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Much has been said lately in the news about the Presidents decision to send more troops into Afghanistan.  I am not going to comment on that, honestly, who cares what I think anyway?  What I will comment on is whether or not we can win a war.  Any war.

If you look at the recent military engagements around the world, most are completely ineffective.  Indeed, there have been many comparisons to Vietnam, Korea etc.  The fact of the matter is that fighting ideology cannot be done lightly.  Back in WWII there was this concept of “Collateral Damage” that is to say, civilian casualties.  We accepted this.  We didn’t like it, but it was understood as necessary to defeat the enemy.  It used to be widely held that in order to win, you must counter with at least equal force that the enemy attacks with.

We have grown morally over the last 60 years.  We need not look at wartime casualties to see the moralistic chain of events.  First civil rights, followed closely by womens’ rights, being debated currently is homosexual’s rights.  We are morally moving away from the time where we simply accepted casualties in war.

There seems to be an opinion that we should be able to win without losing a single soldier.  I’m not sure how this is possible, but every argument about the war has this undertone, -civilian death is unacceptable, civilian targets cannot be destroyed, etc.

How is a soldier in the field supposed to tell the difference between a civilian or an enemy?  By the time they start shooting it’ll be too late in many cases.  My father reminded me of something from the Vietnam era, when a 12 yr old child holds a rifle pointing at you, what do you do?  Do you kill him?  Did you just kill a soldier or a civilian?  A man or a child?  Are you a murderer?  My father is a hero to me, and he believed in “total war.”  Not only do you destroy the enemy (including collateral damage, after all, that’s the enemies fault), but you destroy their ability to make war.  Sort of like blasting them back to the stone age.

I disagree with this.  Conventionally, we cannot win wars anymore.  I firmly believe this, we have lost our dedication, or our old views on life that allowed us to morally justify the mass destruction necessary to win wars.  We cannot win when the enemy is willing to hide bombs on people and go into towns and detonate them.  Must we match force with force?  I’m not sure.  I am not, however, a person of non-action.

Propaganda, my friends.  Thought is the natural enemy of ideology.  Critical thinking and education destroys ideology faster than a bullet.  Now, I am not supposing that we should drop books on them, nor should we be completely unwilling to fight.  But we need to add a powerful non-violent weapon to our arsenal.  We need to find ways to infiltrate their lifestyle, ways to get the people over there to shed their narrow ideology.  This is not easy (HUGE understatement), however, often I find the right things are never easy.  We need to educate, we need to support the non-violent Muslims.  Just like the Catholic church has changed its stance on many topics with the advent of science (usually after torturing or burning the people who originally spread those “nasty” ideas.  RIP Galileo) there are many progressive Muslims who believe that the violence is wrong.  There are not enough bombs or bullets in the world to defeat religious ideology, but education, and ideas can certainly help.

We need to start finding ways to defeat the ideology from within.  And I know education is a start.

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