Train Of Thought: A letter To Sen. Arlen Specter

by Diana West - July 20th, 2007 - Townhall.com

In our new age, in our post-modern culture, American war goals -- American self-preservation -- are secondary to war casualties, and I don't mean our own.

That's who we are -- socially humane, expendable and increasingly impotent. It's not who our fathers and grandfathers were. The men who decimated German and Japanese cities as part of the effort to win World War II as quickly as possible would have been perplexed by descendants who now send American troops house to booby-trapped house and expect to achieve anything but more war, "limited" though it may be.

Talk about waste.

America's enemies are hard to define nowadays. With this article Diana West has come close to summing up the reason the American people have become disgusted with the battlefield in Iraq. I refuse to say war in Iraq since we are not at war with Iraq. We are at war with Islamofascism and these extremists are killing our soldiers in Iraq as just one battlefield.

The problem is that no matter how just attacking Iraq was, the way we are fighting the war right now is not working. We have a President who thinks of himself as an MBA President. He takes on each task and does it the best he can. However he has failed to keep the American people on his side because he is inarticulate and tone deaf. This failure to keep the American people behind the war has allowed our internal enemies to drag his approval ratings to abysmal levels. This means the ability of America to fight for our long term freedom is compromised.

The anti-war movement has demanded, and America has complied, with a method of war that borders on the insane. We never fight all out war any more. We do not recognize that the easiest way to minimize all casualties is to destroy the enemy so the war stops. We fight limited war, handicapping our troops so that they don't do TOO MUCH damage to the enemy, and especially we must protect "civilians". As a result the war drags on.

In this war our enemies behead innocent civilians. They take the children of tribal leaders and bake them and feed them to the tribal leaders to demand allegiance. They set as their goal the killing of innocents as their primary form of warfare. Our liberal and progressive leaders complain that we must give up the fight if we can't stop them from their outrageous conduct. Anything they do is our fault according to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and other leaders of the democrat party. Our fault, and we must stop "making them" attack us.

No one it seems wants to win this war by going all out. Our nation is in trouble right now. We have four basic sides in the war right now. 1. Anti-war liberal-progressives who support socialism and side with anyone who is an enemy of our nation. 2. Patriotic liberals who want us to win but only if we fight "limited" war and don't do anything that they feel is nasty. 3. Patriotic moderates who will accept the limitations on our troops and fight the best they can to assure we "don't lose" this war. 4. Various flavors of conservatives, who feel we should fight aggressively to win this war and that our troops should not be sacrificed to "police" the middle east in the meantime.

This last comes closest to what Diana West seems to be proposing though she wants even more aggression. I have felt this way for a while. I recognize we must not stop the war. The four groupings of our citizens described above are in a state of flux. With next year being an election year, it will be fascinating to see what the four groups, (along with those like Diana who are outside the mainstream of even the aggressive group) wind up becoming. We may fragment even more. We may see one group come to the front and dominate. Right now it is chaos and our nation is suffering because of it.

What do you think? Should we bring our troops home, stay the course, or expand the war? Do you know why?

Your children's lives are dependent on your answer.