Defensiveness

The key to winning a political debate is getting the other side to buy into your assumptions, to argue on your turf. A case in point is this entry from "Rantingprofs" on a Newsweek article describing an insurgent ambush that left 26 enemy dead with no American KIA:

"Then comes the daily roundup of violence.
No doubt, there's a daily roundup of violence to be had, no doubt the security situation isn't good, isn't what it should be.
The place ain't Shangri-la.
But there are more and more people on the ground saying the situation isn't just getting better, but that it's getting better to the point that it genuinely looks as if the enemy is in real trouble."

I think it is interesting to note the defensiveness in the author's analysis of the situation. It is as if we are to apologize for the lack of security. Here are Iraqis killing other Iraqis in order to impose a dictatorship and we are apologetic because we haven't "provided" enough security.

This way of looking at it just seems so wrong. Our soldiers are selflessly laying down their lives, taking no profit or tribute from the people of Iraq, only fighting to give the people of Iraq the right to live freely under a government of their own choosing and still we are somehow to apologize because some other Iraqis, who want to re-impose a dictatorship, are going around killing people at random. The thing that is so perverse is that we feel an obligation to put a good light on this because if the Iraqis trying to impose a dictatorship on the rest of the country.

We are trying to protect people and the more murderous the other side is the more we are apologetic about not providing enough security? It is as if the Federals and Abolitionists were expected to apologize for freeing the slaves because of the Klu Klux Clan riding around hanging black people. Was the violence of the Klu Klux Clan, the terrorism, used as an argument for not fighting the Civil War? How can the degenerate terrorism of the Baathists and Jihadists be used as an argument for having left them in charge?