Two Smears. One Crater. And Then Another
Two dark smears marked the sky. Grey with dust and black with smoke.
A crater in Washington.
Another in Pennsylvania.
Why we fight.
We just finished watching the movie "Flight 93". It was not a movie that I had pursued. I still believe in why we are militarily and diplomatically engaged in the Middle East. A reminder isn't necessarily required in my case.
I feel a certain amount of frustration with those that seem to have forgotten September 11, 2001. For a brief time we were one nation, dedicated to repairing what was broken and ensuring that such a thing would never happen again. At least, not if we could help prevent it.
Yet today it seems as though partisan politics have once more become more important than national security. Who wins the next election is more important than running down the barbarians with dreams of grandeur that place so little value on human life.
All of them.
We have lost more people fighting the Islamic Jihadists, the Muslim Extremists, the barbarians, than we lost on September 11, 2001. There are those whose ledger sheet would declare our campaigns against the barbarians to be not worthwhile based on those losses.
We lost more people fighting Japan and Germany than we ever lost on December 7, 1941 or in any of the shipwrecks caused by Nazi submarines. We killed many more people than we lost fighting those campaigns as well.
But we achieved our objective. Nations will strain mightily to avoid the path of the Axis of World War II. Those that dare to tread on that foul and fetid path face near global acrimony.
The objective of our current campaigns is clear. We want to ensure that whenever some small band of barbarians seeks to build an organization dedicated to the wholesale slaughter of innocents, that their friends and their neighbors will shun and isolate those barbarians. We seek to ensure that the first response to barbarism is to reject it out of hand as unworthy, undesirable, and destructive.
We call ourselves the "land of the brave". The crew and passengers of United flight 93 provided a powerful example of what is required when one comes from such a place.
If you have not yet had the chance to watch "Flight 93", then please do so. Remember that we did not start this fight.
We had better be the ones that finish it.
Two dark smears marked the sky. Grey with dust and black with smoke.
A crater in Washington.
Another in Pennsylvania.
What a tragic waste of those lives if we let the barbarians win.
by Dann
|
Blog Home
The Marine Corps
Michael Yon
