The Willingness to Fight

On my ride in to a client's office, I had the Breitbart News radio show going on satellite.  One of the callers in had apparently spent some amount of time in the Middle East on a defense-related set of assignments, and wanted to share a curious conversation he had.

While out there, he was discussing things in general with a Muslim who was working with him, when as a slight non sequitur, the associate said "You will never win, you know."  Pressed to clarify, he added, "Christians will never win.  You can't win.  You don't fight."

Sometimes it takes a comment from the outside to remind us of truths we should easily have seen, much as the little child in "The Emperor's New Clothes" sees the truth no one wanted to admit.  In this case, I was startled at how readily I understood what this person from across the planet saw in my religion and my culture.

We don't fight.

Sure, we have an outstanding military capability here in the USA, doubtlessly the superior of any other on the planet.  We can fight.  Our people are courageous and know, as the song goes, more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery.  A lot more.  Our people can fight.

It is our leadership, such as it is right now and, frankly, has been for a few decades, that has disassociated the strength of our principles and values, from our willingness to use our military might to defend them.  We are so fearful of being regarded as colonialists, imperialists and crusaders; so fearful of appearing to be foisting our values on an unwilling world, that we have exposed ourselves to that world as too soft even to defend ourselves in our own homeland.

The radical jihadists, on the other hand, have no such compunction, and they have the value of time on their side.  They see themselves as tools in the establishment of a worldwide caliphate that will take hundreds of years to create, far past their own life span.  If they die in its creation, well, so be it -- they weren't going to be around for its completion anyway, and there are always those 72 virgins (although one of yesterday's shooters in California was female, again making us wonder what her reward would be).

I do not have any particular desire to have Islam go away and convert them all to Christianity.  Religious Muslims who want to live in peace with their fellow man of any faith neither threaten me nor prompt me to want to convert them.  Just getting that out on the table.

But the fellow above was right in that we are so paralyzed by our fear of what the world will think, that we pull our punches and, as he said, "don't fight."  And the time has come for that to stop.

First -- we as a country declare a set of principles based on right and wrong.  Murder of innocents is wrong.  Terrorism is wrong.  Radical religious philosophies that inspire their advocates in the 21st Century to murder and practice terror are wrong, and we will define them as evil.  Our leader needs to say that.

I have no problem whatsoever declaring that we have the right to declare when something is wrong and go to the ends of the earth to protect our fellow man from evil.  It is our duty as the leading light of the free world to do so.  And we will fight, proactively, to rid the world of evil.

But under the current administration, we will not fight.  And when the evil enemy, with time, money and weaponry and a goal of taking us back to the 7th Century, is indeed willing to fight but sees us as cowed into passivity, it's no wonder we're losing ground.

In our next president, I want to see someone willing to act, not out of imperialism or hegemony, or religious fervor, but out of defense of the free exercise of faith worldwide.

If you want to be that president, let us know.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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