Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:
The Vietnam Syndrome, a loss of confidence in the efficacy of American military engagement, was mainly a failure of U.S. elites. But it's different this time. This presidency has been steadfast in war. No matter. In a piece this week on the White House's efforts to rally the nation to the idea of defeating terrorism abroad to thwart another attack on the U.S., the AP's Nedra Pickler wrote: "But that hasn't kept the violence and unrest out of the headlines every day." This time the despondency looks to be penetrating the general population. And the issue isn't just body counts; it's more than that.
The missions in Iraq and Afghanistan grew from the moral outrage of September 11. U.S. troops, the best this country has yet produced, went overseas to defend us against repeating that day. Now it isn't just that the war on terror has proven hard; the men and women fighting for us, the magnificent 99%, are being soiled in a repetitive, public way that is unbearable.
The greatest danger at this moment is that the American public will decide it wants to pull back because it has concluded that when the U.S. goes in, it always gets hung out to dry.
Two major military reports will come out soon on the Haditha incident, and no one will gainsay justice if that is required. But the atmosphere around this event is going to get uncontrollably manic, and that will feed the dark, inward-turning sentiments already poisoning the country's mood over issues like the immigration debate.
Good for Democrats? Don't count on it. After this, the public appetite for a Democratic president's "humanitarian" military intervention in a Darfur or East Timor will be close to zero.
One suspects that U.S. troops were party to some awful events in the Pacific and European theaters of World War II, all gone in the mists of history and the enemy's defeat. Not now. Gen. Chiarelli's magnificent "99.9%" notwithstanding, it's the phenomenon of the so-very-public 0.01%--at Abu Ghraib, on an Afghan street, at Haditha--that is breaking America's will this time.
Ed Morrissey writes:
Other nations, notably Australia, has repeatedly warned of this dynamic. They have argued that the world needs an engaged US, simply because no one else has the resources necessary to handle nuclear proliferators and out-of-control despots. The UN has already abandoned the US once in this war, and the question will be, as Henninger points out, whether we will be inclined to assist them when they call the next time. Will we bother to go to Darfur or East Timor when no one would recognize the effort anyway, and would probably look for ways to discredit it? Would we trust ourselves to do it right when the press seems hell-bent on magnifying the actions of the few who may or may not have committed war crimes?
Hopefully, the answer would be yes, regardless of the anklebiters on the world stage. However, as we slowly lose the will to fight for ourselves, fighting for others will certainly not rejuvenate it. Through a continual focus on what less than 0.01% of our troops have done wrong, the nation appears ready to give up on the 99.9% of our men and women who perform magnificently in their country's service. That confidence will take another generation to recover, and when we do, we may find our enemies have multiplied -- as they did the last time.
Indeed.
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