John Murtha - Stuck on Stupid

Proving once again you don't have to be born French to be a cheese-eating surrender monkey.

I retired from the Air Force in April, 1991 as a Master Sergeant (E-7). During my 26 years of military service between 1964 and 1991, I served as a Cadet at the Air Force Academy, as enlisted active-duty, and as an enlisted Reservist. My overseas tours include Panama, Vietnam, Germany (three times), and England. I have no medals for valor, and no purple hearts - after all, few Air Force personnel other than flying officers and Security Police are involved in harm's way. I say this to acknowledge that I don't have the "credentials" John Murtha has as a "veteran" or as a "war hero". But I'm NOT stupid.

We are currently engaged in another world war, whether we wish to be or not. We don't have a choice - there are people in this world that want to kill American citizens, destroy American freedoms, and end our way of life. We have two choices: oppose them, or surrender. There is no "third way" - it doesn't exist. Anyone that says otherwise is either a fraud or a fool.

The terror war against Western civilization began in 1972 with the attack on the Israeli athletes in Munich, Germany. Since then, it has claimed several thousands of innocent victims. The list of terror attacks would fill a dozen pages, ranging from the Achille Lauro to the Iran hostage crisis to the Marine Barracks in Lebanon to the Berlin disco bombings to the Lockerbie tragedy to 9/11 to Madrid and London. Each of these attacks was a military strike in the terror war against the West. Finally after 9/11, we began to strike back - almost 30 years into this current war.

The attack against Afghanistan and the Taliban was an effort to criple the basing of terrorist training being conducted by Al-Qaida. It has been a qualified success in that respect, but more still needs to be done. The attack against Iraq was another strike against state-sponsored terrorism, and a defensive measure designed to eliminate the possibility of terrorists acquiring chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons. It, too, has been a qualified success. Each of these, however, is just a battle in a long and exhaustive war that we MUST win if our kind of civilization, government, and personal freedom is to survive.

We have three enemies: the terrorists, those that sponsor them, and those that fail to acknowledge the war and fail to support it. We're fighting a war with one foot in a bucket and one arm tied behind our backs, limited by rules of engagement pressed upon the US military by "public opinion" and a congress hyper-averse to any negative statistics. Our military has suffered exceedingly few casualties in this war - less than the number killed on Omaha Beach alone on June 6, 1944, less than the number of casualties from the air drop during Operation Market Garden, and less than a tenth of the 25,000 casualties from the assault on Tarawa in 1942. More than 40,000 Americans are killed each year on our nation's highways - twenty times the number of Americans killed in combat over a two-and-a-half-year span. Yet many members of Congress want to surrender, to pull our troops from the Middle East before the job's done.

We can fight the terrorists, and are succeeding in killing thousands of them in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We're also hunting down and capturing thousands of others, and helping our allies in this war kill and capture thousands more. We've taken out one state sponsor of terrorism, and eliminated the ability of the terrorists to openly recruit and train in another state. There are still many states that both harbor terrorists and allow them to raise money to equip, arm, train, and employ terrorists against the West. We know who they are, and what they're doing. Once things are stable in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm sure our attention will be redirected to those other states, either one at a time, or against several. That's the next logical step in this war, and one as essential as the first.

Fighting the people who refuse to acknowledge that the entire West is at war, not just the United States, and that all democratic, free nations and their people are in danger, is a more difficult task. There is no coherent strategy to wage this war because too few believe it actually is a war. Even many in the United States who, in the aftermath of 9/11 agreed to go to war, now wish to stop, and "bring the troops home", irregardless of whether the job is done or not. John Murtha is one of those people.

The war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is not going to end with the conquering of territory or the destruction of state sponsorship. It will only end when there are no more fundamentalists, or when those that survive understand they cannot win this war. When people like John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and a host of others in the government of the United States fail to grasp this basic fundamental and act against the necessities that face us as a nation, they are giving aid and comfort to the enemy. When France refuses to crack down on Muslim destruction of personal property, to break heads and hands to secure the rights of the French people to live in peace, they give aid and comfort to the enemy. When elected officials in Great Britain ban the wearing of "George Cross" pins by police officers, bend over backwards to defend "multiculturalism" and fail to insist on some common basic requirements for continued citizenship, they give aid and comfort to the enemy.

John Murtha wants the troops to come home "now". He claims the US military is "broke, worn-out". I live in a military town, with Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force in abundance - active duty, Reserve/Guard, and retired. I hear no such talk from them. Instead, they speak of pride in getting a job done, in what they've accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how they look forward to seeing the job through to the end.

The United States did a "cut and run" once before, in 1975, when the Democratic-controlled legislature refused to come to the aid of South Vietnam, as a treaty between the United States and South Vietnam said we would. Over three million people died because of that, and it set us up for the Iran hostage situation and a dozen other incidents around the world. The old saw says that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, secondly as farce. It's a shame that John Murtha and other Democrats cannot see the falacy of their behavior. There cannot be any unilateral surrender this time. Our current enemy has never stopped at a national border, and will not stop at one this time. There is only one course of action that this nation can follow to secure the peace and prosperity we insist upon, and that is to defeat our current enemies, and deny them the opportunity to rise again.