Thursday, 9 Aug 2007
By Harmon
Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards declared a few months ago that the War on Terror is nothing more than a bumper sticker slogan.
The Global War on Terror is more than a bumper sticker. It is a war between the West and a growing radical Islam. It is a war which engulfs every major continent and every Western nation. It is a war which is fought by armies in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Somalia, and Lebanon. It is a war which has taken hostages from Gaza to the Philippines. It is a war which has detonated bombs from streets in Baghdad to buildings in Bali and from a Scottish airport to an embassy in Kenya. It is a war which rages from trains in India to suburbs in France and from caves in Afghanistan to skyscrapers in New York. The Global nature of this war cannot be emphasized enough, and though this seemingly endless proselytizing will be repeated many times, by talk radio and bloggers like me, but to the discouraged home front, it seems as though nobody is listening.
The mainstream media continues to refer to a War in Iraq, as opposed to an Iraqi front in a larger War on Terror. Just as the Peninsular War was part of the larger Napoleonic Wars and the Pacific Theater was part of the larger World War 2, the so called War in Iraq is a front in a larger, much larger, fight against a common enemy. But this enemy is one which knows no geopolitical boundaries.
The extremist enemy makes no distinction between combatant and noncombatant, as the business men and woman who held hands as they plummeted to their deaths should have taught us. But in a larger sense, they make no distinction between nations. America will always (we can only hope) be their Great Satan, but that provided no comfort to Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was found with eight bullets in his body, his throat slashed almost two the point of decapitation, and two knives buried in his chest pinning a note which promised, “A Day of horrible tortures and painful tribulations which will go together with with the terrible cries being pressed out of the lungs of the unjust.” The borders between Nations, drawn by the hands of men, have been erased.
The Treaties of Paris, Versailles, Westphalia, and Berlin -which added graffiti to the globe by dividing nation from nation- might as well be crossed out and replaced with a single litmus test: believer or infidel. That is the mind of our enemy.
In the Napoleonic Wars, the soldiers of the French after loosing a battle would wave the flag of surrender and go amid the enemy army to evacuate the bodies. While surrounded by the men who just hours before were pointing muskets into their faces, they often found common ground even engaging in conversation. (See Mark Urban’s Wellington’s Rifles) In this war, there is no common ground between enemies.
The American Democrats who seek to undermine the War on Terror do not understand the nature of the war at hand. Our President has failed to articulate the struggles of the day at hand and the challenges of the coming night. It is the job of every American who cares about the outcome of this most important of all battles of will to articulate its necessity.
We can only long for the days when the War on Terror is nothing more than a bumper sticker slogan.
But those days have passed and we are now in the days when that phrase should be burned into the insides of our eyelids, along with the memories of the innocent people whose lives have already been stolen.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
I take it that you dont believe that US involvement in Iraq is creating more reasons for the enemies to hate us?
Isnt there a lesson to be learned from Viet Nam? continuation of American occupation and bombings in VN only fed more hatred to Vietnamese people.
the killing in the My lai Massacre happened, you cant denied that.
I am looking at the Katrina post on Sept 4th on this website, stating that the Katrina victim shouldnt expect the gov’t to help them with everything.
Why is that? when u expect the army to do the fighting of this “war on terror”? If what you say is right (and i believe it is), that RADICAL Islam hates us, but not peaceful muslims, then, they must have reasoning and feelings, right?
Then, why dont we fight a war using love? I know that the posts here have different authors… but still.
You can’t fight your way through everything, and also expect trust from the American people. At the same time, the soldiers and US forces cannot be at home protecting and performing disaster relieves, because they got a war to fight….????
how can some of these bloggers(or post-ers) argue for less government intervention for something that is humane, and support wars? where government is obviously intervening?
Pce out.
P.S. btw, no more number adding? i saw some spams, haha, Katelyn was right
oh wait, theres this CreCaptcha thing..
September 19th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
If your school mate punches you in the face and his motions indicate he is going to hit again, do you stop and ponder whether hitting him back will give him more reasons to hate you?
If America and her allies ignore the threat of Islamic terror, we will be hit again; hard. Our enemies hate us as a fundamental part of their ethos. Koran Surrah 9 Verse 5, “slay the infidels where you may find them.”
Removing a dictator who murdered an avg. of 50,000 people per year from power, while at the same time protecting American sovereignty from a regime which had demonstrated its willingness to attack the West and Israel can hardly be classified as feeding hatred. The first rule of counterinsurgency is never allow a vocal minority ideology to trump the silent majority. Most Iraqi Muslims, Sunni, Shiite alike, would prefer to be able to live in a peaceful country than a base for Islamic terror: hence the participation of local militias in the counterinsurgency effort.
We must not confuse lack of war for peace.
There is no peace in allowing a dictator to murder his own people, there is only inactivity. Failure to act because the persecuted in question live across an Ocean is what Sartre would call Bad Faith. America realizes that she cannot spill blood for every humanitarian effort on the globe, but she also has a history of choosing humanitarian missions when it suits National Interest.
Speaking of Katrina: The purpose of a good government is to do what the people cannot do alone: a social contract to maximise the self-serving utility of masses of individuals. A church group cannot liberate Iraq. A student activist club cannot depose a dictator. A philanthropic individual cannot protect his country from a unified enemy with unlimited resources and an ideology which does not fear death. Thus it is the role of government to intervene, precedented from Jefferson’s 1812 Barbary Coast Wars to liberate merchant slaves to Clinton’s blundering 1993 invasion of Somalia.
Individuals can, however care for each other in times of need. A church group can rebuild a town; a student activist club can host refugees of a storm; a philanthropic individual can buy school supplies for the children of New Orleans. When government intervenes, it simply takes the means of individuals to care fore each other–by force– and uses them less efficiently than the individuals from whom they were taken.
Government is a business to inefficient to support itself honestly. It must therefore take from those who have earned to redistribute to those who have not. For every dollar that is given by the government toward an abstract, “common good,” a dollar is taken from an individual who worked to earn it.
The problem of evil is one we must wrestle with— as individuals, not governments. Government should embrace no philosophy, ever as seemingly simple as providing for the needs, other than protecting the social contract upon which it was conceived.
Protections of our nation from externalities, such as the unified forces of the Islamic Caliphate, warrants the necessary evil of government because I cannot, with the money I earn, protect my inherent right to life.
Therefore we may bury our heads and our hearts in the sand; act in Bad Faith and leave the civilization to which we owe our lifestyle under siege with no hope of reinforcements; we may leave Somalia to be overrun and her people massacred; we may leave Darfur to the Janjaweed to pillage on horseback, invoking the image of the Prophet’s battle of Badr; we can allow Iraq to fall into genocide; we can leave the Philippines to fend for itself against Abu Sayaff. We can ignore the entire world, the world we love, and let it rot, burn, and turn to ashes.
But we will not.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
dental health lesson plan…
indigo despotic woven!…