War is a horrible thing. It is mankind at its worst. I can sympathize with the radical left and their intolerance for such depravity. Mankind at its best rejects such things outright. Gandhi was an embodiment of such human bravery, the way he faced down the British with a veritable mob of non-violent protesters. On that day, the British showed the ugly side of their humanity (the one we all possess) as they beat them back.

The face of the war in Iraq is certainly uglier.

When I was participating in the first Persian Gulf War, my contribution was limited to taking lube oil readings on the ship's main engine, making coffee, rousing the watch, monitoring the bilge and measuring potable water levels with a brass plumb bob. No glorious warrior, I.

We were isolated, doing our part of the big job as well as we could. Still, the news would eventually catch up to us. The marines would leave the ship, but not all of them would come back. People would share photos, stories... especially in the berthing, over late night poker games hidden away in parts of the ship where officers rarely tread, and in bars out in town.

I remember one Marine who rode in one of the choppers that flew over Sadaam's palaces and took photos of him strafing the building, putting ugly marks in the side of it. Those photos tucked away in his leather vest was his passport to an evening of drinking and revelry; armed with those, there wasn't a Kurd in Turkiye who would let him buy his own.

Eventually we would be able to watch the news. We saw the images on CNN where we bombed Sadaam's army as they traveled along that great road of Death. You could easily imagine the black, smoking line of ruined vehicles and the smell of charred flesh as it mingled in the dust that seemed to come from everywhere and go nowhere. No, I was never privy to such sights first hand, but we traveled the adjacent regions and it was not hard to picture.

I remember hearing that using napalm was the best and only real way to kill the Iraqi troops in their sand bunkers, but I only heard about that once on the news and it was followed by a quick comment from the Department of Defense that we had only done that a few times, and that we would discontinue immediately.

I kind of doubt that we did. After all, it was efficient. I learned the same lessons studying the martial arts as I did in the military: combat is horrible, end it as fast as you can. In a fight, that might mean kicking someone in the groin and sweeping them to the ground. In Iraq, perhaps it meant dropping napalm on bunkers.

I can't really say that I felt bad about the war. Not then, or even now. It was the right thing to do, and we didn't waste any time getting the job done. An evil bastard (that we helped in the past so we could contain Iran) decided that he wanted his neighbor's house, so he took it. The world itself as a community can not condone that and an immediate response is required.

What I do feel bad about is the 12 years of sanctions that we forced the Iraqi people to suffer through.

There is no shortage of horrible pictures on the Internet as a result of us waiting for the problem to fix itself.

It won't, you know.

It won't fix itself.

We learned the hard way, after years of merciful "containment" policies... the problem that we tried to keep our moral heads above reached out and hit us.

Hard.

I have to hand it to President Bush: when the country was screaming for blood, we did nothing for months. I was waiting for an indiscriminate blood bath; such was the rage of our nation.

Eventually, we acted, and the Taliban fell... thus ended the reign of a state government which supported terror.

For all the headlines that I have read in the mass media that decry the failure to link Iraq to Al Queda, I have seen enough to have been convinced that Iraq was an attractive breeding ground that had already been making overtures for years. The 9/11 report said on one hand that there was no direct evidence, and then they list pages and pages of evidence that seems pretty direct to me. Tired of the drubbing that the pundits have been giving President Bush, Wendy spent the better part of the day relentlessly searching on the internet for Weapons of Mass Destruction, links to Al Queda, etc. It did not take her long to find quite a list of things that the media brushes over: nerve gas, sample strains of weapons-grade biochemical agents, missiles that were in violation of the UN mandate, unmanned drones... She also came face to face with the horrors of war.

War is a horrible thing. You can't say it enough times.

But when such cancerous evil takes root, it must be excised or it will infect us all. People do not look back on World War II and give it the same kind of drubbing. It was some kind of noble conflict. People don't remember things like what we did to Dresden; for the most part we just remember how horrible the enemy was and how glad we are that they are gone.

How long did it take Germany to recover?

How long Japan?

Where are these countries now?

Do you honestly think that these futures are not possible for Iraq and Afghanistan?

Just yesterday I read that despite all the horrible news still coming out of Afghanistan, like the departure of Doctors Without Borders and the people who were shot because they carried voters registration cards... 90% of the people have registered to vote.

That country is still so fractured that you couldn't get 90% of them to agree on the fact that the sky is blue, or that peanut butter is king.

Okay, so I slipped that one in there.

The bottom line is that virtually the entire country said quite clearly "We want this freedom!"

It takes time, people. Time... and unfortunately, blood.

Senator Zell Miller (D) put it quite well in his book, A National Party No More:

We've freed a nation from a cruel and oppressive dictator. A free Iraq, most everyone agrees, can transform the Middle East. Isn't that what presidents have wanted to do for many years? Give it time. Of course it's going to be difficult. Of course it's going to be costly. Regrettably, more of our American sons and daughters will die. There will be times when it looks like it's not worth it. But in the long stretch of history, it will be worth it.

Senator John McCain and other well-informed leaders have called Iraq "the central battle on the war on terror." I believe that. Condoleezza Rice spoke plainly and truthfully when she called it a "generational commitment." For someone like me with grandchildren and great-grandchildren, whom I love more than life itself, that is a hard and sobering thought. But with all I've learned from study, age, and experience, I believe, with every fiber of my body, that there comes a time when a civilization has to choose between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny. One of the greatest lessons history has taught us over and over again is that the choice we make between good and evil will reverberate for generations to come. It could make the world a safer place for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It is worth the risk.

More blood will be spilt. Our blood. Theirs. The blood of innocents. The blood of the devout. The blood of the ignorant.

I can't get the bad taste out of my mouth, I'll confess. But I still can't shake the feeling that humanity is still stumbling awkwardly in the right direction.

Stay the course.

Posted by Michael at August 3, 2004 10:37 PM

Posted by: JP Balzen at August 3, 2004 11:17 PM

Posted by: Michael Cummins at August 3, 2004 11:29 PM