Glen Lowance's War Story

It’s not very funny how The United States’ commanding warriors and politicians continue to fail to learn from their mistakes.  We need to bring our kids home.  We are in a quagmire again.  Our president took off after the wrong guy.  The people that hit us continued to survive in their safe havens while we deposed another regime. He led us in with no exit strategy and left office.  Our kids are still there.

Those are my bullet points.  Let’s see if I can support them.

After the attack we promised to avenge the deaths of thousands of Americans by eliminating those who would attack us, those who would train the attackers, and those that would harbor our attackers.  However, we went after a dictator that was not involved it the attack.  He was a ruthless killer that killed his own people, imprisoned his people, invaded other countries, and continued to thumb his nose at the international community.  He broke treaty after treaty and had total disregard for agreements he had made that could have helped bring peace to that region.  He really did need to be eliminated.  So our president and our commanding warriors devised and executed a plan to depose him.  It worked. He’s dead.  Our kids are still there.

Now let’s go get the guys that attacked us.  This enemy is not like most enemies we have faced through our history.  These guys flew airplanes into their targets.  To be willing to die in delivering their weapons is one of their strengths.  They were taught that loosing one’s life for the Supreme Being is noble and in some cases required to continue a spiritual life.  It’s hard to develop a strategy to contest this kind of warrior.  Many of our kids died learning this lesson.  Our kids are still there.

The president left office and a new president took over.  We have spent years and treasure attempting to avenge that initial attack.  Not to mention lives of our kids.  The only thing good I can say about the war is that it stayed on another continent.  Except for the initial attack and a few attempts to hurt us inside our own borders, we were successful at keeping the war over there.  We did finally pay Japan back for their surprise attack on our soil.  Our kids are still there.

We did finally hit the right guys.  Their safe havens turned out to be not so safe after all.  But, there is still no exit strategy.  We are still in Japan.  We are still in Germany.  When will we learn?  Our kids are still there.