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Pat Buchanan: To Lose a War

While America was consumed this summer with quarrels over town-hall radicals, "death panels," the "public option" and racism's role in the plunging polls of Barack, what happens to health care is not going to change the history of the world.

What happens in Afghanistan might.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has done his duty. He has bluntly told his commander in chief what he must have in added combat troops and warned that if he does not get them, America faces "mission failure."

Translation: a Taliban victory and U.S. defeat, as in Saigon 1975...

... If, however, Obama comes to believe the cost of "victory" in blood, money and years is not worth it, or the American people, already against the war and adding more troops, will not sustain it, or the war is unwinnable, then we need to look defeat in the face.

For that is what McChrystal says we are risking, if Obama dithers or draws down troops.

Russia's withdrawal of 1988-89 led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. What would a U.S. withdrawal do to the American Empire?

A Taliban triumph would mean the Afghans who sided with us in this war would face the same retribution as our allies in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Western aid workers would have to flee the country...

... Osama bin Laden would be a candidate for Man of the Decade.

With his 9-11 attack, he had fired a shot heard 'round the Islamic world, sucked America into two wars that bled, divided and helped to bankrupt her, and seen the last superpower off in Afghanistan.

Osama's ultimate goal from the start -- the removal of all U.S. troops from sacred Saudi soil and expulsion of all Crusaders from the Islamic world -- would no longer be an impossible dream...
Read entire article at Real Clear Politics