Integrity News

Yesterday we marked the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America. On the other side of the world, our troops were under attack in Afghanistan and the deaths of two more soldiers brought the number of Afghanistan fatalities to 113, making 2008 the deadliest year for our troops in Afghanistan.

FoxNews: 2008 Becomes Deadliest Year For American Forces In Afghanistan

Have you ever heard the expression “If you don’t know history, you’re doomed to repeat it”? Well, it seems to me that some of our leaders don’t know their history. If they did, they could have applied a few of those lessons to the current conflicts we are fighting.

Remember how we fought World War II in few years and achieved a hands-down, no-doubt-in-my-mind victory? We destroyed the Italians, then we destroyed the Germans and finally we destroyed the Japanese. Patton rolled across the sands of North Africa and defeated Rommel. Then we invaded Sicily, Sardinia and finally the Italian peninsula. After that we assembled in the British Isles and headed across the Channel to free the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch and then rolled across the Rhine (after Patton pissed in it) to defeat the Germans. Then we fought island to island across the Pacific until we were knocking on Japan’s back door. A couple of nuclear bombs later, the Japanese surrendered.

Our fathers, grandfathers, and even great-grandfathers (and we can’t forget the mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers) fought the second World War SYSTEMATICALLY. They knew that no matter how wealthy America was, how much capital we had to put to into production, and no matter how quickly we wanted to end the fighting, we had to approach the war with a strategy that would allow us to defeat and demoralize our enemies and we could NOT do that all at once. So after examining the situation, they developed a plan that would target a possible weakness in the enemies’ strategy as well as one that would create openings to move the battle forward.

Somehow our current crop of leaders missed this simple logic. They decided to go after Iraq while they were still fighting in Afghanistan, and the commitment to Afghanistan was half-hearted at best. Eventually the bulk of our resources in materiel and personnel were being sent to Iraq. We should have committed ourselves to Afghanistan, securing the borders there and rounding up all of the Taliban and relentlessly hunted down Osama bin Laden, ultimately bringing him to justice and breaking the back of al Quaida.

Once we achieved victory in Afghanistan, we could buid positive relations with the Afghan people and most likely the Afghanis would have pursued their own style of democracy and we would be able to come home. For historical perspective, read about the Berlin Airlift and other activities in Germany, Japan and Italy during the oocupation period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Such actions may have provoked Saddam Hussein and other Middle Eastern leaders to do something stupid and we could have invaded or attacked them with undisputable reasons - instead of the unrealized possibility of weapons of mass destruction.

Military and political strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or mysterious. From my reading and conversations with the people who lived in those days, the simplest and most straight-forward strategies are usually the best anyway.

Yesterday you took a moment to remember the people killed in the attacks of 11 September 2001. Today take a day to remember the 113 American service members who perished in Afghanistan this year. May their lives be remembered.