Have we learned any lessons?

For 10 long years I was led to believe the USSR was the ticket to real democracy and that democracy would come via the satellite communist parties of the west. Yes I was a socialist. When I traveled to Russia in 1990 I was hard pressed to find a young Russian that supported the Communist party. Today we know that those ideas are as dead as Lenin’s corpse in Red Square. Yet the fight for democracy is not over, not by a long shot. We all remember the morning of 9/11 as we watched terrorists fly planes into the twin towers and killing thousands of innocent people. Yet somehow we are led to believe that on 9/12 the world was with the USA the morning after. Well tell that to the people who were dancing in the streets of Gaza or the numerous regimes across the earth that celebrated.
We face an enemy today that lives by a code that if you walk into a crowded market with a suicide vest and blow everyone up you are a martyr. MLK was a martyr as was Robert Kennedy; these so called martyrs though are cold blooded killers. Somehow the lasting democracies must put an end to that evil and it won’t happen by giving up. Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama are racing towards a quick withdrawal from Iraq and they think that will solve the problem. True Iraq is a mess we all know that and some major tactical mistakes were made, but retreat and capitulation is not the way and it is indeed the wrong message to send to the enemy. To endure and fight to the end is truly our only way out. If that can happen by talking along with fighting then so be it. We have the choice to live in a society that allows our woman to wear as much or as little clothing as they choose and for general free choice to thrive. Or we can adopt a style of life that enslaves people Taliban style and shoots a woman in the back of the head in a crowded stadium while thousands watch. I don’t like everything that free capitalism brings like poverty and homelessness, but it sure beats the life that the people of N. Korea endure. We live in a country where people like Ezra Levant and his Muslim opponents can debate cartoons without having to behead someone. Where journalists can write freely and not be shot and or poisoned like those in Moscow who are critical of the Kremlin. That to me is worth fighting for, here and abroad. Bring the troops home is a cloaked slogan for “surrender”. It’s all wrapped up in peace and tolerance but these same people have marched in the streets of Calgary with Hezbollah flags chanting “death to Jews” and did so in front of a war memorial in memory of our war dead. I still support the right for people to yell insane slogans, and my right to disagree peacefully. What is that right to worth to you?