wco81 wrote:Not to minimize the warrior ethos but not every soldier enlists to protect our collective freedoms. They do so because it provides them certain vocational and educational opportunities. There are a lot of reservists who will probably return to nonexistent jobs and disrupted family lives. I doubt they signed up for any of those things.
I fully support the decision to attack Afghanistan (but not necessarily the execution, especially at Tora Bora where OBL and hundreds of Al Qaeda soldiers were allowed to escape because we chose to rely on Northern Alliance ground troops).
However, the truth is, as horrific and traumatic as 9/11 was, this country has had it easy as far as strife and threat to freedom goes. We haven't had war on the main land anywhere near the level witnessed by other countries.
Our freedoms have been at least as much defended by jurists, journalists and others expressing free speech, exposing abuses of power.
wco- That's a nice post, and I essentially agree with it. If we were talking theory, I would argue that at this point and time in history no soldier is defending American freedom, as there simply is no opponent capable of fundamentally altering the way in which life or government on this continent is conducted. The language of the warrior ethos hasn't changed from the time of Homer, when the end result of a war was the extermination of a city, the slaughter of all the men and the wholesale enslavement of the women. Contemporary soldiers fight to defend the national interests of their countries. Those interests may be worthy, such as punishing a group of criminals who killed 3,000 innocents, or they may be unworthy, such as providing a venue for corporations to make as much money ripping off the government as possible (in fact, the whole question of whether the new Cardinal stadium is named after Tillman or not is an amazingly spot on metaphor for the worth that soldiers' contributions are currently given- in Phoenix, just as in Iraq, the sacrifice will be noted with lovely language and then everyone will get on to the business of making some money). But one way or the other, they are not interests that threaten the existence of the nation-state.
As for the specifics of the Iraq/Afghanistan debate, I wouldn't say that Afghanistan is the right war. It's the right target fought in the wrong manner. If Afghanistan had been fought in the correct manner, which is to say with overwhelming force at the outset (a greater occupying force than we currently have in Iraq) and the rebuilding attempted on a massive, mulitlateral scale, that would be the right war. And, I dare say, there would have been hundreds of fewer military casualties and tens of thousands fewer civilian casualties. But that's not what happened.
