Our Place In The World; A Critical Analysis

I was a little apprehensive when we decided to go into Iraq the second time because many of the American people have shown several times in the past few decades that they have no stomach for war. They demand to know the date it will end on the day it starts. Congress whines that only they have the authority to declare war….but they never do. Not since 1941 have they done so. But they consistently vote to approve funding for the President’s adventures and then stab him in the back at the microphones right after the vote. Congress is gutless.

And armchair critics, battlefield experts all…. despite a collective military service of less than a nanosecond, immediately begin lambasting those who have spent 30 years or more rising through the military ranks and amassing the most war-fighting experience of any people walking the planet. But, Joe Couch Potato and Samantha Soccer Mom know best. Tommy Teenager who can’t even get his ball cap on right knows best. Senator Chickenhawk who once walked past a recruiting office during his closest ever approach to the military knows best.

Now I don't claim to be a military genius, but I know this. The last war we won was WWII and that was because we defeated the enemy. We didn’t just beat on them until they agreed to surrender. We beat on them until they wanted to surrender. To make your enemy surrender, you have to go to war with overwhelming forces armed with the weapons capable of doing the most killing and destruction, and strike with swift, fierce, savagery and keep striking until the enemy is beaten. You have to be willing to take casualties and inflict them. You have to be willing to concede there will be casualties amongst the civilian population. War is a very messy business and unless you have the resolve to see it through and do it right, you should never begin. Just surrender to the enemy, learn their language, adopt their religion, and begin a new way of life....if they let you and your family continue living.

I think it is a mistake to try and liberate a people who haven’t made a serious effort to liberate themselves and lost a lot of lives in the attempt. If liberation isn’t worth it to them, why should it be worth our blood? If we’ve made a mistake in Iraq, that’s probably it. And there will almost always be a certain number of die-hards who have been part of (or at least support) your enemy. We used to call them guerillas. Now we call them "insurgents". You must eliminate as many of them as possible....preferably all of them....by killing them. The rest must have their weapons taken away or you will not be safe and neither will the people who really want to be liberated.

To do this, you must occupy and maintain a tight control over everything while you slowly and carefully turn control back over to the indigenous people when they are prepared and willing to accept it. To ensure their continued security, you usually have to keep a lot of military forces in their country to enable them to spend their revenues building up their own standard of living in safety.

But that's not what we did and we haven't done it since 1945 and we've lost in Korea, Viet Nam, and now probably in Iraq. Maybe even Afghanistan over time. We may have deposed Saddam, but has that really accomplished anything? The Iraqi people want us to leave soon and a growing percentage of our own people want us to leave immediately. Will a free Iraq remain for more than a week after we leave. I doubt it. And why is that? You would certainly think that a people who allegedly suffered so badly under Saddam would be absolutely thrilled to be rid of him.

I think they are at the moment but the new menace really isn't leftovers from Saddam's reign of terror, and it's not just in Iraq. In fact, it's not about government, politics, territory, money, weapons, rights, borders, or anything at all like the things wars are traditionally fought about.
The enemy now is a wide variety of people of many nationalities from numerous countries. They have no politics, no government, and no borders. They are Islamic Fundamentalist radicals. Zealots. They're mostly uneducated so they eagerly grab onto the radical teachings of the radical leaders at the local radical mosque and believe every radical word they're told because surely those words are coming from The Prophet, himself. The non-zealots in Iraq aren't their enemy. We are and so are all the other infidels in the world.

How do we combat such an army? They aren't nationalistic. They won't wear uniforms. They won't fight in traditional ways. What are we to do? If a faction of them succeeded in putting together a nuclear device and detonating it in an American city, who will we retaliate against? We’d better be thinking about that one because when they have the capability, they’ll do it. Meanwhile, the naysayers among us do their best to keep the hands of our leaders tied as they try their best to protect us.

Well, one school of thought is that when a country like Iraq is given freedom, their own people will set up government and housekeeping which will rid the world of the radical element. But that's foolishness. The non-radical muslims are very tolerent of the goofballs among them and as long as they go attack someone else, it's perfectly okay. If that someone else is us, that's perfectly okay too. They know we think we're helping them and they're perfectly happy to accept that help as long as we go away as soon as we're not able to help any longer and then things will seek their own level and life will go on in some fashion. Allah will provide.

So that is why I’ve come to the conclusion that it's time to defend the homeland and let the rest of the world seek its own destiny since the rest of the world....save Great Britain....seems disinclined to help much with what we've been trying to accomplish. And it's time to quit having our own country split down the middle and it's time to stop spending our wealth trying to solve everyone else's problems. If Iraq wanted to get rid of Saddam, their own people needed to do it....just like we threw off King George III, just like the British people created the Magna Carta, and just like the French overthrew their monarchy.

True, Japan and Germany became democratic countries and prospered after WWII, but look what they had to suffer through and look what they put the rest of the world through. Millions of people killed, tens of millions of injuries, grief, carnage, suffering, pain, misery, agony, and countless other descriptive words that aren’t sufficient to adequately describe the horrors and aftermath of war. In short, we should let each country that needs change to see the need themselves and then take the steps to achieve it on their own. Maybe they'll succeed and maybe they'll fail but unless they achieve what they seek on their own, they won’t recognize the value of such change.

So, maybe it's time to bring home our armed forces....from everywhere. Maybe it's time to use them to tightly control our own borders....all of them. Maybe it's time to rethink a lot of our immigration policies. Maybe it's time to put the safety of this country ahead of corporate profits. Maybe it's time to take back the jobs we've sent to third world countries. Maybe it's time to spend our money eliminating poverty, disease, hunger, and homelessness in our own country instead of worrying about everyone else everywhere else. Maybe it's time to quit importing and put tarrifs in place to help balance out our trade deficit. Maybe it's time to start making things again and quit exporting our own natural resources. Maybe it's time to stop being so damn squeemish and politically correct when our government does things to try and protect us from crazed zealots whose prime goal in life is to kill us...all of us....soldiers, civilians, children, women, newborn babies. To them, all are fair targets and we should have not the slightest compunction about sending them to Paradise. That is their goal. We should oblige those zealots, one and all.

To protect ourselves however, we must first grow a national backbone. We have got to resolve to play by rules which favor ourselves over our enemies. We have got to use severe methods and engage in severe actions to combat our enemies and we have to adopt a national mentality which puts the survival and preservation of our way of life at the pinnacle of criticality and damn everything else and damn anyone who seeks to tear us down. If we aren't willing to do that, then we don't deserve the inheritance our founding fathers left us.