“Do you want your child to die fighting in Iraq?”
This type of question is one of the subtle, insidious ways by which pacifists try to undercut the war against Islamic terrorists. To understand how this is done, we must first take an honest look at our enemies.
Islamic fundamentalists have been threatening death on, terrorizing, and murdering Americans for over 20 years. Islamic radicals took 52 Americans hostages at the US embassy in Iran in 1979, Libyan terrorists in 1988 exploded a Pan Am flight over Scotland that killed 189 American passengers, an Iraqi intelligence officer conspired in the bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six in 1993, and Osama bin Laden’s minions in 1998 blew up US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that murdered more than a dozen Americans. These are some of the many terrorist acts by radical Muslims against Americans that have culminated — so far — in the murder of over 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2002.
While Iran is the root of this Islamic terrorism — based on a hatred of American values such as freedom and the pursuit of happiness — Iraq is also among the top terrorist-backing states that must be destroyed. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein shares the same virulent anti-Americanism and is committed to same use of force as the Islamic barbarians who destroyed the World Trade Center.
In 1988, Hussein used poisonous gas and nerve agents against his own citizens, the Kurds, which counts “as one of the largest chemical attacks ever made against a civilian population,” according to The Intellectual Activist. Today, he still possesses biological and chemical weapons that he can unleash on Americans, and he pursues the capabilities to launch nuclear weapons.
If a dictator murders his own citizens with weapons of mass destruction, he would certainly do the same against people he despises above all others (and possibly already has with the five Americans murdered last year by anthrax-tainted letters). Thus, there should be no doubt in any reasoning person’s mind that, given the chance, he would kill Americans enmasse.
Now, I would support my child’s decision to voluntarily fight against such regimes relentlessly out to destroy us, provided he did so on these grounds: first, in self-defense to preserve his life and freedom, and, second, to preserve those values for the people he values most, his parents and his fellow Americans.
Unlike past US military missions, such as in Somalia and Bosnia, where no self-interested or self-defensive purposes existed for America, US military action against anti-American Islamic terrorists is absolutely an act of national self-interest and self-defense.
Yet the question that began this editorial manipulatively implies that if “your child” fights and dies in Iraq it would be for no good reason, and that his only alternative is to stay home while they, the appeasing pacifists, “negotiate” a “peace process” with terrorists. At root, their question is just part of their ongoing efforts to evade the true nature of our enemies, their threat to us, and our military action against them.
But since history teaches that negotiating with dictators and terrorists only emboldens them to launch further, greater aggression against these alleged peacemakers, we must ask pacifists: “Do you want your child to die sitting home passively in America?”
Naturally, no reasonable parent wants his child to die fighting for any reason. But neither does he want his child to die as a sitting duck at home, as so many children did on Sept. 11, 2001 — precisely because for decades our so-called leaders appeased terrorists while doing virtually nothing militarily against them.
Our survival and freedom are not guarantees. Sometimes our loved ones must fight in self-defense to preserve these most sublime values, which means some, perhaps many, parents will have their honorable children die in the process. But if few or no children fight in a military mission whose explicit purpose must be to decisively destroy terrorist states out to destroy America, then all of us — parents and children alike — will undoubtedly be victim to ever-greater aggression, from more sniper shootings to nuclear attacks.
In short, the pacifists seek our and their own destruction, whether they recognize this or not. It is a psychology borne of a philosophy that fundamentally hates all of existence.
Americans who love life and their freedom must battle the pacifists intellectually to maintain our most important weapon, the one they seek to demilitarize most: the moral conviction that our lives and freedom are our highest values and worth destroying our enemies to keep.
