NEW PERSPECTIVES COLUMN: The righteous U.S. against Them
By Adam Holmberg
A couple days after Sept. 11, President Bush stood before the heroes sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center in hopes of finding survivors and told them, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."
Every day the bombs fall in Afghanistan and more Anthrax is discovered in America. We kill them, and they kill us. The fourth victim of Anthrax died the day I’m writing this column. Last month I predicted more American civilians would be dead by the time that column was printed. While the casualties were thankfully not as widespread as I was predicting, innocent Americans have died. We kill them, and they kill us. Such is the vicious cycle of war.
The people who knocked those buildings down are hearing us. We have destroyed their airports, their airplanes, their bunkers, their bases. All they have left are caves, and we’re working on ways to take care of those too. We’re hitting them hard, and they’ve resorted to desperate measures such as poisoning our food shipments for their civilians and attempting to blow up mosques and blame it on "The Great Satan" as we were known during the ‘80s. They’re even, on some fronts, hiding behind those civilians as we continue to exact justice.
That’s what we’re doing – we’re exacting justice and in the process defending our nation from the evildoers who threaten our freedom and way of life. We are teaching the Taliban, al Qaeda, and by extension the world the price you pay when you attack America. We’re taking care of business that Mr. William Jefferson Clinton didn’t have the stones to see through.
I’ll tell you right out that President Bush’s environmental policy leaves much to be desired, he is sleeping in a very deep waterbed with the oil industry, and he’s definitely not the smartest man on the planet. George W. Bush is not perfect. But he is the strongest president we’ve had since John F. Kennedy, and what he lacks in intelligence he makes up for in honor and courage and dedication. Ask me why I’m not afraid, and I will point to him standing on the pitcher’s mound of Yankee Stadium in game two of the World Series as the United States braced for a credible imminent threat.
America isn’t perfect either. I’ll tell you that we’ve managed to dumb down everything in the past twenty years from journalism to literature to movies to education. I’ll tell you that we’ve been inexcusably sloppy in every military engagement we’ve been in since Vietnam, and we’re paying for it. I’ll tell you that we’ve lost the war on drugs simply because we’re too busy getting high or rich off the product to try and save a few lives.
And, I’ll tell you that we’ve supported criminals and murderers in the name of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. And I’ll tell you that America is the greatest country on the planet Earth. Want to know why? Simple. I write what I just wrote and it can be printed, and I am protected by the Constitution of the United States of America.
Last month I wrote that the hand of American justice has grasped Afghanistan in its iron grip. That’s still true. This is not the time for negotiation or bargaining. It is a time for action.
I wish we had no need for war – no need to send the young to die to preserve freedom. I wish I could be naïve enough or idealistic enough to pray for peace and believe that we could talk to these people and make it all go away. Unfortunately, any naïveté and idealism I had left died with those people Sept. 11.
This is a simple war – we kill them or they kill us. We bomb them, or they turn more planes into bombs. Those civilians that die when we miss and hit a hospital are not innocent, if that word has any meaning anymore. We don’t deliberately hit civilians, but they die because that is war, and no amount of wishing will make it otherwise. They hate us, and we cannot educate them to why they’re wrong. We’re infidels, they’re evildoers.
Maybe they have good reasons to hate us; I wrote that we’re not perfect, and God and Allah both know America has been downright sloppy when dealing with the Middle East and Eastern Asia. But does that give them the right to turn our planes into bombs aimed at our tallest towers? The people of Afghanistan don’t die because they chose Islam. They die because they chose hate.
The people who knocked down those Twin Towers are hearing us. They hear our cry for justice, and it is a loud and terrible thing. But it consumes evil and hate, and it is righteous.