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Interviewer: We haven’t talked to you in quite some time.

Cynic: You’ve been denying yourself a great pleasure.

I: Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal questioned Department of War chief Pete Hegseth recently. Blumenthal’s opening interrogatory gambit was as follows: “I know you have characterized this war as an astonishing military success. But the American people aren’t buying it. One point is irrefutable: which is, Americans never succeed in war unless the American people are behind it. And if what you are seeing as success now is winning, I would hate to see what losing looks like, because none of the shifting and contradictory objectives of the war have been achieved so far…”

Cynic: Yes. Responding in a like manner, Hegseth might have said, “If, as you suggest, the U.S. military engagement with Iran, a notorious financier of anti-American terrorism throughout the Middle East for roughly 40 years, must be called losing, I would hate to hear what you would call winning.” The U.S has destroyed Iran’s navy and ground forces. It has closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping coming and going from Iran, thereby imposing on Iran a crippling loss of daily revenue. Iran will be losing an estimated $150 million a day in oil revenue as long as the U.S. blockage continues. Blumenthal equates “winning” with 40 years of pointless non-productive “peace negotiations.” Everyone recalls how former President Barack Obama said pointedly that Iran must never be given the opportunity to develop nuclear weapons and followed up by sending the self-declared enemies of the United States and Israel planeloads of cash later used to finance terrorist groups at the very gates of Israel. Blumenthal, a Jew, has not rushed to point out the obvious failings of Obama’s Iran policy. The twitter-like clips Blumenthal cherishes are intended only to be used as a campaign voting inducement. In almost every such partisan Congressional “discussion”, the person being interrogated is not permitted to answer in full the points made by the interrogator. Attempts at debating questionable propositions usually are cut short by interrogators screaming “I am reclaiming my time…” which is simply a not so polite way of saying, “Shut up!”

Some students of history at the Pentagon could easily demonstrate that the most productive peace negotiations between belligerents occur after one side has defeated the other on the battlefield. The Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta lasted through 27 years of fruitless negotiations. Sparta finally defeated Athens and imposed peace terms, but in the end Athens won the peace, and a very productive one it was. Sparta was a magnificent military barracks but far inferior culturally to Athens, which gave us a Socrates, an Aristotle and ideas concerning democracy and a republic that lit the imaginations of the founders of the American Republic.

World War II ended in a military victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The U.S. and its allies, having won the war, imposed peace terms on Germany. These things are usually mentioned in historical accounts with which Blumenthal, a student of military affairs, should be familiar. The notion that wars never blossom into long periods of peace is an anti-historical fable easily dismissed. Despite the Democrat Party’s occasional successful attempts at resurrecting old animosities, the Civil War and later Constitutional amendments dealt a death blow to both slavery and Jim Crow attempts to reintroduce de facto political slavery through a back door.

I: Some people regard Blumenthal as a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.

C: There is no such thing as a partisan pragmatist. That is what is wrong with most news reports these days. They present themselves as pragmatic and indifferent to partisan designs, but their product tells against them. The Democrat Party has for decades been retreating from the foreign and domestic policy of President John Kennedy, a genuine liberal, and campaign enthusiasts such as Blumenthal and his fellow neo-progressive U.S Senator Chris Murphy are leading the retreat. Pragmatism is an American locution. The philosopher most closely associated with it is William James, who defined pragmatism as a method of resolving philosophical disputes by attending to the practical consequences of ideas rather than abstract or purely logical distinctions. We see before us the practical consequence of a violent attack by an Islamic regime on Israel. One may always hope that partisan Democrats who falsely regard Trump as Hitler would understand and embrace a policy of unremitting distain for true enemies of the United States – particularly when the Democrats are Jewish.

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