In A Nutshell

After my last post I conversed back and forth with my father about the position I took and whether or not he thought my argument was well thought out. I am not sure if we exactly see eye to eye but for the most part we are on the same page. He wrote this email that follows to me in response to my wanting to post another comment further explaining my point. In a nutshell this is exactly how I feel about things right now.


“You got me. I don't see how this clears up anything that wasn't already clear. I don't see where you can make your point any better than you did. People are either agreeing or disagreeing down party lines. If there's anything you might do, its let it be known what you think about the usual position of the anti-Iraq crowd- that its an illegal war, that we went there for oil, WMD or Bush's daddy, that we ought to be isolationists and nuke people that attack us, etc., etc.

I get so tired of people that can't see that we were attacked because we gave radical Muslims the mistaken belief that we're so soft they could bring us down. WMD, democracy in Iraq, and so on have always been icing on the cake to me. After 9/11, we needed to change course and bring somebody down from the malarial swamp we call the Middle East. I would have been happy, after the Taliban, to have attacked anybody over there- Saddam happened to be my favorite. Our doing just that was brilliant to my mind, then and now. I don't expect things to be easy and Bush, et al, NEVER said it would be. Our showing the Middle East, and indeed the world, that the consequence of thinking of attacking the U.S. is more than you should ever dream of bearing, was NECESSARY and has produced much of the fruit we could have hoped for. I think a big part of the reason that much of the Arab world is being relatively compliant about Israel aggressively defending itself, is that we have convinced the rational Muslims that continuing to oppose us is a bad idea.

We are in Iraq to change the mind of the world that Vietnam was the exception, not the rule, for America. We need to stay not just so the fledgling democracy in Iraq can get a real start, but so that the rest of the world knows that America has the will to defend itself and therefore that to become our enemy is to commit suicide. Peace thru superior firepower is part of it, but we need to demonstrate beyond doubt, that this new idea of asymmetrical warfare against the US is as stupid as taking us on conventionally. There are other potential enemies out there who are studying this war to discover how to undo us. If we are to have much of a future, we need to convince others that they are better off pursuing peace than war against us, and by extension, our friends (i.e. other non-totalitarian countries).

There are lots of radical Muslims left to convince. If we stop this war before we destroy or otherwise pacify most, if not all of them, the swamp will quickly become malarial again. The swamp must be drained. The leaders of Iran, one way or the other, must be brought down. Do that and I suspect the people of Lebanon and Syria will straighten out their countries. If not, we do it for them. After that, there are more in Asia, Africa and South America that need killed. If we take them on one by one, steadily grinding away, I think entire regions of the world will take ownership of the fight themselves, much the same as General Ali has in Qayyirah (or whatever its called). I think far from being a reason to come home, the number of our losses is among the reasons for staying with this fight. We keep figuring out more and more how to fight these guys efficiently, minimizing loss of life. There's a deployment plan that will help keep from burning our forces out and we need to rapidly implement it.

In this real world we live in, there are no options that allow us to solve these problems without some of our people sacrificing their lives. As a society, we should hope these come from our fighting forces. If you're not prepared to do this, then stay out of the military. For those that are, the rest of us need to impress the world with how we esteem and care for our war fighters. You guys should take the place sports heroes have in our society. Little boys should grow up hoping to be soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, before pursuing other dreams. Those of us who eschew this great calling, should live out our days with regret for only half lived.

I can see no other hope for the world to enjoy some measure of peace and stability. Is there another candidate for dealing with evil in the world that makes any sense?”


I am not sure why he hasn’t started his own blog yet as I think he has a lot of good things to say, but until he does I’ll continue to steal and post his ideas as if they were my own. As far as another way for dealing with evil I can only think of one: create a reality TV show called “Extremist Russian Roulette” and invite six new terrorists on each six week series and tell them that whoever survives until the next week will receive a lifetime supply of cell phones and detonation cord. The last man standing after each series gets to go onto the next series and so on and so forth.