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Back in Kindergarten you had a difficult choice to make when it came to bullies. You couldn't ignore them. You could either stand up to them, or give in to their demands. What did YOU do? Did you stand up and fight back, or did you give them what they wanted? Simple question. Defining question. Honestly, what did you do? In Kindergarten we learned that when you stood up to bullies they backed down. When you didn't, they'd come back for more. If you wanted to be left alone, you had to stand up and hold your ground. It was a simple idea — peace through strength. And by golly it worked! In the 1980's Ronald Reagan instituted his policy of "peace through strength" in an arms race with the Soviet Union (USSR). He rejected détente and confronted Communism head on. He called the USSR an "Evil Empire" and supported anti-Communist movements worldwide. Reagan stood up to the world's biggest bully and brought it down. Today, the world is a better place for his efforts. In the last 100 years, the world has seen many bullies come and go. In the 1930's and 40's we faced Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini. In the 60's and 70's, Pol Pot. In the 80's and 90's, Manuel Noriega, Muammar al-Gaddafi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. More recently, Saddam Hussein. These men had something in common. They were evil. And they wanted to spread their evil around the world. They tortured people. They killed millions of innocents. The only way to stop them was to stand up to them, and, in many cases, take them down. The United States is fighting a war on terror. Today, we face a whole cast of evil characters with sinister intentions: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran), Hugo Chávez (Venezuela), Kim Jong-il (North Korea), Bashar al-Assad (Syria), and Osama bin Laden (al-Qaeda). To stop them, we must stand up to them. If necessary, we must take them down. America was attacked by al-Qaeda on 9-11. Let us never forget that. We have taken the fight to our enemy, and we're kicking terrorist butt. Despite that, and despite what we learned about bullies in Kindergarten, there are some who say we should appease the enemy. They say America is evil, that we brought this on ourselves. They say we should leave Iraq. They want us to back down in the face of evil. But where would that leave us? The flip side of peace through strength is defeat (and subjugation) through weakness. Look what Hitler did to Europe and the Jews before Britain, the United States, and their allies took up arms and defeated Nazism. We cannot appease the enemy. If we do, they will see us as weak. If they see us as weak, they will not respect us. What they will do is attack, and attack, and attack until they defeat us. You either understand that concept, or you don’t.
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