Innocence lost (reprise)...

 

 

 

"As bad as we thought it was, it was so much, so much worse..."

What have we wrought? Not us (US) so to speak, but the human race? We kill, destroy, kill and maim, and no one seems to know our name. How bad is it? See either Lone Survivor or American Sniper to get an idea of the answer. And that answer is not pretty. We confront evil in its most primitive form. And we expect our young boys and girls to go into the pit of hell and fix it.

We have been down this road before. Any war in which we have needed to send our young people to fight. World War I, World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam. There are also others, only not as large. In each of these conflicts, our young people have seen a side of humanity which is anything but humane. Many of our young people have come home scarred. If not physically, then emotionally. They found out the adage "war is a dirty business" to be so true, and then some.

As much as I would like all wars to end, and our brave peacekeepers to come home safe and sound, I am not that naïve. Today we face a new evil which knows absolutely no boundaries. As brutal as the Axis juggernaut was in World War II, this group of ideological zealots are worse. Much, much worse. Soon the United States, as well as the rest of the free world, will need to make a choice. Do we commit our young men and women to fight a ground war against this evil, or watch it slowing capture more territory while exterminating those who live there.

Part of me wants to just bomb this group into the stone ages. If there is collateral damage, then so be it. But I know that would be the wrong answer. The innocents who live there no more deserve to die under our bombs than they do under the knives of the butchers. And who are the enemy? Many are nameless and faceless and wear no uniform. They conscript old men, young men, women and even children. Some are innocent, some are not. The ones who are not innocent can be as deadly as any soldier on the battlefield. 

My belief is 2015 is going to be a critical year in the War on Terror. How we will fight it, if we  fight it, and then who will fight it. They enemy has taken asymmetrical warfare to the furthest extreme. To win this, we are going to have to know their tactics in order to counter their tactics. We are going to have to get in the mud with them. We are going to have to capture, not kill more of the leaders. We are going to have to keep Gitmo as well as the rendition centers open and packed full of captured terrorists. We need to get the Hague involved in trying some of these monsters for war crimes. For what they have done to children, to babies, to anyone.

Asking young people to sacrifice their lives and/or their innocence is a hard thing to do. For any leader. But we are fighting an enemy, an evil which knows no bounds. An enemy who wants very much to come to our shores and take care of the "great Satan". An enemy who will not accept our surrender, only our heads. This gathering menace is real. It is coming. It may already be here. We need to wake up before the sleeper cells do.