“America Does Not Do Its Share!”

“America…is consistently chastised within the economic development community of experts for not providing foreign aid to poor countries at a level commensurate with its wealth.  We are told, ‘The whole developed world is more generous than the United States.  America does not do its share!’  Somehow, the fact that America performs virtually all the Core’s combat interventions in the Gap counts far less than other countries simply sending money, or–better yet–peacekeepers after the fact.” — Thomas Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map, p.359.

Getting the Memory Right

Today is Memorial Day. It is a day dedicated to the memory of American servicemen and women who have given their lives in the advancement of liberty. But of course, there are many who do not believe this to be the overarching purpose of the American military. One such person made this comment in the Singaporean newspaper today:

“The UN has made some headway in getting the junta [of Myanmar] to accept foreign aid. The US and other forces in the vicinity can deliver this aid under the auspices of the UN. This would greatly facilitate their strong desire to participate fruitfully in this calamity. This would be an excellent opportunity for the US to put its immense power to good use, and save lives instead of inflicting misery.”

I agree with the suggestion that the US should put its power to good use. However, what I resent is the last clause of this paragraph. The US inflicting misery? Indirectly perhaps. War is always a horrible thing. Many have died in Iraq and Afghanistan because of stray bullets and bombs. But I cannot help but suspect that what the author of this article is insinuating is that the US inflicts misery on purpose, as a policy. His words seem to be of a piece with those who want to portray the US serviceman and servicewoman as baby-killers–cold-blooded, unintelligent hicks who slaughter innocent people indiscriminately. I thoroughly resent this view not only because it isn’t true, but because it dishonors the soldiers and makes their job even harder. Why is it so hard to see the vast difference between the American soldier and the Taliban/Al Qaeda thug? One’s cause is just (the advancement of freedom and conditions friendly to human rights). The other’s cause is unjust (the protection and advancement of a decrepit perverse religious vision). One strives to kill specifically (only terrorists), the other kills indiscriminately (American soldiers, American civilians, pro-American Iraqis, etc.). If people cannot even see the moral difference between these two kinds of fighters, I shudder to think what else they cannot see. May we not allow the memories of liberty’s guardians to be tarnished by the pseudo-intellectuals of this age–men with empty chests and colorless minds who wax eloquent with profound non-truisms. Such men seem to have no problem calling hell and damnation on the American soldier and that consummate embodiment of American stupidity, George W. Bush. But when it comes to calling radical Muslims to account and to exercise responsibility for their social-economic plights, why, “surely they have a right to practice their religion” and “who are we to tell them what’s good or bad?”

So, may moral buffoons not have the last word on Memorial Day. Pray for the American soldier. Ask that the Lord God would grant him always to do the right thing and pursue justice for the oppressed. Ask the Lord God to not only protect him and bring him home safely but make him victorious in his struggles against those who seek to perpetuate tyranny. Without the US serviceman, the world will be a more dangerous place.

Petraeus and Crocker Reports

Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker gave their reports yesterday (April 8, Tuesday) to the senate committees.  You may read the reports through the links below:
1.  Gen. Petraeus’ Testimony (pdf)
2.  Ambassador Crocker’s testimony to the Armed Services Committee (pdf)
3.  Ambassador Crocker’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (pdf)
4.  Testimony handout packet (with charts and graphs) (pdf)

Future Military Commitments

“Preemptive or not, future military commitments will be diverse.  Counterterror operations will include tactical raids of strategic consequence, some involving special operations forces, others executed by standoff weaponry…and those greatest in scale deploying multiple services and putting boots on the ground long enough to purge a targeted area.  The art of the raid will be an essential study for the rising generation of soldiers.  Especially where we have no abiding interests, or where local hostility is especially pronounced, we will need to strike hard and then leave before becoming entangled: global reach, local strikes, strategic results.” – Ralph Peters, New Glory, p.82. 

The Price Bush Paid

“When Bush charged Saddam Hussein with refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, he was…relying in good faith on what the CIA–and every other intelligence agency in the world–assured him was the case.  He was also acting in good faith when he warned that Saddam might put such weapons into the hands of terrorists and when he then invoked this danger in an advance justification of the new policy of preemption…But there would be a heavy price to pay for placing so much stress on the issue of WMD.  Not only did the failure to find them retrospectively injure the case for invading Iraq; perhaps even more injurious was that the emphasis on WMD obscured the long-range strategic rationale for the invasion.  For while the immediate objective was indeed to disarm Saddam Hussein, the larger one was to press on with ‘draining the swamps’–whether created by religious despots, as in Afghanistan, or by secular tyrants, as in Iraq–that were in Bush’s view the breeding grounds of terrorism in the greater Middle East.  Nor could those swamps be drained only by strong-arming the regimes under which they had been festering.  It was also necessary in this view to replace these regimes with elected governments that would work to fulfill the hopes of ‘the peoples of the Islamic nations [who] want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation.” – Norman Podhoretz, World War IV, p. 134-135.