During the 1961 Berlin Crisis, when the Free World and the Soviet Empire teetered on the nuclear tightrope of mutual annihilation, President Kennedy explained why Berliners’ freedom mattered to Americans:
“The solemn vow which each of us gave to West Berlin in time of peace will not be broken in time of danger. If we do not meet our commitment to Berlin, where will we later stand?
“Today, the endangered frontier of freedom runs through divided Berlin.”
For this latest generation of Americans entrusted with defending freedom in an hour of maximum danger, and compelled to do so during an age where a world condensed by an internet cannot endure half-slave and half-free, the endangered frontier of freedom runs through embattled Iraq.
Through the 2002 bi-partisan Congressional authorization of force and through the subsequent heroic sacrifices of our troops, Americans pledged to extend liberty to Iraqis. Yet, initial hopes for Iraq’s immediate transition to liberty vanished due to internal insurgents and external terrorists and nation-states, and the Bush administration’s erroneous assessments and decisions. Now, many Americans demand our nation betray our promise and abandon Iraqis to evil.
For Iraqis, this is a death sentence. But what does it mean for us?
Breaking our pledge to the Iraqis reveals our devotion to liberty is weaker than our enemy’s obsession with death. And it informs the world Bin-Laden is right: America lacks the strength and surety of purpose to win the War for Freedom. This will fuel our enemy’s propaganda; recruitment of adherents; and ability to wage war against us without regard to our military capability to stop them. Their diabolical calculation becomes this: anywhere the U.S. acts against terrorism, to win the enemy need merely butcher innocent human beings until we quit.
Equally, if we again betray our professed commitment to extend freedom to the Iraqis and condemn them to death for the crime of trusting us, America will be morally and diplomatically disarmed against our enemy in the War for Freedom. Having abandoned the principle of liberty, what else can we offer the region’s oppressed to turn them away from the enemy and towards us?
Nothing.
If we are defeated – and it will be by our own hand, not the enemy’s – in today’s endangered frontier of freedom, innumerable Iraqis will die and we will belie our faith in liberty. Consequently, we will be impotently trapped in a war without end against an implacable enemy bent upon our destruction; and we will have nowhere to stand but alone here at home.
So cursed to live in an age of retreating liberty and encroaching tyranny from Al-Qaeda and nuclear-armed terrorist states, future generations of Americans will rue the day we sealed their fate.
Yet, when we win – and we will win, as other generations have done against the enemies of liberty – we will have furthered the cause of ours and all human freedom; we will have hastened the day true peace descends upon our terror ravaged planet; and we will have reaffirmed America’s promise to ourselves, the Iraqis, and all humanity as annunciated by President Lincoln:
“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just – a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”
May America never “change course” from this promise.
