Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Are there similarities in how we fight wars less effectively today and how we discuss them, similarities that might ultimately undermine the war effort itself?

If someone didn't whole-heartedly support America's cause in World War II, odds are they would have been called a traitor, a coward, or at least a weakling, etc. Today, just as we see collateral damage as an argument for not fighting a war, as opposed to an unfortunate by product of one, the conventional wisdom is that we shouldn't be too hard on war critics, less we run the risk of looking like unhinged war mongers.

Recently the term disproportion has been in the news as regards fighting a war. Think about proportionality as regards the current debate of the Iraq War. Young men and women, good young American men and women are off in a foreign land fighting for what America defined as her cause when she went to war. They are fighting, being severely and often permanently injured and even dying everyday.

Yet, as purveyors of what some might call pro-war rhetoric, how do we respond to the people we see daily undermining the very effort required to fight that war and adequately support our troops?

Isn't the tendency to go soft on them? To not actually say what we believe to be true in our hearts - that, ultimately, their short-sighted reasoning, or lack of resolve weakens America's prospects in what is an increasingly dangerous world as a result of the rise of radical Islam?

Isn't it disproportionate to give anti-war folks like that a pass when they sit safe and protected pumping out un-war-supportive prose, while better men and women than all of us fight and die? I'm starting to think that it is.

What I do know is that, if we are to defeat Islamofascism, many more innocents will die. And even more innocents will die if we don't defeat it. With stakes that high, is it really such a crime to call certain individuals cowards, or traitors, or somehow un-American, or dangerously misguided Americans, at best?

If America and perhaps now Israel find themselves in a position where they can no longer effectively let slip the dogs of war for just cause, isn't it, at least in part, because the rhetoric of war has been ceded to those who will always oppose it, no matter how right the cause?

Q: What did you do in the war Daddy?

A: Well, I tried to be as polite and careful as I could be when arguing about it.