As September 11th is tomorrow, and after hearing
the President speak tonight and members of congress speak the last couple of
days something has become increasingly clear to me. In thirteen years we have learned
nothing. We are ready to ramp up the
war machine again without clear direction nor with the commitment to do what
needs to be done.
War is a very ugly business. Loss of life will occur, and some of that will
be of the innocent. Our young men and
women will give their lives in the name of freedom. We keep doing this over and over again and
get the same pathetic results (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq). This is because we as a nation do not have
the stomach to fight a war with the means necessary to win it. President Bush and now President Obama are
making the same mistake. This mistake is
not fighting a war to win it.
We won the WWII because we understood the barbarism of our
enemy. We were willing to do all that
was necessary to devastate and destroy or them. We killed thousands of innocent women, men,
and children while defeating our enemy.
We dropped the most devastating weapon known to man to end the war with
victory. We had leaders who understood
our enemy and what it would take to defeat them. I say this not with glee or a blood lust,
but rather with a clear understanding that if we do not win wars and completely
destroy our enemy, we have to repeat the wars.
There is not a “surgical solution” for war. If we believe we have the moral authority to
enter into war, we better damn well be willing to do what is necessary to
win. If we don’t, we spit on those
whose lives were lost.
We also have made the mistake that if we give these people “freedom”
they would be our friend and we would have planted the seed of democracy in the
Middle East. Like the fools in
Washington, I believed that crap too.
The one thing that we either didn’t recognize or refused to believe is
that we cannot take a people who have lived under a despot for thousands of
years and automatically expect them to be able to live free. For a people to be able to support freedom,
they have to of experienced some self rule.
The colonist of our nation had common law and had some form of freedom
which gave them the structure for self rule.
They developed the taste of freedom and wanted ultimate and complete self
determination. Without this experience,
we would have fallen under complete anarchy if we attempted the great experience
of freedom. To expect a people whose
standard of living hasn’t seen a significant improvement for thousands of years,
and who have never had any sort of self determination to automatically be able
to self rule was foolish. I remember
Colin Powell stating that if we broke it (Iraq), we bought it. He knew that Saddam Hussein; while a dictator,
gave stability and structure. With the
vacuum of leadership we left when we ousted him, we gave way to the rise of
ISIS. We questioned why President Bush
41 didn’t take Bagdad in the 1990’s. I
believe he understood that what we are experiencing now would have occurred.
We are going take this folly on again, and unless we are
truly willing to do ALL that is necessary to defeat ISIS; no matter the
cost, we should come home and leave the Middle East to take care of themselves. Let us protect our boarder, have true immigration
reform (so we know who is in this country), and become completely energy independent,
so that we are not willing to entangle ourselves in the issues of others
again. If we as a people (both
Republicans and Democrats) are not willing to take a Jeffersonian approach to
our place in the world, we will continue to be at war. Our biggest influence on the world should not
be because of our military might, but because of the example we set.
