Kos Prefers Peace At Any Price?

10 Feb, 2005 by John Hawkins

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This telling quotation you’re about to read from Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos is worth reading and analyzing because it exposes some of the underlying ideological beliefs that make today’s liberals incapable of handling foreign policy. From Kos…

“Here’s the deal — a war is worth fighting if you would sacrifice everything you hold dear to fight it.

It’s that simple. The 101st Fighting Keyboarded and their bretheren in the Republican Corporate Media fail this very easy test of the sincerity of their convictions.”

On the surface, this would simply seem to be a combination of the chickenhawk “argument” (and I used the word “argument” very loosely here) and Michael Moore’s “would (you) sacrifice your child to secure Fallujah” comment to Bill O’Reilly and hence, is rather silly.

If you wanted to be as ridiculous as the people who take those sorts of positions, you could just as easily say that if you’re serious about preventing war, then you should go to Iraq and be a human shield for Al-Zarqawi. You could also apply that sort of shallow “reasoning” to firemen or policemen just as easily as it can be applied to soldiers…

“Oh, well if you’re not willing to charge into a burning building to try to put out a fire, then you shouldn’t expect a fireman to do it. Same goes for cops. How can you ask a policeman to risk his life enforcing the law if you’re not willing to grab a shotgun, kick in the door of a crackhouse, and start making citizens arrests?”

Put another way, these are frivolous tactics that are designed to cut off a debate about the war that the left has been losing from day 1.

That being said, the first part of what Kos said deserves more attention,

“Here’s the deal — a war is worth fighting if you would sacrifice everything you hold dear to fight it.”

So, if you support a war, you should be willing to “sacrifice everything you hold dear to fight it?” Gee, I thought the point of going to war was to protect “everything you hold dear,” not destroy it.

In any case, let’s consider what the phrase “everything you hold dear” would entail. Your house? Sure. Your bank account & everything you own? Certainly. Your family? What could be dearer to people than their family?

Everybody reading this blog remembers the war in Afghanistan, correct? Would there have been a war if every American who supported it had to go fight in Afghanistan, take their kids with them, and come back to an empty bank account, a burned down house, and dead wives and parents? Of course there wouldn’t have been a war.

As a matter of fact, there’s no war that the United States has ever fought that we could have fielded an army for if the Americans fighting the war and everyone who supported the war was asked to “sacrifice everything (they held) dear to fight it.” Yet, that is the standard Kos thinks we should apply to every war…at least when there’s a Republican in the White House and Kos doesn’t support the war that we’re currently fighting.

All Kos is doing here is artfully rephrasing slogans like “Better red than dead,” “Peace at any cost,” & “Better to live on your knees than die on your feet,” in a way that’s more palatable. In other words,

“It’s not that we liberals are pacifists or won’t support any war, it’s just that there’s no justification for war that we’ve heard that meets our high moral standards.”

How can you trust people with this mentality to make vitally important decisions that will have an impact on our national security? You can’t…

Hat tip to Lori Byrd from PoliPundit for finding this post at the Daily Kos.