From John P. Delaney’s “The Blue Devils in Italy” —
“War is never glamorous. War is a dirty, filthy business. It is life lived under the most miserable conditions. It is death suffered under the most horrible circumstances. It is fought on lonely hillsides, in rubbled towns, in ditches and sewers and cellars, in rain and snow and mud, in pain and fear . . . War is dead men in the hot sun, dying men screaming in pain, wrecked men in hospitals with plates in their skulls, sightless eyes, stumps of legs and arms, men fed through tubes or with their insides held together by wire . . . War is something that should never happen, but does.”
Every President, every Vice President, every Secretary of Defense, every Secretary of State, every National Security Advisor, every Secretary of the Army, Navy and Air Force, every Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be required to memorize and recite this paragraph prior to sending others off to such possible fates.
From Thomas X.Hammes, retired Marine colonel and author of “The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century” —
“Talking about a new strategy (in Iraq) is useless until we get a new team–in the Pentagon, in the Administration. These guys have screwed up everything. They haven’t got the credibility to implement anything.”
Amen.
War is sometimes a necessity–that’s simply the way of the world. Security can be entirely dependent upon it. In this country, with the ultimate nod to enter into battle hanging with the President of the United States and his bully pulpit, the individual holding this position should be human enough and, more importantly, moral enough to undergo an honest and rigorous self inventory before deciding to send people to their ruination. For who and what and why is he sending people off to war?
In recent history, George W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson are the two most flagrant abusers of this power inherent in the presidency. These deviant cowards lacked the simple honesty and integrity to truthfully present to the American public their respective cases for going to war–an honesty and integrity exhibited each and every day by so many in this country. Richard Nixon is a close second for demonstrably putting his political gain above that of human life.
Maybe someday, a majority of the citizens of this country will realize that they don’t need a national Daddy-figure in their lives or that they should be unyielding in pushing and probing anyone seeking such a role. There is a history here and throughout the world, a sordid litany, of rallying around those who appeal to the worst in humanity because that perversely makes us feel better–a conundrum of being, one of many.