I was doing some reading earlier today and came across an address Ronald Reagan gave on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964. It covered a great deal of topics, not the least of which was The Cold War and Vietnam. He also elucidates the fallacies of liberalisim and anti-war sentiment, which to this day are still being used on the left to invalidate the War On Terror, namely the theatre of Iraq. Certainly the causes and consequences of the War On Terror are disparate from the Cold War and the Vietnam War. However President Reagan, then simply a movie star and political activist, makes points valid for our consideration today. Below is the salient part of Mr. Reagan's address, in regard to war, freedom, liberalisim, and America.

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but simple.

If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb [= "the threat of terror"] by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain [= "the rule of Islamo-facist Dictatorships"], "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are 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." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in 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 and 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 [= Osama Bin Ladin or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad] has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War [Iraq War], and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." [or "Bush Lied and People Died" or "No War for Oil"] 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 Concord Bridge 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. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is 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 will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

I don't think that this could have been said with any more eloquence. Reagan (and Goldwater) called it back in '64, and the foreign policy analysis holds true. The Liberals and Democrats are pulling the same rhetoric out of the can and attempting to douse us with it. As Rush Limbaugh often points out, they have a playbook with only a few pages, and like the rest of the 98.6% of the time he's correct.

Things haven't changed on the left, and I doubt they will. However make no mistake, what the real men and women in this country, our soldiers, are fighting for is the future of our way of life and to better the lives of others around the world. They are fighting for those of us who know this and for the right of their detractors to continue to miss the forest because of the trees. Which makes each and every one of them better people than, me and probably you.