Things about the "war on terror"

What annoys me about our present “war”

Politics is an attempt to change an opponents policies utilizing logic, pressure, reward, influence, etc. War is an attempt to overpower the opponent so that you can implement your own policy. The use of politics to reach an end of armed conflict is perfectly legitimate. In that regard war can be seen as a political tool. However, war should always be what it is. It should always be a legitimate attempt to conquer. The political part comes in the form of motivation. “Let’s solve this at the table while you still have power before I solve this on the battlefield and you have no power.” In this present conflict we have, and have had, are highest military powers on sight acting for political purposes. There is much talk, it is in fashion, about “winning the peace.” It is not a new idea. Sun Tsu’s The Art of War addressed it. If I remember correctly by going to war we lost the peace. The idea now is to win the war. This should be a decisive effort. Perhaps I don’t remember so well. Perhaps Sun was wrong. And I realize he didn’t actually write it. What we have now is a combination of aborted politics and aborted military action. All in all, just an abortion. Unfortunately, since the abortion is being conducted by our military, our militants are in the middle of it. We have fought in such a politically motivated way that one of our concerns was minimizing the American body count, but on a day to day basis. We didn’t go in, overwhelm and secure. To do so would have cost too many American lives that month. It’s the same as the financial policies that brought down so many huge corporations. I would have rather had ten times as many dead at the beginning and on third the dead now. And I think those go together. And I think that’s why Sun wrote what his student wrote. And I think he was right when someone else wrote it. And I think the best course of action now is to do the job, do it fully, and do it forcefully so that it gets done. I think the second best course of action is to get out without doing the job. I think that would be mocking our dead, but it wouldn’t be making more of them.

Speaking of mocking our dead. I am also mildly sickened by the media’s, and to some extent the concerned families’, use of the term hero. The word means something to me. I checked in the dictionary, and granted I use an old dictionary, I prefer them, and it says I’m right. Being a hero means you did something extraordinarily courageous. We send out ten patrols on the same route on some certain day. The first nine complete the route without incident. The last goes along without incident until it’s blown up by a roadside IED, killing the entire crew. They are touted in the back home press as heroes. They did the same thing the other nine crews did. That means they did nothing extraordinary and therefore nothing heroic, in as much as their patrol was concerned. The only thing they did that was different from the rest was dieing. That brings us to the common meaning of hero. As commonly used in our press, hero just means dead. In reality, many of those who die in war may be heroes. But dieing didn’t make heroes of them. I’d love to see some news reports that honor those who die by reporting what did make them heroes. By reporting all who die as heroes our press only mocks the heroism of those who truly are heroic, including those heroes who die in roadside bombings and are called heroes only because they died.

The third thing is the use, or overuse, of the term terrorist. I’m not sure how we define it. Clearly, we mean our enemies. My mind, though, continues to return to the earlier discussion of fairness. I guess I’m a little concerned with absolutes. For instance, what is terrorism in absolute terms. From there I can work back toward reality, which rarely exists in absolutes. Are we the greatest terrorists of all time? I refer to the mass killing of civilians perpetrated by the United States against the Japanese. I don’t think anyone could make a decent argument against it in terms of lives. By simple numbers I think we’re ahead having dropped the bombs, on both sides. The Japanese warriors were tenacious. They would have killed many, many more American warriors had the war continued. That is clear. It is also clear that many, many more Japanese warriors would have died had the war continued. In terms of numbers, I think that more Japanese soldiers would have died than Japanese civilians who did die. So a great number of military lives were saved on both sides. We traded those military lives for civilians. Non-combatants. We killed people who weren’t fighting us to save our own soldiers’ lives and the lives of the soldiers who were fighting us. We call the tragedies of 9/11 great acts of terrorism because of the human toll, and because that was just people like you and me who went to work that morning, or were simply traveling, people who were non-combatants. We killed teens and preteens, the elderly who had to be held up when they walked and mothers suckling their infants, and their infants. When I step back to where my terms of absolute are and try to decide what an act of terror is, without the luxury of whether the person(s) committing the act are our enemies, I am ashamed of us. And that statement extends past WWII. The actions of our troops in non-battle conditions and the CIA’s recent “Extraordinary Rendition,” as well as other, long standing policies regarding clandestine ops, or a sniper’s SOP concerning POWs.

Lastly is that there is a war on terror at all. President Bush, Sr., got our troops onto the Saudi peninsula on an explicitly temporary basis. That has changed to semi-permanent at the very least. The presence of our (infidel) troops there is sacrilege for Islamics. This isn’t because they took a vote after we went there and decided they didn’t want us. This was part of their religion before the discovery of the new world. Not since we got there, not since the formation of this nation, not since the colonization of the Americas by (predominately) Christians, but since the time that the terms of their religion were set out. We knew this. Sr. put us there knowing the sentiments it would cause, and Presidents and Congresses on both sides of the aisle have kept us there knowing it. Our politicians knowingly went looking for a fight and got it. Our presence on their holy ground is the origin of the terror we now fight. Our continued presence is it’s nourishment. Withdrawing our troops from the Saudi peninsula would do more, and be cheaper, than all previous and current efforts combined toward eliminating the scourge of terrorism.