December 07, 2006
Pearl Harbor (No, Not The Shitty Movie)
This is probably going to be done to death all over blogs today, but it's Pearl Harbor Day. The 65th anniversary of a woeful act of aggression that led to one of the few truly justified reasons for war the United States has ever had. (Of course, war is never really justified, but that's an entirely different therapy session altogether)
FDR responded with swift immediacy against a known aggressor, and our country was willing to fight against a blatant threat.
Comparing such a scenario to the machinations leading to the Iraq war is depressing. Instead of finishing our supposedly honest and singular mission of capturing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, our utterly misguided and incompetent administration broke off the effort and funneled everything towards an invasion of Iraq.
Unfortunately, something's become severely fucked up with our culture between the 40's and now. It could be that we've gotten stupid. Could be that we've gotten complacent. Could be that a majority of us truly fear our government and thus let them operate unchecked and rarely criticized for their decisions in spite of their actions.
But whatever the case, we failed. We failed to complete our mission and honor the names of those who died on 9/11, despite the administration's constant assertions that everything was all about 9/11, "Never Forget", et al. We failed to stand up and push back when the government wanted to further intrude into the daily lives of citizens and quietly push aside our civil liberties in the name of "National Security.
And worst of all, we failed to uphold our integrity as a nation and question our administration's motives as they embedded our troops further in an unnecessary police movement that, even today, has ultimately led nowhere short of countless deaths of troops, innocents, unfettered sectarian violence, and ultimately civil war.
Between infighting amongst our government and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a rising death toll in Iraq, and Mr. Bush's increasingly tenuous hold on...well...everything, it seems that the past few weeks have been filled with fairly apparent examples that things need to change. In spite of the fairly unspectacular and uninformative report released yesterday by the Iraq Study Group, public sentiment for the war is waning. The claims of justification for the war in Iraq have grown more and more dubious as time has moved on, the constant beat of the war drum by war supporters has become more shrill, and more soldiers are discussing their unwillingness to return to Iraq.
Now all that's left is the debate on how to cut their losses. The Bush administration is deathly afraid of having to eat crow on the war issue, and undoubtedly there will be many families who will be hurt and angry over the sacrifice of their loved ones for a failed war effort. But we can't keep continuing down the road that we are traveling. The war on terror is not a battle that can be successfully fought with troop formations, assault rifles, and tanks. It is a battle against ideas, a war between contradictory worldviews. Our enemies are not unified as were the Japanese and the Germans during WWII, they are numerous and sporadically positioned throughout the globe. And unfortunately, it will take a long time for those in power to come to grips with those concepts.
December 7th, 1941. Let's don't forget this one either.
Posted by Jake at December 7, 2006 06:23 AM
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