PrintMarch 1, 2008
Jihadists and Progressives: An Affair to Remember
General Douglas Macarthur once quipped that it was "...fatal to enter any war without the will to win it". Few epithets more accurately reflect the prevailing default setting of the majority of this country's Democrat contingent, arguably more than two thirds of the mainstream media, and anyone who even remotely identifies with the progressive agenda.
In fact, as depressing as it may sound, the left is not merely devoid of the will to win the war in Iraq; they are irrevocably committed to the pursuit of a global exposé of their own country's moral, political, and military failure, with a passion that is rivaled only by our jihadist adversaries with whom we are presently engaged.
This rather unsettling ideological partnership is not one that is necessarily shared in equal measure between these two not so strange bedfellows. For the terrorists, who are eager to capitalize on a media convinced its survival depends primarily on the shock value of what it reports, this is only a marriage of convenience.
The Democrats, for their part, engage in the surreptitious endorsement of this negative trend, through their unwillingness to cast any developments in the war in a positive light, and simply opting to promote any evidences of success as desultory accomplishments in a line of inglorious miscarriages.
But recently, those who hold such sentiments have increasingly found themselves at odds with the facts.
This discrepancy between what actually happens on the ground, and the image to which the media continues to subscribe -- with the full assent from the progressive block -- was most notably exposed in recently released documents that included a 16-page Diary written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader north of Baghdad.
While it is practically impossible to fully analyze the perambulatory social, political or psychological reasons why members of the left have adopted what could best be described as a hawkish deportment against their own motherland, the aforementioned Emir's epistle provides a good starting point from which to reckon with the more determined mindset of the terrorists, who have declared themselves sworn enemies of the United States, showing no prejudice against the diverse ideologies of its citizens.
In this document, an al-Qaeda leader by the name of Abu-Tariq bemoans the trials and tribulations that have befallen many of his once brave fighters, in a region where he once held a post as commander. At one point, in the soulful prose of a blues' singer, he even complains of being "...mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of [his] brothers". He attributes their loss of morale to the emergence of concerned citizen groups that are increasingly being organized to address the problems itinerant Mujahideen pose to the local communities. Predictably, these groups have become the newest targets of insurgent attacks.
But what is most startling about the Emir's litany of woes, and most certainly at odds with the stately picture that progressives tend to paint of the beleaguered "freedom fighters" who are heroically resisting the American "crusaders", is one of the reasons Mr. Tariq gives for his fighters' loss of motivation, in which he laments that many foreign suicide bombers bent on experiencing the "sweetness of Jihad" became disillusioned, because they were led to believe they would be dispatched to operations that involved eradicating "not less than 20 or 30 infidels" at once. Many of these assignments -- to their great regret -- never materialized.
It is this particular remark one hopes would help progressives arrive at a more realistic appraisal of the actual substance of this presumed liaison with the "insurgents", with whom they fancy an ideological kinship in pursuit of a common goal.
At first this may sound as a very offensive analysis to the average progressive; but consider for a moment that most of the rank and file members of the Democratic Party have essentially declared the war a lost cause; that the main stream media have relentlessly beaten the anti-war drum as they spuriously mourn that so many American lives have been lost in vain; and that progressives in general have declared our involvement in Iraq as a Vietnam-like quagmire from which we are sure to emerge an utterly demoralized and defeated country that will be duly renounced as an international pariah.
Now, granted it must be quite disappointing for our determined enemies to realize that -- due in no small part to the bravery of American soldiers -- they may be discouraged from pursuing an exciting career as suicide bombers since, as of late, the opportunities to maximize the number of victims on their first (and last) assignment appear to be steadily decreasing.
But how much more disappointing it must be for patriotic Americans who wish the conflict to be over, to learn that this is by far the most vexing moral dilemma terrorists who are "anxiously awaiting martyrdom" have had to wrestle with; especially when set against the backdrop of countless progressives in this country who feel they have a moral obligation to indulge in a form of collective self-condemnation on the terrorists' behalf.
