Give war a chance

The government-marked car was speeding out of the imperial capital when it was stopped by a motorcyclist; word had just arrived that the Luftwaffe was headed to London. The prime minister ordered the car to turn around, for as biographer William Manchester explains in "The Last Lion," "He wanted to be wherever the bombs were falling."\nIt was Nov. 14, 1940. Britain stood alone. Sir Winston Churchill had called for something the appeasement-minded War Cabinet had always emphatically rejected: war. Fired by the conviction that national honor required a confrontation with Nazi Germany, he spurned Hitler's squalid offer to let England survive alongside a Nazified Europe. Churchill's insistence that fascism would mean war (in both senses of the verb "to mean") is worth remembering today.\n"We ask no favors of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, 'No, we will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us.' The people of London with one voice would say to Hitler: 'You have committed every crime under the sun. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who do your wicked will. You do your worst -- and we will do our best.'" \nThese words remind me of the moment, shortly after the liberation of Baghdad, when President Bush, who hails from Texas, was asked a question in regards to the "former regime elements" and al-Qaida terrorists staging attacks on U.S. forces and those Iraqis welcoming them. His cowboy roots glowing, Mr. Bush shot back: "Bring 'em on." \nThe president was immediately scolded for inviting attack upon American soldiers. The more shrewd observer replied that the iniquitous foe had never sought permission to carry out its deadly deeds. But even the White House press secretary, making the classic statement of the apologist, was reduced to muttering that the remarks were "taken out of context." The truth, however, was rather different.\nThe statement was indeed an explicit invitation to attack Americans. But I thought it was also a sober warning to Americans that if they could not take it and dish it out as well, then our enemies -- with the field to themselves -- surely would. \nOnce, there was a time when the left knew that totalitarian forces intended war and also necessitated it and that the battle against them should be joined early and for the long haul. Yet with exceedingly rare exceptions, this tradition has been abandoned. \nBut if Churchill was right that a nation, like an individual, is defined by the caliber of its enemies, Americans can give thanks that their country has long been the chief threat to -- and therefore the central target of -- tyrants and terrorists. Far from being ashamed of this, Americans can wear it as a badge of honor -- and all Americans worth their salt do.