Perhaps your memory no longer contains this information, so please let me remind you that the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and either the Capitol or the White House by the third group of Islamists originated in Afghanistan, and before that other attacks on U.S. interests originated in the Sudan by UBL. I agree with you about Germany, especially considering that nation’s cowardly gestures of help in Afghanistan. We should have long ago moved those facilities to an ally that deserves our support and would welcome an important logistical base for our efforts—Poland. This would also demonstrate to the Russians, and the Poles, that we value their independence and will not tolerate further Russian expansionism westward.

As to being in Iraq, that not-quite nation has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and if they were to come under the control of Iran or neighboring Arab states, the world and we along with it, would be bleeding money to our enemies at an even more alarming rate.

As to our being in South Korea and Japan, I think we should pull out the remainder of our ground combat troops, but insofar as North Korea has WMD in the form of chemical and biological weapons mounted on short range missiles as well as artillery, we must maintain the threat of a massive counter-attack that would wipe out the North’s capabilities to do anything more than that first strike.

Most of all, we must prevent bad actors such as Iran and North Korea from completing the development of nuclear warheads mountable on missiles that can be detonated over the U.S., causing a catastrophic EMP attack that would throw us back to the late eighteenth century in our ability to control and move around in our environment. A recent Congressional Commission estimated that as a result of starvation, disease such as cholera epidemics, and a total breakdown in society, ninety percent of the U.S. population would be dead within a year. 

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf

http://bartlett.house.gov/Issues/Issue/?IssueID=2060

DanNV, I think you have it exactly backward. It was only when we recognized that allowing the enemy to control the territory and the population except during our occasional sweeps was a failed strategy that the Surge strategy of bringing the troops into the cities and have them stay in the neighborhoods that the populace began to feel safe and trust the U.S. The same was true of the Anbar Awakening, when the fed-up tribal leaders realized that the U.S. forces were staying instead of mere moving on thru that they switched sides, for they could then see that ours was beginning to be the winning side.

If we leave the Afghans to their own fate, you can be sure that the Taliban/Al Qaeda will be in control in a fortnight, for we have neglected those people for too many years. With such a victory, Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal would become easy pickings for Bin Laden, and where would we be then?

Bob in WV, Vietnam turned out the way it did for a few reasons, none of which had to do with American soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors. We started out with a lousy general, Westmoreland, who like most generals fights the previous war, and an even lousier Secretary of Defense who warned his President that the war, given the American propensity for quick victories and very limited casualties, could not be won the way it was proposed by the Chiefs of Staff, but neither McNamara nor Johnson paid attention to their own warnings and allowed Westmoreland to drag us down into the big muddy.

Despite that, we had a resounding victory as a result of the battles of Hue, essentially destroying the Viet Cong and more than decimating the North Vietnamese Army. However, the “most trusted man in America” decided the war for us, in conjunction with the new left anarcho-pacifists terrified of what might happen if they served their nation in the military (the protests dwindled to almost nothing as soon as Nixon ended the draft—as he predicted). 

General Creighton Abrams succeeded Westmoreland and built a counter-insurgency strategy that, in conjunction with training and supplying the South Korean Army, as the Soviets had been doing for many years in the North, changed the face of the war in our favor. However, by this time sentiment in the U.S. became so negative that I am reminded by the Democratic Congressional leaders just two years ago who were proclaiming the Surge a disaster and the war lost, even before the Surge began.

Unfortunately, the Paris Peace Accords ending the war did not prevent the North, from within a year of their signing to invade the South in great strength, including large armored forces provided by the Soviets. In the U.S. the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, elected in the wake of Watergate, revoked the solemn promise we had made to the South Vietnamese to supply them with the equipment and supplies necessary to keep their defense effective, and refused to vote any money for supplies to the South Vietnamese. As a result their forces were outnumbered and poorly supplied and quickly fell to a fierce North Vietnamese invasion.

These are the lessons we should have learned from Vietnam. Instead, we had generals who vowed never to fight that kind of war again and they disposed of all of the counter-insurgency manuals and institutional knowledge and history contained within their ranks. Among them was Colin Powell, whose doctrine of overwhelming force and an exit strategy presumes, as is almost never the case, that the U.S. can control exactly when, where and under what conditions we will fight a war. All one needs is a cursory glance at history to see that this is fantasy. But it was a fantasy that the quick-and-low-cost solution to a military threat that the short-attention-span American public demands—the fruits of immediate gratification dragged into adulthood and public life—that made this obvious stupidity into strategic doctrine. When, if ever, are we going to grow up?

We have become a largely gutless nation. No…”nation” is too proud a term to use for that great majority of the supposed citizens among us who know nothing of our history. We can credit Howard Zinn and millions of schoolteachers who have brought up our children in the belief that patriotism is equivalent to chauvinism, and that the only ethical way to respond to those who would destroy us is to deny that they are in the process of doing so, and doing so with our help. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

We have the most powerful armed forces ever assembled in world history, and through the decades, from the Battle of Midway to Fallujah, through Bagdad and beyond, we have demonstrated our ability not only to survive but also prevail in the process of preserving and spreading liberty. The men and women who are risking and giving their lives for us are just a tiny portion of the American population, but they know that we can win this war in Iraq and Afghanistan and defeat the jihadis—those fanatical Islamofascists who are dedicated to our conversion to their barbaric beliefs, or our deaths, or our enslavement.

We have liberated 50 million people from murderous, barbaric regimes and helped to establish governments, corrupt though they may be, that are more representative of their inhabitants than almost any in the world outside of the Western Hemisphere and most of Europe. 

Commentators cry out that we need a Churchill. We don't. His task, and that of the British people was a hundred times more difficult than ours, for Hitler was planning an invasion that the British were entirely incapable of defending against. They existed on the knife-edge of defeat and enslavement for two full years until we joined them in World War II. 

But they had backbone then. We—most of us--don't any longer, for now we bring up our children in the belief that dodge ball is a form of aggression, and that a kindergartener pointing his fingers and yelling “bang” at a playmate is exhibiting hostile behavior that must be punished by a suspension from school. 

The defeatists believe, and have been getting our children and grandchildren to believe, that only the UN has the moral responsibility and authority to resolve issues of war and piece. They believe this despite more than sixty years of evidence to the contrary, where the UN repeatedly failed to act to keep the peace, just as it failed to intervene in the genocide that is taking place in Darfur and several years previously took place in Rwanda under the less than watchful eye of the future Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, whose excuse was that he knew the members of the Security Council would do nothing about it so that there was no point in further diminishing the UN’s stature, such as it was, by attempting to get approval for intervention from that august body.

President Clinton, always a man of peace, agreed with Anan’s position and the wholesale slaughter and vivisectional dismemberment by machete proceeded apace.

By accepting unwarranted and deceitful claims about the capability and authority of the UN the defeatists and peace-at-any-price internationalists morally disarm us.

In the past we have defeated enemies ten thousand times stronger than the jihadis. What devastation upon our cities, our economy and our people will it take for us to realize our strength and use it? Or is there anything that can shake us from our cravenness?

The Bush administration started the war on terrorism well but then slid back into business-as-usual in both foreign relations and military effectiveness. How many years has it been since President Bush reassured the world that Iran would not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons? He put North Korea on the list of terrorist states, and then allowed that military kleptocracy to break every agreement it made with us and our allies, meanwhile continuing its own development of missiles and nuclear weapons. He went so far as to cave in to their demands that we take them off the list of terrorist states not only before they had demonstrated that in fact they were moving in that direction, but in fact started to rebuild a nuclear facility that they had agreed to tear down. 

Much of the difficulty in the pacification of Iraq and the spread of democracy generally in the Middle East is because of the on-going feminization of our society. This attitude implicitly equates 4,000 dead in Iraq with 48,000 dead in the Korean War, 58,000 dead in Vietnam and 400,000 dead in WWII. As incalculable a value as is a single human life, the somber arithmetic of death still applies, and we ignore it at our peril. 

Hitler miscalculated when he declared war on us in December 1941; he was sure we were too effete a nation to fight a then invincible Wehrmacht. But he did not see the toughness of American soldiers and Marines at the end of World War I, and the willingness of those troops, their leaders and the American people to accept horrendous losses. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive alone, which brought the war to an end cost us 26,277 killed and 95,786 wounded. On Okinawa in the Spring of 1945 the Army, Navy and Marines suffered more than 50,000 casualties, with over 12,000 killed in action.

Usama Bin Ladin, reviewing our withdrawal from Lebanon after the Hizbollah attack on the Marine barracks that killed 243, our withdrawal from Somalia after the extraordinary feat of arms displayed by our soldiers in the Black Hawk Down battle, our focus on saving lives rather than creating martyrs, concluded that we would not have the stomach for a protracted war that would yield significant casualties.

In 2004 and 2006 he stupidly had his surrogates support the candidates of the Democratic Party, for he knew that that party’s life-style choices favored diplomacy above all, and a willingness to resort to war only in circumstances so extraordinary as to almost never occur. Not long after, the Majority Leader of the United States Senate proclaimed that “the war in Iraq is lost.” and the Speaker of the House of Representatives wished to bring to a vote an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, thus confirming Al Qaeda’s prediction and putting at peril the morale of our troops who were in the midst of terrible battles and attacks.

If we wish to defend ourselves against enemies who are determined to do 9/11 again, but on an unimaginable scale, we must be prepared to take losses that may eventually rival those of past wars. Two percent of the American population died in the Civil War. That would mean, in today’s population 6,000,000 killed, and many, many more millions wounded and maimed. They did it to save the Union and to end slavery. I don’t believe that we are willing to pay the necessary price to preserve the values of our society.

“THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” Thomas Paine, The Crisis   1776

”Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural address January 20, 1961

As a nation we forgot those words a mere eighteen years after they inspired us all.

Very recently the world has changed in a way so fundamental that we have yet to recognize it. 

At this instant just a few men, or even a single individual can now maim, sicken and destroy hundreds of thousands or even millions of people with relatively little effort, and very quickly. This has never before been true in history! 

Recently some nitwit scientists distributed to laboratories all over the world the genome information for the 1918 flu that killed between 50 and 100 million people, and the virus can now be cultivated and turned into a multi-million-death weapon against us. We have no defense against this.

Or, a dozen determined suicidal Islamists can saunter over our open borders, having been freshly infected with any of a variety of deadly contagious diseases, and disperse themselves to every major metropolitan center, efficiently infecting thousands of first contacts in a matter of days. With such rapid and stupefying death rates we can expect that terrible cry from the bubonic plague to be heard once again: “Bring out your dead.” And watch the bodies of our countrymen and our loved ones sucked into the bowels of garbage trucks and taken to a place to be burned.

Nuclear weapons can be sent to our ports in some of the thousands of ship containers that arrive every week. Which targets would be their favorites—New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, Houston—or all of the above?

Worse yet, surrogates of Iran such as Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, or customers of North Korea can mount a relatively crude nuclear warhead on a missile, drag it to our seacoast on a barge or in a small freighter, and detonate it above the atmosphere over the U.S. The electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear detonations would wipe out almost all communication--and anything dependent upon electronics. No water, power, heat, telephone, or plane, train or automotive transportation. Estimates are that the chaos produced would bring about the deaths of NINETY PERCENT of the population within a year's time.

George Bush, despite his sometimes halting, sometimes-two-steps-back-for-every-step-forward actions, was right in pressing for democracy everywhere. We must dredge and drain every swamp, including those of Russia and China, in order to gain even a semblance of security against the great variety of WMD available, not only to any tinpot dictator, but even to a single semi-crazed fanatic who wants to practice nihilism on the grandest of scales. 

This may seem to be the wildest form of idealism in foreign policy as well as an almost impossible task that makes Woodrow Wilson look like a practitioner of Realpolitik, but we have no other alternative to safeguard ourselves and the world from multiple mini-Armageddons in the not-so-distant future.

"A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does, will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."     --Jean Francois Revel