Diana West nails it.

There is an outstanding Diana West column up over at Jewish World Review. It's all good, but this, especially, needed to be said by someone with a wide audience.

Such tactics suggest we no longer seek a military triumph over Islamic jihad -- if we ever did. Had we engaged in such a war, it would be over by now. The president would have directed the military to eradicate, freeze or neutralize jihad threats where they exist -- from Iran to Syria and from Gaza to Fallujah. Concurrently, we would have closed our own borders as a post-September 11 security precaution, and implemented an immigration policy designed to avoid repeating the European example of Islamization through massive Muslim immigration, or, as some are calling it, "reverse colonization."

But no. Such a war on terror long ago gave way to the Struggle to Make Everyone Think We're Swell. In this no-win fight, we must watch what we say -- as when the government distances itself from an official's frank characterization of three suicides at Guantanamo Bay as a jihadist "PR stunt."And we must watch what we do -- as when we repeatedly send our military on dangerous house-to-house missions with restrictive rules of engagement rather than using air power. In a war in which an interrogation could save a city, we rewrite our interrogation rules to make sure that they won't. "If this debate were limited to what's best for interrogation purposes, the decision [about whether to soften interrogation techniques] would be pretty easy," a senior Defense Department official told the New York Times. "But then you have to look at what we lose diplomatically."

We are indeed a far cry from the day when men risked life and limb -- because they knew that the fight for their freedom required it -- to sign a document that proclaimed that all men had "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". Today, we have instead a government of mice, who scurry away lest anyone be offended by such "intolerant" language.

The funny thing about freedom is that you cannot keep it without a fight, but you can certainly lose it that way.

-- CAV