Surrender

Not much doubt about the way this column of Matthew Parris is going, with its headline ‘No surrender’ moves swiftly from heart to lip but it detours the brain:

The column that these bombings may seem to invite trips easily from the tongue. “No surrender,” it says. The enemy “can never be allowed to win”; no quarter must be given; barbarity must be met by resolve; we are not weakened but reinforced in our defiance of evil; we owe it to those who have died not to deviate from our chosen path.

From Shakespeare to Churchill to Kipling — from Rourke’s Drift to the Blitz to Port Stanley — politicians and poets have given us templates for this oratory, and every generation rewrites it. Winston Churchill mastered it when Hitler struck. Franklin D. Roosevelt rehearsed it after Pearl Harbor. John F. Kennedy hurled it at the enemies of liberty.

Margaret Thatcher repeated it from the rubble of the IRA bombing in Brighton. It formed the basis of the American and British response to the mailed fist of Soviet communism. In the face of provocation a ringing declaration never to falter proceeds direct from heart to lip.

But…

Yep…he thinks we should surrender. It’s hopeless, we can’t win. All those scary Muslim youths hanging around the East End….”The road back to their trust is the road back from Baghdad.”

Yeah right. Pull our troops out of Iraq, and suddenly all those sullen faces will light up with joy. They’ll abandon their Islamist teachers, and proclaim the glories of a tolerant liberal society.

Does he really think withdrawing from Iraq, then burying our heads in the sand and hoping all these nasty Islamists will go away and leave us alone, will do anything but make matters worse?