That’s the question I have in my head.
No, I’m not worried about the elections in November. Although the political battle is important, the real war that needs to be fought and won is the War on Terror.
Democrats were overwhelmingly united with the Republicans on September 12, 2001. The decision was made: This must never happen again. President Bush laid out the plan: We will fight terrorists in their homes until they no longer want to fight us. This was a very obvious plan.
When President Bush appeared to be dragging his feet in invading Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban, harborers of Al Qaeda, the Democrats began to complain. It turned out President Bush wasn’t dragging his feet. He was doing the operation the right way, gathering information on who lived where and how we can take them all by surprise. A few months later, and Afghanistan was in completel control of the US military, with several key Al Qaeda agents captured or killed, and Osama bin Laden’s army in disarray.
The next theatre was Iraq. Saddam Hussein, above all, was a staunch ally of terrorists everywhere, writing $25,000 checks for suicide bombers in Israel and providing training camps and safe haven to Al Qaeda agents fleeing Afghanistan. President Bush made the case for war, and then invaded. Several key Al Qaeda agents since then have been captured or killed, among them Zarqawi. Al Qaeda broadcast the message to Islamofascists everywhere. “If you want to fight the Great Satan, fight him in Iraq, or we will lose the war forever.” Terrorists from all over the Middle East, Europe, and even Asia began to flood into Iraq. Our military was more than willing to oblige them with a one-way ticket to “paradise”.
This kind of war is a war of attrition. Are we losing fewer troops than they are losing fighters? If this rate is sustained, which side will run out of fighters first? The idea was to get every person who ever thought of fighting America to show up in Iraq, fight America, and get killed. If this would create more terrorists, then let them be created,sent to Iraq, and killed. We were the wood-chipper, drawing in loose branches from all over the world to be chipped.
By all accounts, we were chewing the terrorists up left and right. Zarqawi wrote that they were running out of people and the war was going to be lost. Intelligence estimates showed that there were a little more than a hundred terrorists left all over Iraq. And simultaneously, popular opinion in Iraq turned against the terrorists and in heavy support of democratization. Things were honestly looking up.
I don’t know why the Democrats are turned against the war, in particular when we are at the turning point, where it will be plain to everyone including our enemies that the war is going to be won by us. I can’t follow their arguments anymore because they make no sense. Apparently, stripping a few prisoners and taking pictures of them is an “atrocity” on par with the Nazi death camps. Apparently, President Bush planned the whole 9/11 thing because terrorists were too stupid to fly planes into a building. (And yet they can coordinate a global war, use very advanced technology to wire IEDs, and put up a good fight to our best Marines.) Apparently, President Bush, in capturing prisoners of war and sending them to a prison without releasing them (as is common practice in all wars) is a war criminal.
Now the Supreme Court lays down the law that the Geneva Convention applies to non-signatories of the treaty, in a way that even the Geneva Convention doesn’t read. Now we see that the New York Times is engaged in spying activities on behalf of Al Qaeda. Not only did they publish the fact that we were monitoring phone calls, but they published the fact that we were monitoring banking transactions. And it goes even farther than that. Today, they published the locations of Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donal Rumsfeld’s vacation home. They even pointed out to the terrorists that the birdhouse in front of Cheney’s house was actually a security camera.
I am concerned because I know what history says. If we are not united at home, victory abroad is simply impossible. No matter how fiercely we fight, our enemy knows that should the elections turn the other way, we will lose. And so they will not surrender.
We must have a unified country, especially in times of war. Let me turn to the constitution to describe how wars are fought in the US. The president, upon the congress’s declaration of war, is the command in chief of that war. There is no checks and balances over the president during war. (Congress can only declare peace, rescinding the war declaration, to stop the president from fighting.) Even the courts have no jurisdiction over how the president fights our wars. He is, for all intents and purposes, almost an emperor. I say “almost” because there are certain things he can’t do to the American people, according to the constitution. And I say “almost” because congress can depose him with a majority vote. And I say “almost” because the president is limited to fighting that war.
What does it mean to be commander in chief? It means a lot. It means he tells the troops who to fight, kill, and capture. I believe it means the president has the ability to declare one person an enemy and another a friend. In times past, if the president felt that a certain domestic institution or person was helping the enemy, he simply picked them up and held them. If he was kind, he would offer a trial. But he would usually just hold that person and his assets until the end of the war.
President Lincoln regularly siezed the printing presses of newspapers that published things that didn’t help win the Civil War. Why? Because he was commander in chief. Nobody could question his command in fighting the war.
Why doesn’t President Bush do the same? I don’t care who you are, whether you are even in congress. If you are doing and saying things that don’t help us win the war, you don’t deserve to be able to freely move about. Why? Because you are hurting, not helping us. If there is evidence for a trial, let a trial be held. But otherwise, lock them up until the war is won.
