An Elephant Never Forgets

Mr. Nathan Nelson, over at RedState posted a piece that I wish that I had written. It begins:

The Left seems mystified by the fact that the Republican Party, minus a few defectors, simply will not give up on Iraq. Why, they wonder, would Republicans continue to insist on continuing an unpopular war that cost us during the 2006 election and is likely to cost us in 2008 if nothing changes dramatically for the better? The Leftist minority is dumbfounded that we are continuing to stand by the Iraq War on principle because they have forgotten what principle is. Consumed for over a decade with simply achieving a political majority again, they have pushed aside all of their own principles and have gone whichever way the political wind blows. Thus they cannot understand why the Republican Party won't do the same when it comes to Iraq, but they're certainly willing to capitalize on the opportunity it presents them with.

There's a simple explanation for why we won't abandon Iraq to terrorism and sectarian violence, and it can be summed up in a familiar saying: an elephant never forgets. We haven't forgotten, for example, that there were Loyalists in the late eighteenth century who would have preferred for America to never become a nation rather than going to war with the British Empire. We haven't forgotten that James Buchanan and Stephen Douglas were prepared to give Southern secessionists whatever they wanted, including indefinite slavery, in order to avoid the Civil War. We haven't forgotten that it took the sinking of the Lusitania and the death of 128 Americans, a budding alliance between Germany and Mexico, and the sinking of three American merchant ships before Woodrow Wilson finally committed us to the Allied cause in World War I. We haven't forgotten Neville Chamberlain's failed policy of appeasement, nor have we forgotten that it took Pearl Harbor for Franklin Roosevelt to commit us to beating back the fascist threat in World War II. Last, but certainly not least, we haven't forgotten that it took September 11 and the deaths of three thousand Americans before our government finally got serious about the threat of international terrorism and nations that support it - nations like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which financed Hamas and other terrorists in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

Read the rest.