thunder6: Why We Fight.

This post sums it up nicely. It should be tattooed backwards on the face of every Senator and Representative so they can read it every time they shave.

What? All I need is five Supreme Court judges and it's the law of the land.

After losing so many innocent lives there is a natural tendency to view the terrorists as little more then blind and bitter zealots – but doing so would discount the true depth of their depravity. If you take a glance into their merciless ideology two things become readily apparent. The first is that they are in this for the long game. The second is that they have grasped an ancient truth – that the key to any fight is mercilessly hammering your enemy’s weak point.

A perfect example is the mission here in Iraq. The insurgents arrayed against us aren’t brave fighters or great warriors. In fact every time we fight toe to toe in a direct fire engagement they limp away like scared dogs. But the insurgents aren’t dumb, they have learned to hide their weakness by relying on IEDs, the modern equivalent of a bear trap. In the dead of night they skulk out of the shadows and lay their volatile traps, then lay in wait for one of our vehicles to roll into the blast radius.

When those brutal devices blossom into roaring, rending splinters they gouge men and machine alike. When those white hot pieces of metal find flesh to chew into they strike America's sole the gift of prescience; I don’t know what Iraq will look like when we do decide to pull out. But I do know that if we let the insurgents plan the timeline then we will have lost a key battle in this war without borders. My heart aches for the losses in London, but those horrible losses have only strengthened my resolve to help cut out this cancer.

If I could take the average citizen along with us on a combat patrol I have no doubt they would feel the same way. But I can’t. All I can do is hope that America will continue to support this mission and let us win this war. Is it costly? Very. Is it painful? Even more so. But in the end it comes down to this – in the entire history of the human race, from the dark avenues of prehistory up to this modern “enlightened” age, there are precious few instances where bowing to an enemy seeking your annihilation did anything but lead to a much uglier world. And I for one don’t plan on letting that come to pass.

Amen to all that, brother.