VETERANS' DAY

Because today is Veterans’ Day, I’d like to honor all of our troops. These are some of the bravest, nicest people in the world and worthy of much more love and respect that they are getting from us right now. The American soldier has always acted with bravery in battle and shown mercy unheard of in victory.

One of the ways I will try to honor our men and women is to remind us all, AGAIN, why we fight. Remember September 11, 2001? Remember the people jumping from one hundred floors up? Remember almost 15% of the people dying in the towers ran INTO the building, trying to help? Remember the hole in the Pentagon? The couple hundred people who died there? The hole in the ground in Pennsylvania, where true heroes saved hundreds of lives by sacrificing their own? And the people on the planes, the forgotten victims of the attacks, remember them? Remember the families holding each other on the airliners, crying as they died? The people holding hands as they jumped?

That’s why we fight.

We fight not JUST to catch the people responsible for this, because we’ve already done that. We fight to remove the WHOLE terrorist threat that makes nightmares like 9/11 happen. We fight to bring the killing to THEIR backyards, not ours, and to do the killing, too boot.

But Iraq? Why Iraq? Sure, they were a terrorist threat, but, as President pointed out, not an IMMINENT threat, so why do Iraq?

Well, for a few reasons. Mostly because Saddam was giving everyone strong indications that he had WMD’s. Maybe he didn’t, but he sure acted like he did. You know, the guy who holds up a liquor store with a toy gun in his pocket? He may not have been able to hurt anyone, but he sure acted like he could and that’s why Elmer behind the counter blew him away.

Secondly, as Jonah Goldberg pointed out, the United States had to kick some butt. Not to feed our own egos, but to deflate everyone else’s egos. Because of our actions over the past twenty years, we gave the impression that we were a bunch of wimps. W-H-Y-M-P-E-S wimps. In Beirut, we fled like a bunch of girls. Refusing to get into Kosovo and then only from the air and high up at that. We fled from Somalia – from a freekin’ Domino’s pizza delivery mission! The World Trade Center has a bomb go off under it – nothing. We did nothing about the USS Cole and the embassy bombings. We looked like easy targets. We needed to remind the world WE are the big dog in the yard and attacking someone would do that. Because Iraq was run by a despotic murderer and had WMD’s (probably), it was an obvious choice for attack. We kick some butt, change world opinion on the manliness of the the United States and make several million Iraqi lives better – a winner all around.

So, that’s why we fight. We need to remind ourselves of this over and over. We fight because we need to. We fight because it’s the RIGHT thing to do.