed the line from constitutionally protected dissent and opposition to willful sabotage. The antiwar opposition is not just the radical fringe and loony leftists marching in the streets burning effigies of President Bush, but has now morphed into the Democratic Party in toto. This is the thesis of the new book The Party of Defeat, by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson. Read more...