Understand the limitations of power before offering to become involved anywhere and everywhere.
I thought that WAS the policy "du jour" PRIOR to 9/11.... Am I wrong??
Should we just ignore the march of Islamo-Fascist beliefs, whether Salafist or Shi'ite, as they duke it out for control of the Mid-East??
Was the attempt to murder 50,000 people in the WTC insufficient to cause us to pull our heads out our butts and recognized "we're involved" whether we like it or not?
Imagine, if you will, what the response of this nation would have been in either 1915, or 1941, has practioners of a particular ideology killed as many innocent people as they did on 9/11?
I have no doubt that we'd have mobilized millions of men and gone into full-scale war with any nation that was governed by such fanatics, regardless of whether they were actually involved in the attack. Because we would have recognize that it was the ideology that lead them to attack us, not just a random act of violence. And that ideology has to be destroyed, or at least neutralized as a strategic threat.
Both of us have a struggle with having to have our troops involved in a war where so many people seem ungrateful. These people expected us to change their lives overnight, using all the resources at our disposal, and now they resent us for not meeting that expectation.
But what we ARE giving them is the chance to build their own future. A future in which they can look back and say..
"look at all the obstacles we had to overcome, and the sacrifices our families had to bear to defeat the militants.. The US may have been involved, but it was Muslim blood that was shed to preserve the peaceful nature (at least that side of it) of Islam and prevent it from being hi-jacked by fanatics who would have been the ruin of all of us".
Thus, we must be an enabling power in the region, constantly applying "carrot and stick", when appropriate, and instilling confidence in the democratic process.
For the Islamo-Fascists to thrive as a regional/global ideology, they have to defeat the superpowers, politically and economically, or at least bluster their way into obtaining a geo-political "buffer" that provokes, but doesn't lead to direct confrontation until their power is consolidated and absolute. But there is no doubt, just like was embodied in Mein Kampf, or the Communist Manifesto, they are coming for us (the western democracies).
Mike, we're involved, whether we like it or not. I personally wish we weren't, because that would mean 9/11 would not be part of our history. But none of us have a choice about that.
However, we DO have a choice about how we react to it.
Hawk |
