Courage?
Plenty of other bloggers have already pointed out the logical fallacy of columnists characterizing Chuck Hagel as “courageous” for undermining our soldiers fighting al Qaeda and other terrorists and thugs in Iraq while the polls show overwhelmingly escapist sentiment at home. The latest Orwellian suffix to “support our troops” is “deny them reinforcements.” What this shares with other such feel-good manipulations is that it could never survive utterance in a roomful of actual troops and a live audio feed. Yet it did transform Chuck Hagel from Senate nobody to the darling of the same news media that has been perfectly willing to cover the war exactly the way al Qaeda wants it covered.
You want political courage, you say? I would define that as standing on your principles and taking a risk for them. Let’s say you’re the hypothetic front-runner for the presidency of the United States, and in defiance of all conventional political wisdom, you risk the ultimate political prize on the ferocious advocacy of an unfashionable position. Whether you like John McCain or not, give him the credit he has earned. Here is a politician who would sacrifice his early advantage in the apparent belief that the security of the nation demands it. That is courage.
A democracy so lacking in courage that it yields power to violence has a short shelf life.
This comes perilously close to being an endorsement, so I’ll say here that I do not offer one. But any politician who expects my vote in 2008 will have to do what John McCain is doing: lead. It means laying out the stakes in Iraq in a way that President Bush lacks the God-given diction skills to do, and to challenge the escapists to answer tough questions about the consequences of a surrender they often won’t quite advocate. I ask again: do you have any idea who we are fighting there, and what our surrender would mean for them? And for us? Supporting our troops means what we have always known it to mean: letting them win.