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Military Families & Couples |
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COMMENTARY |
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While America Sleeps |
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By David H. Hackworth
Wake up,
America – we’re at war! And we’re not talking about a
limited, one-time shootout confined to Afghanistan and
Iraq, where we’ll hopefully wear down the guerrilla
enemy and our troops will come marching home.
We’re engaged in a global war, a long-term conflict
against a stateless Islamic movement that’s been
scoring hits against the USA in the name of Allah
since the 1983 truck-bomb murder of 241 of our Marines
and sailors in Beirut, Lebanonª.
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Snipers from 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment,
based out of Camp Lejeune, N.C., scan the rooftops of
the buildings in front of them in Fallujah recenty.
The Marines force led the first patrol inside the city
since the Fallujah Brigade took over in May. (USMC
photo by Cpl. Shawn C. Rhodes) |
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The alarm sounded decades ago – not on 9/11, as so many
uninformed Americans hold. We just slept through it, as well
as through subsequent assaults – Beirut to Pan Am 103 to World
Trade Center I to the USS
Cole – that have become increasingly violent and
more frequent through the years.
This is already America’s longest war, and
certainly the Judeo-Christian world’s most crucial conflict
since World War II – when Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini also were
determined to erase every value, every concept, every belief
we hold dear. And there’s no doubt in my military mind that
America and our allies will still be fighting this ruthless,
relentless, radical terrorist enemy on the hundredth
anniversary of the end of World War I, the 20th-century
conflict that was supposed to end all wars.
That’s because international Islamic religious
fanatics have the same goal as the Axis fascists – the
destruction of our way of life. Their plan is to return the
entire world – not just the Middle East – to the days of the
caliphate and either convert all of us so-called infidels into
born-again Islamic believers or kill us.
Our fumbling government’s response since Beirut
– during both Republican and Democratic administrations – has
been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat,
apparently hoping it would go away. Or occasionally our
leaders would retaliate against a terrorist attack with a few
missiles or an air-strike accompanied by the standard barrage
of toothless threats.
Meanwhile, the international terrorist movement
has only been getting stronger, acquiring catastrophic weapons
and developing bolder tactics while its dedicated operators
have become more cunning and more organized, expanding and
setting up in virtually every nation in the world.
True, Bush & Company responded smartly to 9/11
by jump-starting the Department of Homeland Security,
thundering into Afghanistan, blowing the Taliban out of
business and sending al Qaeda scurrying to the hills. But then
came the invasion of Iraq – our country’s biggest military
miscalculation to date – where we virtually ignored the main
military objective of destroying al-Qaeda, as well as the
important socio-economic opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan
into the same sort of shining example for the Muslim world
that West Germany once was for the Soviet Bloc states.
Fortunately, it’s still not too late to develop
a comprehensive global strategy to eliminate our real enemy.
This new direction might not be great for the warmongers,
neoconservatives and war profiteers, but it would go a long
way toward giving all of our grandkids a future the way our
World War II victory gave one to my generation and my kids.
Of course, it’s imperative that we stabilize
Iraq and quickly reduce our armed role there. But we
simultaneously need to reorganize our military forces to fight
the war at hand, shed both the Cold War thinking and the
structure of our active, Reserve and National Guard components
– and understand who our primary enemy is and the true nature
of the war in which we're engaged.
“Never underestimate the enemy,” writes
former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke in his
brilliant book Against All
Enemies. “Our current enemy is in for the long
haul. They are smart and patient. Defeating them will take
creativity and imagination, as well as energy. It will be the
struggle of the friends of freedom and civil liberties around
the world.”
We citizens must drop the denial, apathy and
foggy thinking that's gotten us into this mess, take charge of
our government – which has irresponsibly ignored this threat
to our national security for 21 years – and finally answer the
wake-up call.
And we’d better get cracking immediately –
before the next 9/11 blisters in and takes an even bloodier
toll.
–Eilhys
England contributed to this column.
Our own Laura Dawn Lewis has
a differing view of the current war and her latest commentary
can be read
here
a:
Victor Ostrovsky,
former Mossad Agent (Israeli version of the CIA) covers this
incident in detail in his book
by Way of Deception, disclosing how the Mossad
knew about this attack ahead of time with very detailed
information and chose to offer only vague warnings to the US
Intelligence community, sacrificing the 241 US soldiers.
This terrorist attack could have been fully prevented
according to the Mossad files; for self-serving reasons, which
Ostrovsky details, Israel did not feel the need to fully brief
their favorite ally (US) with the full information that could
have prevented it. Based upon the information disclosed in the
book, had our 'friend' been a friend, not one of the American
soldiers needed or should have died.
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By permission to Couples
Company
Copyright © 2004, David H. Hackworth |
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David Hackworth
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Books by David Hackworth
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Steel My Soldiers' Hearts:
The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation
of the U.S. Army, 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, Vietnam
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The Price
of Honor
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Hazardous Duty:
One of America's Most Decorated Soldiers Reports from the Front
With the Truth About the U.S. Military Today |
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