Folks,
With all the hubbub going on in the domestic front, I am feeling a little frustrated and in need to vent some steam. So, here it goes.
As any person that has been in combat will attest, war is ugly, cruel, repulsive, repugnant. War is organized madness. Incongruously, war is the most inhuman of all human activities. And, as the supreme paradox of history, war is sometimes unavoidable, necessary, justified, and just. When a nation faces an imminent threat to the freedom and survival of its people, and that threat cannot be eliminated through negotiation, acceptable compromise, or any other tool of diplomacy; when the threatening forces are determined to use violence to obtain their goals; when the only available choices are to surrender or to fight, then the only way to resolve the conflict is to fight and pay the price in blood. For the primal and inescapable rule of war is that young men and women in the prime of their lives will die. Others will be left mangled and scarred for life. That is why, when war is necessary, it should never be that the military goes to war; it should always be that the nation in all its manifestations, its government, its industry, its entertaining and information media, its whole society goes to war. Our commitment during WWII serves as a good example of the right way for a nation to wage war. Anything less is terribly unfair to the young men and women that serve at the tip of the spear.
The war on terror is a just and unavoidable war. Despite what the Michael Moores and Ramsey Clarks of this world may say, we did not provoke this war. We fought the Desert Storm campaign to liberate Kuwait, not to conquer it. That our presence in Saudi Arabia enraged Osama bin Laden and propelled him to wage war on us is his fault, not ours. And this is an irrational enemy, undeterred by the threat of force, with whom negotiation is impossible. Al-Qaeda has been waging war against us for many years: the three bombings that targeted US troops in Aden, Yemen, in December 1992, the World Trade Center bombing on 26 February 1993, attacks on US forces in Somalia in 1993, the bombings of the US Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in August 1998, the attack on USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen on 12 October 2000. We absorbed these attacks, one after another, sometimes taking no military action at all, other times responding with tepid retaliations designed more to "send a signal" and avoid "escalation of violence" than to destroy the enemy. It took the murder of close to 3,000 people in one morning, on September the 11th, 2001, for our government to finally accept the fact that we were at war, and to better start fighting back with the scope necessary to win it. And even then, our government did not commit the nation to the fight. The main criticism I have of George W. Bush is that on September the 12th, 2001, he did not go the Congress and asked for a formal declaration of war against any and all terrorist organizations responsible for the attacks against the US, and against any regime that provides support to such organizations. Instead, on 20 September he addressed a join session of Congress and asked the military to get ready for a fight. "The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud," he said. But, what did he ask of the American people? Did he ask us to brace ourselves for a long and bloody war, to be prepared to make sacrifices, to pay the cost in treasure and blood to field an Army that would exert overwhelming force and impinge devastating destruction upon our enemies, to be ready to alter our lives in the ways necessary to provide complete support to the war effort and to the counter-terrorism activities demanded by the absolute necessity to neutralize and destroy domestic enemy cells? No, he did not ask that. He asked us to live your lives and hug your children, to be calm and resolute, to uphold the values of America, to cooperate with the FBI, to be patient with the delays and inconveniences that may accompany tighter security, to continue participating with confidence in the American economy. Well, these are all fine thoughts, but they fall way short of the mark. That was not the way to take the country to war. And now he is paying the price of that mistake. Now we see that the unity that ensued after the September the 11th attacks has totally evanesced. Now we are more divided than ever. Now we see a growing anti-war movement undermining the war effort and demoralizing our troops. Now we see eighty percent of the mainstream media doing everything they can to undermine the trust and confidence of the American people on our Commander in Chief, a president that they hate, without regard to the effect of their behavior on the war effort; which brings me to the war in Iraq.
Reasonable people may disagree on the wisdom, or the need, of invading Iraq when we did. Reasonable people may express dismay at the faulty intelligence that supported that decision. Reasonable people may complain that Donald Rumsfeld has not done President Bush any favors, that his handling of the Iraq campaign has been misguided and erroneous. That is a view that I share. Rumsfeld is a reformer. Reformers make for good peacetime Secretaries of Defense. But the are lousy ones in wartime. We should have gone into Iraq with enough troops to be able to keep an iron-fist control of the country, seal its borders with Syria and Iran, and crush with overwhelming force any incipient insurrection until the new Iraqi government was constituted and capable of running the country. Nevertheless, what reasonable people should not dispute is that now, today, the Iraqi campaign is the centerpiece of the war on terror; al-Qaeda has made it so. To cut tail and run now, abandoning the embryonic democratic government of Iraq to cope with the insurrection on its own is not only a betrayal of the sacrifices already made there, but a surrender of the entire region to the terrorists. The dire consequences of Iraq becoming another dysfunctional state, a la Afghanistan under the Taliban, and a sanctuary to al-Qaeda are too horrific for us to contemplate. If that happens, the mass destruction of segments of our population in the future becomes a certainty.
Abu-Mus'ab al-Zarqawi and the jihadists know that they cannot defeat the American forces in the battlefield, not even in the battlefield of urban guerrilla warfare. But, what they are counting on is that the American people will lose their nerve, that the support for the war will dwindle and public pressure will force the government to withdraw its forces. That is why the anti-war movement in this country is a de-facto fighting arm of al-Qaeda, and, thus, treasonous. That is why the politicians and pundits that are demanding an exit strategy and a withdrawal timetable are de-facto agents of the enemy. Americans did not demand an exit strategy after the terrible suffering of the soldiers of the Continental Army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78. They did not demand an exit strategy when the American Army suffered more than 16,200 casualties on the beaches of Anzio, or more than 12,600 American servicemen lost their lives in the invasion of Okinawa. There may be armed conflicts fought for limited political objectives where an exit strategy may be appropriate. But when we fight to preserve our freedoms and our very existence the only exit strategy acceptable is victory, in the case of Iraq being defined as the establishment of a stable government friendly to the US, and the squelching of the insurrection.
Iraq is not the most difficult problem we face in the war on terror. A much more difficult challenge lies ahead. Thanks to the policies of that great American, the Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carter (excuse the sarcasm; I could not help myself), Iran went from being a progressive secular Islamic country, and an ally of the US, to being a nation ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, deeply hostile to the US, sponsors of terrorism, bent on developing nuclear weapons, and which government openly proclaims its goal to erase the state of Israel from the face of the Earth. Iran is much bigger that Iraq, with better armed forces. Can we wait until Iran becomes a nuclear power, or should we take action now to prevent that from happening? If you have doubts about the answer, look at your children and grandchildren, and think about their future.
It may sound like a cliché, but it is a historical fact, freedom is not free. We are blessed that we have so many courageous young men and women who are willing to pay the bill. We owe them to finish the job right. Even more importantly, we owe our children and grandchildren to finish the job now, so they will not have to pay a far larger bill later.
That is just my opinion.
AI
