Our Declaration of Independence asserts,

'We hold these truths to be self—evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.' 

Thomas Jefferson captured the essence of our culture; that transcendental Divine spark and compass heading our Founding Fathers entrusted us.

For two centuries it inflamed our hearts, inspired our intellects, and persuaded our politics. It called us to abolish slavery. So, we fought a Civil War, costing us 620,000 casualties. After an indecent interval, it again inspired us to extend full operative civil rights to the descendants of those slaves. It caressed us to acknowledge that all men also included all women, so we made room, with only a loss of male arrogance. It hurled us into wars with tyrants, to replace the ghastly failures of atheistic socialism, communism, and fascism with representative democracies (warts included), noting we bled approximately 418,000 casualties in WWII.  We placed Japan under martial law, wrote their constitution, enforced it, destroyed the cult of the Emperor (their motivating religion), and all while not learning Japanese!  How is jihadist Iraq any different?

It is also fashionable to think that because nations fight wars, the abolition of nations will end wars. Such is a fool's errand, for it demands that all cultures be legitimate.  It ignores some world views, Islam specifically, are incompatible with modern civilization's freedom of conscious, inquiry, and political association. Lex Rex cannot share the throne with Lex Mohammad; one must submit to the other. Today's acknowledged threat is not a nation anyway, but the violent leading edge of a Religion. The way to blunt it is destroy its traction, one nation at a time.

Others, mostly atheistic, secular socialists, declare that religion — a belief in God is the problem. This is the singing of simpletons!  Our Founding Fathers, who designed the most brilliant, tyranny—preventing government in human history, began with the assumption of God—given rights.  God is not the problem; what megalomaniacs say God demands is what matters.  The objective is to teach and enforce a civilized Religion.  For example, self—restrained Christians, who do not steal, or murder, or covet, are far less threatening to civil order than unrestrained atheist materialists whose god, by deduction, is their insatiable appetites. Millions of collectivized and starved Russian peasants rest that case!

So, while we grieve over just one lost soldier, and all abhor war (of course!), the few thousand battle deaths in Iraq in three years are nothing compared to our ancestors' sacrifices.

Consider what is at stake: The true beneficiaries of our Founding Fathers' love of freedom have been the descendants of the enemies we defeated. Imperial Japan and the  Nazis fought us to the death, to the point of suicide, not unlike jihadist Moslems.  But today's German and Japanese citizens bask in the freedom we died to give them. Sadly, what we were willing to do for the Japanese and Germans, we failed to give Vietnamese and Cambodians, cowardly quitting the battlefield and handing them over to slaughter.

The 1960's generation, the principals of the newly elected Democratic congress, do not share our Founding Fathers first love enough to fight for other nations to experience it, notwithstanding it is the most effective way to secure our safety. If current trends continue, Iraq will be lost to the rat hole of Islamic fascism for generations, and our children will pay the price on future battlefields here. The secular, socialist left and the Democratic Party that gives them voice, now have the means to sate their appetite for pork and power and destroy that uniquely American vision of freedom and democracy for other nations. The Iraq fight is a noble fight. Would that they love the Iraqi children more than they hate President Bush.

Joseph Rosenberger  11 14 06