BlackFive

"Not in vain" may be the pride of those who have survived and the epitaph of those who fell." - Winston Churchill - House of Commons Address, 1944

Peter Daou, one-time adviser to the Kerry-Edwards campaign, decides to go after those of us who call the "grim milestone" what it is - a side-line marker that the left will use and celebrate.

Sometimes, I think Peter just is trying to stir the pot - trying to get hits and links -  because that's his actual job.  Sometimes, I think his heart is in the right place.

Here's what he has to say about me today:

SLIMING THE QUAKERS, PART 2: Last week  Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs characterized candlelight vigils by the Quakers marking the milestone of 2000 military deaths in Iraq as "parties."

Today, the MilBlog Blackfive follows them into the gutter. "There are two groups that will celebrate and use George Alexander's sacrifice. The morally bankrupt anti-war movement. And Al Qaeda."

I find this rash of posts suggesting that anti-war activists "celebrate" the deaths of American soldiers to be both tragic and telling.

Tragic, because it represents a descent into depraved, gutter-level slander as a form of argumentation, and it is a profoundly un-American approach to a most American of activities: dissent. Telling, because it means these bloggers have nothing left to justify the deaths of Americans in Iraq but desperate and transparent attacks on those who want our troops home...

Typical of the far left.  According to them, I don't get to have an opinion, either.  Note to Peter:  I'm dissenting, too.  Dissenting against the [email protected]#$% of the anti-war movement. 

Using the deaths of my friends as an excuse to spout socialistic and anarchistic drivel is not acceptable to me.

And you don't believe that the left isn't celebrating the deaths of my friends?  Don't believe it's a celebration?  Zombie has the proof.  It's disgusting and reprehensible.  Did you know that they're planning a large protest at Walter Reed where wounded vets are recovering?  Is that acceptable to Peter?

We're in Iraq now - will be there for years.  And the only way to win is to keep improving while completing the mission.  It'll take years.  It'll be tough going.  And more lives will be lost or irrecovably changed.

Daou continues:

...Regular readers know this issue is personal for me. I did what many of these war-supporting bloggers (MilBloggers excluded) have never done but are eager to encourage others to do: I fought the "terrorists" in Lebanon as a young man. I defended my family against the Syrian military and helped lay the groundwork for the "Cedar Revolution." I was in Beirut when we lost hundreds of brave Marines. I experienced the horrors of war in the Middle East, the rivers of blood in the streets. And because I knew the hell we were sending our young men and women into, I marched in opposition to the Iraq invasion.

I did it for one basic reason: I believed that our government was lying about the rationale for war. If we send courageous Americans to die in a foreign land, the moral underpinning MUST be rock solid. Unassailable ethical justification for war is essential if we want to maintain our moral standing, our dignity, our humanity. In a word: America isn't America if we lie our way into war. There's no better way to undermine the sacrifice of our military men and women than to deprive them of the purity of purpose that undergirds their mission...

Aside from the I'm-better-qualified-than-anyone-to-have-an-opinion-about-war drivel, Pete says he was anti-war because he knows the horrors of war.  But, then, he says the one reason he was against the war - marched against the invasion - was because, according to Pete, it was based on lies. 

The "lies"?  That's Peter politicizing the war.

"Bush lied"?  Hell, even Saddam thought he had WMD.  Get over it.

Peter Daou was against the invasion but worked on the Kerry campaign.  Let me remind you all of a few quotes from John Forbes Kerry:

"[WE]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." - Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others Oct. 9, 1998

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction...So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003

So was Peter either working for someone that he believed in or whoever was paying him to be a spinmeister? 

Peter quotes another blogger then wraps up by paraphrasing from the blogger:

...Bottom line: If Malkin, LGF, and Blackfive think opponents of the Iraq war are "celebrating" the deaths of American troops,  let them answer the basic paradox of their position, namely, how is it that wanting our troops NOT to die is worse than wanting them to remain in the line of fire?

Well, in order to answer this one-sided question, I can't speak for anyone but myself.

Of course, I don't want our troops to die.  I've lost three very good friends in this war.  I talk to my friend's widow every week.  I've had several friends wounded.  And I've visited wounded heroes.  I've met Iraqis, too.

They aren't numbers to me.  That's why I blog.  That's why folks like Peter Daou and others on the far left side of the aisle don't want me to have an opinion.

Some things are worth fighting for.  A free Iraq is worth fighting for.  A free Middle East is worth fighting for.  A world free of terrorism is worth fighting for. 

My friends believed that, too.

The people that are against a free Iraq are people that don't believe that anything is worth fighting for.

Update:  LGF responds.