The war hits a little closer to home

I had planned to write a little rant about the book I picked up yesterday at the airport, or how annoying Dakota Fanning is in War of the Worlds, but all that's kinda taking a back seat right now to a phone call that recently came in to my grandma.

My cousin Kim (cousin-in-law?) is in the army, which is where she met and married my cousin Blake. He joined the army right out of high school, where he proceeded to win Soldier of the Year like 3 years in a row. He's been stationed in Korea on the DMZ, and served in both Afghanistan in Iraq. He's currently in the reserves learning to fly Apache helicopters.

His wife Kim however, has been much less 'involved', I guess you would say. Most of her responsibilities are state-side. She plays clarinet in the Army band (which is nothing to sneeze at musically), and was studying toward a degree in nursing.

I say 'was' because of an assignment she just received. Due to her expertise in a certain field (I'm not entirely sure what, something with fueling), she has been activated from the reserves. She has been assigned some sort of training in North Carolina for the next month, followed by more training in Indiana for the next four months. After which she will be deployed to Iraq for 18 to 20 months.

Her four-year-old daughter will have started school before she sees her again.

In reading Letters to the Editor at work, I get a substantial bit of commentary on the Iraq war. People saying that it's a quagmire, we have no business being there, we're not getting anything accomplished, Bush lied-kids died, we should come home now, blah blah blah.

I also read quite a bit of mail that says things like 'our soldiers are dying for no reason' and '[supporters of the war] would feel very different if it was their own family that was over there getting shot at.'

Aside from the general narrow-mindedness of the first characterizations I mentioned, the last two really get to me. Or should I say, infuriate me.

Let me start from the beginning.

Was Saddam Hussein's Iraq an immediate threat to the United States? No.
Was he producing weapons of mass destruction? Apparently not.
Did he have anything to do with 9-11? Besides rejoicing over it, no.
Did President Bush kinda maybe fudge intelligence so as to get more support for the war? Probably.

But so what? I think that reflects more poorly on the American people -- and the Western world as a whole -- than it does on President Bush.

One of my favorite quotes is from John Stuart Mill, when he said 'War is an ugly thing, indeed, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks nothing is worth a war -- is worse.'

The American people, and the Western world as a whole -- myself included -- are complacent. We have no sense of sacrifice. Gas goes up 10 cents a gallon, and everyone's all pissed off. And as long as we get home in time for American Idol, we could care less what some oppressive dictator does to his people. We don't want to be bothered with unpleasant things. Especially when those unpleasant things might cause an American to lose their life. We certainly don't want to sacrifice our lives for a bunch of sand-niggers that don't know what to do with freedom anyway, right?

On top of that, the American people, and the Western world as a whole, are generally stupid. Not in the academic sense...but moreso in their inability to see the big picture and grasp its importance.

If President Bush had come to the American people and said 'Alright look, here's the deal. Saddam Hussein is a tool. He's not an immediate threat, but there's a chance he could get his hands on some nasty weapons, and give them to people that want to kill us. But more importantly, he, and people like him, breed anti-Americanism. So we need to make an example out of him by kicking his ass, and showing the Iraqi people the beauty of democracy. It won't be easy, but we gotta start somewhere if we're going to change the region from this hotbed of hatred. People there want to kill us, and they're going to continue to want to kill us unless we change the system.' -- no one would've bought it.

Because Saddam Hussein isn't a threat. Osama bin Laden is. That's the real enemy.

Is it really? Osama bin Laden is no more of a threat to us than Hitler was to Americans in 1944. Hitler himself wasn't the one conquering nations and exterminating millions of people. However, he was the one breeding the ideology that brainwashed people into thinking it was the right thing to do.

That's what Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and every other militant Islamist do -- they justify hatred. They justify children being strapped with explosives and put onto busses where they detonate and murder other children. They justify flying planes into buildings and killing thousands on innocent people. They justify stoning rape victims to death and forcing women to be covered head-to-toe in the middle of the desert.

And saying 'Well that's just what some Muslims do...' is the equivalent of saying in 1939 'Well, exterminating Jews is just something some Germans do...'

That's such a cop out. If there's one thing Americans should be the first in line to defend, it's 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness', to be cliche.

These people want to destroy us. And they're going to want to destroy us as long as we continue the status quo.

That's what we're accomplishing in Iraq. We're changing the status quo. We're putting an end to the soft bigotry that Muslims just do crazy things that we don't understand, and instead giving them the right to self-determination. We're giving them freedoms that many have never experienced before.

Is it going to be rough? You're God-damn right. Are innocent people going to lose their lives? Yes, and it's tragic. But we have a responsibility to the next generation to ensure that their lives are better than our own. And we're not going to accomplish that by trying to reach an understanding with people who justify things that are intrinsically wrong.

Am I scared for my cousin? You better believe it. Does my heart bleed for her daughter and her husband? Of course. But I refuse to believe that she's not a part of something incredible. I refuse to believe that when this history is written, that she will have contributed to anything less than a world-changing experience.

I don't feel any less supportive of the war knowing that my own relatives could very well die because of it. In fact, I'm all the more supportive because I want them to accomplish their mission so that their sacrifice and the lives lost are not in vain.

We're changing the world and trying to make it a better place. It saddens me that so many are complacent to the point that they refuse to see the big picture.