Unheralded Victory

Last weekend, my sister-in-law was in town for a family event. I try to keep politics out of family matters--or should say that my wife has given me the evil eye every time I talked politics during family events. My sis-in-law is a liberal although she probably has never thought about herself in those terms i would suspect. Politics is at the bottom of her list of interesting and important things.

That said, I have gained a new perspective on how many view the war in Iraq--those people who are not like you or me when it comes to updating ourselves on the news every twenty minutes or so. They are the people who get their news via snippets on TV, in their cars during the two-minute news brief at the top and bottom of each hour and from their circle of friends or acquaintances. In other words, they are people who are just like the 99.99% of Americans who don't refresh blogs and read fifty takes on a single topic daily. People unlike you and me.

So it was interesting to discuss the war with her and her son who just finished freshman year at an extremely liberal northeastern university located in an enclave of leftism in NY state.

When the topic shifted to Obama and eventually the war in Iraq. I said that we are winning and she looked incredulous. "No we aren't" she said. I explained that we in fact are and that even the NY Times was forced to admit it. She wasn't buying it and probably thought to herself that her crazy conservative bro-in-law is drinking the Kool-Aid again.

I didn't press the issue but it made me realize that our men and women are out there fighting and dying for our freedom and our victory while many here don't even think about it. I've heard stories where in the early 1940's, war news was everywhere. Everyone knew where Sicily, al-Alamein, Bataan, New Guinea, Guadalcanal and the Ardennes were and what happened there. Ask the average person about al-Anbar and the "awakening" or Basra's liberation of Sadr's militia and they'll likely not have a clue, put their ear buds back in and be gone. Ask them about Abu Ghraib and Fallujah and they'll know because the media focused intensely on the bad so much.

We are winning and that is bad news for the Democrats so we aren't reading about it. Barack Obama will have to face up to the fact that we are making great strides and the Iraqi's have gotten serious about their own security. We are in an uphill battle to convince the rest of the country that our brave troops have accomplished their mission in stunning fashion. It an uphill battle that must be fought.