Posted by
Michael Scotto on Saturday, August 26, 2006 3:41:48 PM
Forever on Defense
If there is one thing that history teaches us (check that), that history screams very loudly and very clearly, is that you cannot fight a defensive war forever.
On one level I can say that the terrorists have won. I had to fly this past week and I spent my time making sure I didn't have any liquids on me, making sure that no object on my keychain could be construed as a weapon and suspiciously eyeing every other passenger at the airport. As the terrorists continue to find loopholes in the system, travel will become increasingly more unpleasant than it already is.
Nineteen men five years ago have made millions of passengers uptight ever since.
We're just sitting back waiting to be hit. We're waiting for North Korea to nuke some US property. We're waiting for Iran to nuke Israel or blow up more Amreicans in Iraq via their many proxies. We're waiting for Hezbollah and Hamas to regroup and strike again. All this while TSA members sift through my wife's unmentionables at the airport.
Why are we here? Well, first and foremost, sometime around 1970 the press decided that the death of any American soldier was unacceptable... and we've since come along for the ride. 2600 military deaths in Iraq in over three years? That is phe-nom-i-nal. Couple that with no major terrorist attacks in the US and countless Islamofascists killed way way way over there and we should be emboldened to take aim at Iran, Syria and North Korea.
But where do we find ourselves? We find President Bush adoting the KERRY PLAN FOR WORLD PEACE. That is, we pressured Israel to stop killing terrorists because other terrorist states were upset by the war. Then we decided that we can't move forward unless the French and the UN tell us we can.
The Bush Doctrine is dead. Kerry has apparently won the argument.
What happened? We have lost the will to fight. Dying for an ideal and for the sake of the future is no longer considered noble. We'd rather sit back and watch three little rogue nations rule our lives.... ignorantly hoping that talks with madmen will end the struggle. And don't be fooled, our freedom of movement has been altered, our ecomony has been altered, our very way of life has been altered. The Iranian president flinches and the stock market reacts. Syria threatens (threatens!) the UN and somebody actually cares.
We have an administration that is more concerned with the editorial pages of US and European newspapers than it is with restoring the American way of life. We have a population that is content to slowly watch the world we knew implode and die so long as the death is a slow one.
If this nation continues to fear going on the offensive, the war of attrition with a billion people who have no fear of death can only end up as all such efforts, in defeat.