• March 28, 2024

Poll: Almost Two-Thirds Back Attacking Militants

WSJ/NBC poll
WSJ/NBC poll

Do you feel safer now than before the 9/11 attacks? 47% of Americans feel less safe based on a new WSJ/NBC poll.

Almost 2/3 of people who participated in the poll believe it is our best interest to confront ISIS. In 2009, Al Qaeda in Iraq ( ISIS ) was virtually decimated. In fact, we had the current leader in a US prison for a majority of our time there. Obama’s campaign was based on ending the war in Iraq, the world was listening. It’s not a coincidence that the world’s villains are a major threat right now. They have watched and listened to the failed leadership that is Obama. This is our reality, this is what happens when you attempt to appease enemies by abandoning your allies. These threats will not disappear if we choose to ignore them. 

 via WSJ : 

Asked what type of military response was appropriate, some 40% of those polled said action against ISIS should be limited to airstrikes and an additional 34% were willing to use both airstrikes and commit U.S. ground troops—a remarkable mood swing for an electorate that just a year ago recoiled at Mr. Obama’s proposal to launch airstrikes against Syria.

That suggests he will be addressing an audience more open to supporting a military operation than at any point since he took office promising to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

In moving cautiously to date, Mr. Obama may have underestimated the public’s appetite for military action—especially after the beheading of the American journalists. The new poll found 61% said action against ISIS was in the national interest. Last year, after Mr. Obama accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons, only 21% said it was in the U.S. interest to take military action.

The president has “a country and an electorate, regardless of party, who seems to be ready to take the next step,” said Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster who conducted the survey with GOP pollster Bill McInturff. That could give Mr. Obama a chance to reassert himself as a leader, the pollsters said.

The survey was taken Sept. 3-7, just after the beheading by ISIS of a second U.S. journalist. While those surveyed weren’t asked directly about that event, the poll found that 94% had heard news of the two murders, a higher level of public attention than given to any of 22 news events the Journal/NBC News survey has tested since 2009.

President Barack Obama will lay out plans Wednesday to combat ISIS.

read more here

I leave you with a foreign policy lesson from Ronald Reagan ( 1964 ):

“We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. 

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us. 

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at ConcordBridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all. 

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits—not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.” 

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. 

We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

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