Josh Manchester (who blogs at Adventures of Chester), writing today at Tech Central Station, reacts to the James Carroll piece from last week in the Boston Globe. This was the Editorial, readers may remember, in which Carroll suggested that Americans might best look upon failure and defeat in Iraq as a necessary prescription for what ails. We lost our honor in going into Iraq, and it’s too late to worry about losing any more by turning tail, Carroll concluded.

I responded last week with considerable anger, thinking Carroll’s question an easy one “for any fool in Boston to ask, since the lives of many brave men and women In Iraq would be the objects of his answer.”

Carroll went further, admonishing his fellow Americans that, “can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?”

Carroll says we lost our honor in how we got to Iraq, and have no more to lose, now. I’ll say again:

We did not lose our honor by acting on behalf of the United Nations Security Council and their 17 resolutions against Saddam Hussein, and acting to remove a brutal tyrant who actively supported and sponsored terrorism, and sought weapons of mass destruction.
We did not lose our honor in helping the Iraqi people conduct three successful elections with majority participation that greatly exceeded participation rates in any US elections.
We certainly have not lost our honor in the face of dishonest, manipulated, propaganda media campaigns launched by our sworn enemies and willingly, knowingly, and enthusiastically supported by “journalists” such as Carroll.

I quite agree with Manchester’s suggestion that defeat is what many Democrats have in mind:

It is difficult not to conclude that there is a class of well-intentioned individuals in the United States like him who don't merely feel as they do upon witnessing a defeat, but instead think this way all the time. Like it or not, this mentality of permanent defeat plays a large part in the Democratic Party.

At least until the expected golden era when Democrats send us to “winnable war” under the Powell doctrine, when no lives are lost and killing is done without us having to see any of it first hand, and only second hand through the eyes of an adoring media.

(Via Instapundit)