VDH: "Don't Stop Now"

Another excellent VDH column is up at National Review Online.

Some choice lines:

"...we need to reflect on a few often-forgotten realities... America had few alternatives. This war was never between good and bad choices, but always a call between something bad and something far worse."

"Only democracy was new. And only democracy — and its twin of open-market capitalism — offered any hope to end the plague of tribalism, gender apartheid, human-rights abuses, religious fanaticism, and patriarchy that so flourished within such closed societies. It was not just idealism but rather abject desperation that fueled the so-called neoconservative quest to try something new."

'The next problem we face is not that we have pushed democracy too abruptly in once-hostile lands, but that we have not pushed it enough into so-called friendly territory. It is, of course, dangerous to promote democracy in the Middle East, but more dangerous still to pause in our efforts, and, finally, most dangerous of all to quit before seeing this bold gambit through to its logical end — an end that alone will end the pathologies that led to September 11."

To quit now is to concede the war. And the thousands we have lost will not forgive us if our resolve fails now. The most dangerous choice we can make is not to try.

America is not perfect - in honesty, we never really have claimed to be. I do believe we offer the best way - that a constitutional republic, respecting and guarding the rights of the individual and ruled by law, not men, is the fairest form of government by which corruptible men can govern themselves. Our current status in the world commands that we advocate our ways, that we encourage liberty by all the ways we can.

If we quit, we will fail both ourselves and our posterity, and the shame will follow us for generations. If we try and fail, we will at least know we are not cowards. If we succeed, what wondrous things may come...