One of the most preposterous arguments against the war in Iraq that I have heard is that the brave men and women who have volunteered to serve in harms way to protect us here at home do so only because they have no other options or because they just wanted to get help with their college education. TIME magazine’s May 30th cover story was on West Point’s class of 9/11. The way the article was written almost made you feel sorry for these students who enrolled in a peace time military school to get a top notch education but now must face a global war on terrorism when they graduate. Students who attend the academy do so because they want to serve and protect their country. The purpose of the academies is to educate and teach the military’s future officers to carry out war against any threat that faces our country. To say they attend purely for an education or for athletics is to cheapen their service, sacrifice, and the honor they rightly deserve. I actually heard someone say that “those young boys did not sign up for Bush’s war, they signed up to get a college education.” The purpose of the military is for carrying out war. The military is not a social program they can do experiments with. It really bothers me the way we take our men and women in uniform for granted. There will never be a point when we have done too much for them. One of the big contrasting differences between the left and the right is that they see the purpose of the military completely different. Under the Clinton administration the military was downsized and turned into a police force, all the while we were being attacked by terrorists.
Liberals and conservatives view the purpose of the military differently because the left does not really believe in evil. This postmodern way of thinking that there is no real absolute truth, that utopia is possible on earth, is their down fall, as it was with Chamberlain and the rest of the appeasers of Europe before WWII.
Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy philosophy of “speak softly and carry a big stick” is as true today as it was then. You win the peace through strength, not weakness. The left’s inability (and our media’s) to recognize evil was evident the week one of our fellow Americans was brutally beheaded and broadcast across the world. Instead of covering this story, most TV sets in American homes that week showed pictures of Abu Grab Prison, where a handful of misguided soldiers made some prisoners get naked in front of each other. If I hear another person say that our fellow Americans in harms way only joined the military to get a education one more time, I am going to slap them.