Table of Contents
For the men and women of the armed forces of the United States of America, past, present, and future. For the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, for it is you whom we shall send. God bless you, your families, and your service to our country.
Wherein lies our security? It is the American man at arms. From personal experience I know how well he guards us. I have seen him die at Verdun, at St. Mihiel, at Guadalcanal; in the foxholes of Bataan, in the batteries of Corregidor, in the battle areas of Korea; on land, on sea, and in the air; amidst jungle and swamp, hot sands and frozen reaches, in the smoldering mud of shell-pocked roads and dripping trenches.
He was gaunt and he was ghostly; he was grieved and he was loused; he was filthy and he stank; and I loved him.
He died hard, that American fighting man. Not like a dove which when hit, folds its wings gently and comes down quietly. But like a wounded wolf at bay, with lips curled back in a snarl.
He left me with an abiding faith in the future of this nation; a faith that our beloved land will once more know the serenity of hope without fear; a faith in the course of our destiny as a free, prosperous, and happy people.
General Douglas MacArthur, as quoted by General Alexander M. Haig at the Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California, on July 29, 2003
INTRODUCTION
by Thomas S. Winter, president and editor in chief of HUMAN EVENTS
White House political advisor Karl Rove created a stir on Capitol Hill in January 2002 when he told a group of Republicans that the GOP should use national security as an issue in the upcoming midterm elections.
We can go to the country on this issue, Rove said, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening Americas military might and hereby protecting America.
Democratic House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri immediately condemned these remarks as shameful, adding, I hope the president will set the record straight. This is not a partisan issue.
Rove had violated a new principle that liberals now want everyone in politics to embrace uncritically: that in the post-September 11 world, it is going too far to question the other partys commitment to national security.
Yet when it comes to such an important issue as national security, sensitivity and comity between the political parties are obviously less important than actual results. The question is not whether Rove was insensitive, but whether Rove was right: Are Republicans really that much better on the issue of national security? And conversely, are Democrats so bad on the issue that they can never be trusted to defend America?
In this strongly argued book, Lieutenant Colonel Buzz Patterson (U.S. Air Force, Retired), answers with a resounding Yes. I must agree with his assessment. In my forty-three years of covering policy and politics in Washington, D.C., for Human Events, I have seen this thesis borne out again and again on nearly every defense issue, vote after roll call vote. It is not a question of how many historical examples one can give of liberal weakness on national security issues, but rather of how many one can fit into a single book.
It is no exaggeration to say that the United States won the Cold War despite the best efforts of the American Left. Beginning especially with the Vietnam era, liberals have consistently done everything in their power to ensure Americas military defeat. And despite their frequent active alliances with Americas Communist enemies throughout the Cold War, many liberal Democrats have successfully duped much of the American public into supporting them politically. Each election, Democrats ask for still more of the same power they have repeatedly demonstrated they are not worthy of exercising.
THE DODGER PRESIDENT
If there was ever any doubt about the truth of this conclusion, the Clinton presidency sufficiently answered it for all time. It is difficult enough to forgive Bill Clinton for dodging the draft and making some other young man from Hope, Arkansas, serve and perhaps die in his place in Vietnam. It is outright impossible, however, to forgive him for gravely abusing his power as commander in chiefusing the military for political ends, dramatically cutting back the size of our forces to pay for wasteful social programs, and turning what should be an elite fighting force into a laboratory for social experimentation.
Despite lacking any clear mandate after his plurality victory in the election of 1992, (a fact that would only come crashing down on him later in the GOP electoral sweep of 1994), Clinton, once in office, immediately moved to undermine military morale and effectiveness by trying to force acceptance of homosexuality on the military. In doing this, Clinton again showed that all too often liberals top priority is not to strengthen the military, but rather to force political correctness on Americas soldiers.
Along these lines, Clinton made it a priority to put women in situations closer and closer to actual combat. In 1994, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin revoked the so-called risk rule, which barred female soldiers from roles in which there was substantial risk of capture. This culminated in the Nasiriyah incident in Iraq last year, in which two women service members were captured and one killed. These womentwo of them single mothers and the other a mere girl of nineteen yearswere in maintenance roles close behind the front lines, in a place they never would have been had the Clinton administration not altered the rules for women in combat. The fact that women were serving in that specific location did not make Americas military any strongerquite the contrary, in factbut it did serve to further a social goal of the Left: to obliterate sex roles, even at the expense of American security and strength.
Clinton also introduced sex-integrated training into the Armya policy frowned upon as not efficient in a January 2003 study by the Army itself. Although co-ed training does not improve the militarys strength, the study stated, it improved female performance... increases acceptance of women in the Army and provides shared training experience. All very nice, but hardly the way to build military might in an age of global terrorism.
Of course, given that human nature is realnot the societal construct that leftist theorists claima more highly sex-integrated military produces increasing rates of pregnancy in the services (especially aboard ships at sea) as well as aberrations such as the sadistic, pornographic photographs and videos that have come out of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It is noteworthy that as the first explanations of the prison abuse incident trickle out of Iraq, we learn that the co-ed guard staff was practically running a sex club right under the nose of their incompetent female commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski.
The liberals accompanied their social experimentation on the armed forces with an outright dismantling of Americas military might. In the 1990s, as American servicemen were undergoing sensitivity training thanks to Clintons leadership, the commander in chief was cutting the armed forces nearly in half. As Republican House Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter of California told Human Events
