Boots on the Ground

One of the blogs I read regularly is from a US Army Sergeant with the 25th Infantry Division. I came across his blog about a year ago, when he was stationed in Hawaii, and immediately added it to my live bookmarks. In August, he was sent to Iraq and he's been able to post often. A few days ago he posted an entry entitled "Go Home?"

Here's an excerpt:

There's an argument being circulated, and has been for awhile now, that fighting in Iraq is creating more terrorists. It's a load of crap. Sorry to be blunt, but that's the truth. What creates terrorists is a societal acceptance of terrorism as a tool for political or social change... no, control. When we allow terrorism to change our laws, our lifestyles, our sense of security, we lose. We lose our freedom, our rights, our security and we give all the power over those things to terrorists who have no desire to be fair, kind or just.

Here's the LINK to the rest of this post.

I see some parallels between Iraq the Civil War. During the Civil War, the Confederates pushed the same policy we see today used by the enemy, hold out as long as they can and eventually the North will tire of it and just let us go. In fact, Grant, in his memoirs, makes several references to how the press in the North almost seemed to give every little bit of bad news major headlines as to imply that things are going well for the Confederacy but not the Union. Nothing has changed much in 142 years. The Confederacy, like the enemy we fight today, knew they could not beat the North at its own game - they did not have the industrial or military capacity to compete evenly, so they deployed the policy of emotional fatigue - the North will withdraw because so many men are dying; even if the ratio is 3 Confederate soldiers to 1 Union.

The policy today should be let the generals run the war. Unfortunately the politicians want to run it and too many politicians are willing to let their feelings dictate policy: "I don't like war, so let's not fight." If we stop fighting now, the enemy won't and you can bet that if the North ceded to the South, we would have had another war that would have been more deadly and more destructive. Terrorists declared war on us and if we don't like it that's too bad but we must respond and we must win. It may be painful, it may be sad, it may be hard, but giving up is not an option. To quote JFK: "we choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard." Fighting terrorism is hard; preserving the Union was hard. Unfortunately, too many people today want to take the path of least resistance and pass an even greater struggle off the next generation. Had this happened 140 years ago, the US as we know it today may never have existed.