Why We Fight in Iraq

After being exposed to a great deal of anger driven rants about the war in Iraq over the past few days, it was nice to run into a post at Captain's Quarters that contains this little nugget:

"Free societies cannot possibly apply the kinds of security procedures that would make mass transit completely safe, not if they want to remain free societies. We can adopt better technology and hopefully screen airline passengers more effectively, but in truth that approach alone always puts us behind the terrorist curve. They only have to be successful once; we have to be successful every single time, and still protect the civil liberties of the travelers in our nations. The only way to effectively fight terrorism is to fight it somewhere else."

This is why we must take the fight elsewhere, in my opinion, we can't fight here and win without sacrificing our personal freedoms in a dangerous way. Once gone, freedoms are hard to get back. Stop taking the fight to the Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and you will soon see the fight back on our shores. My greatest fear after 9/11 wasn't another attack, it was that the American public would suffer from a short attention span and forget that day as the years went by. This is a generational war, something not seen in modern warfare. Even WWI and WWII were short wars compared to some in the past, so this is new territory for this age. It will be long, agonizing, and will result in one of three outcomes: Islam dominates all of humanity, the fundamentalists are crushed, or democracy and Western ways spread virally through the autocratic Islamic states. Right now we are attempting a noble experiment in trying to bring about the last option. The other two will be horrific and there is a good chance of that happening as isolationism is impossible today, mainly because of modern technology shrinking the planet. I don't know about you, but I'd rather try to bring freedom to those oppressed and misguided people in the Middle East than nuke them.

The rest of Ed Morrisey's post is well worth reading.