There are a lot of people who are a lot smarter than I am and who have years more political experience than I do. But it didn't take much in the way of smarts or experience to learn two very basic lessons.
One, if someone repeats a lie often enough -- no matter how absurd or colossal -- the lie eventually becomes accepted as conventional wisdom.
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Two, if one does not respond to or refute an attack, the unanswered attack becomes truth by virtue of the silence.
For example: global warming. I'm neither a scientist nor a meteorologist, but I know enough to understand that our climate has cycles. It's true, we have experienced somewhat of a warming trend in recent years. Given this, Al Gore and his buddies who believe automobiles are the greatest threat to civilization today have found willing accomplices in the mainstream media, and now have many of us believing our world is melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.
The next time a good old-fashioned nor'easter sweeps across the Atlantic Coast, shutting down commerce, industry and education, you'll probably find our old friend Al huddled in front of a fireplace belching unfiltered ash into the once-pure air we are forcing our children to breathe.
But that's another column.
This one is about another big lie, and the consequences of unanswered attacks.
Just as the big media has had a field day with global warming, they have really teed it up on the war in Iraq. They have repeated the revisionist history offered up by Democrat leaders nationwide as if it were fact.
And it's working.
Eight months ago, 53 percent of our fellow Americans believed President Bush to be accurate and honest in making his case to the country before we went to war. Forty-one percent believed he had "misled us."
Today, The Wall Street Journal and NBC tell us that only 35 percent believe Bush was truthful while 57 percent believe he deliberately misled us into war.
I'm aghast at the absurdity of it all. No matter how vehemently I may disagree with a political opponent, I would never presume to believe that a man or woman who was elected by a majority of Americans in a particular district or state would deliberately choose to send our sons and daughters to war and send them to their untimely graves.
But I guess I don't play the game the way they do.
To these opponents of our president, I might point out another adage: Those who ignore the mistakes of the past are sure to repeat them.
What do the USS Cole, Somalia, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and attacks on American embassies in Africa have in common? None of these transgressions against the United States drew a response.
You can't keep giving a bully second, third and fourth chances.
Bush's loudest opponents are talking about failures in intelligence. Intelligence by nature is subject to human error and interpretation, and there were no doubt some failures there. However, these opponents saw the very same intelligence and drew the same conclusion as the president.
Faulty intelligence aside, we all knew that Saddam Hussein was an international bully. That he had used chemical weapons against his own people. That he had scorned U.N. sanctions. That he had kicked weapons inspectors out of the country. And that he had fed his own people through human shredders and his thugs had dug mass graves.
With all of this in mind, 15 members of the U.N. Security Council, including Germany, France and Russia, voted for Saddam to come clean. He never came clean, so our president acted.
This was the same intelligence to which former President Clinton had access, and which led him to conclude that Saddam was indeed a threat. The former president never did anything to stop the terrorists. But Clinton's stated position was the same as Bush's. Now the most political of all politicians apparently has amnesia and now says it was a mistake to attack Iraq. However, he thinks it's great that Saddam is gone.
You can't have it both ways.
In 2003, our president was faced with a bad decision and a worse one. To go to war was the bad decision. Not doing anything was worse.
No bully wants anyone to stand up to him. Saddam proved that by burrowing into a hole in the ground. Terrorists can't defeat us militarily. They can only defeat our will.
It is our choice to re-write history or ignore history. Revising history is not an option.
We must be as committed to win as the terrorists are committed to breaking our will.
J.C. Watts (JCWatts01@jcwatts.com), chairman of J.C. Watts Companies, a business consulting group, is former chairman of the Republican Conference of the U.S. House, where he served as an Oklahoma representative from 1995 to 2002. He writes twice monthly for the Review-Journal.
