Posted on 05/28/2018 5:21:12 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
How Can We Honor the Soldiers of an Endless War? What does Memorial Day look like when the war never ends?
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
What does Memorial Day mean in an age of endless war?
The era of wars that began and concluded neatly, with declarations, speeches, rules, objectives, deciding battles and signed peace accords, ended before the oldest active duty soldier serving today was born.
The men and women who fight and die, leaving their families never knowing if they will return, and in what form, serve not in wars, but endless police actions, peacekeeping missions, terrorist pursuits and nation building exercises with names that sound like obscure action movies, New Dawn, Inherent Resolve, Freedom’s Sentinel, that will never have a final ending, only another generic name.
Obama ended the Iraq War twice. It’s still ongoing. And likely will for all of human history.
We didn’t begin the Iraq War. Arguably Mohammed and the Sassanids did. Over 1,300 years later, the Persians and the rulers of Mecca and Medina are still fighting over Bahrain. When we left, it went on without us. And the Sunnis and Shiites, Mecca, Medina and Tehran, will go on fighting no matter what.
Civilized nations fight wars. And the places where we fight are not civilized, though they may have flags, anthems and constitutions. They’re murderous tribal wastelands torn by perpetual hatreds and feuds.
The Islamic resurgence has placed us in a state of permanent war. We may debate over which fronts that war should be fought on, but only the left can deny that the conflict itself is inescapable. We may fight it in Iraq or in New York, in Syria or in Sweden, the front lines may shift, but the war won’t go away.
And yet, paradoxically, this form of fighting takes us back to the origins of our military.
The heritage of the US Army goes back to the provincial regiments that fought in colonial territorial disputes with the French and defended the colonies against Indian raids. The Marine Corps shone at Tripoli in the Barbary Wars. Like the battles that their spiritual successors are called upon to fight today, these were conflicts with tribal raiders, bandits and territorial conflicts with no clear conclusion.
If you think the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are endless, the Indian wars arguably went on for 300 years.
We define our history by the definitive wars against European nations with definitive victories. The great cataclysmic world wars convinced us that our conflicts would get bigger and more explosive.
Instead we have returned to civilizational warfare. We no longer fight nations, but tribes. The wars are low intensity, but never go away. The weapons are primitive, but the goal of the attackers is to destroy our morale by inflicting psychological trauma, terrorizing us with barbaric atrocities, to defeat us.
Our military is still adapting its techniques and technology to this old/new way of war. But as a society we must also adapt the way we honor our troops and respect their sacrifices. Memorial Day was born out of the reconciliations between North and South after the Civil War. But we cannot look either to wars won or reconciliations achieved. We must honor the soldiers of a war that may never end.
The volunteer army has isolated entire cultural swathes of the country not only from military service, but from its realities, its virtues and its sacrifices. Paradoxically this too takes us back in time to an era when the wealthy could pay others to take their place in a regiment. But military service was always part of American life. The sacrifices of service and the nature of duty were widely understood.
The polarizing anthem protests reveal once again a divide between the parts of the country that understand military service and those that don’t. It is impossible to sustain patriotic communities without service. Those communities that do not serve in the military will instead take service in various causes, from political activism to gangs, as a substitute for what military service offers young men.
The war we are in is no longer a temporary emergency. And the military has been badly damaged by both the strains of recruitment in the previous decade and the social experiments of this decade.
To truly honor the sacrifices of those who fell in battle, we must set service at the heart of our society.
We are once again fighting wars in which everyone is on the front line. Whether as a soldier flying over Syria or the commuter on a bus targeted by a terrorist, we are all under fire. As we debate the Second Amendment, the role of militias and an armed populace are becoming more relevant than ever. And we must adapt both the military and the civilian populations to a definition of war that is both new and old.
Every terrorist attack erodes the distinction between the front line and the home front. And yet our language and understanding have been slow to adapt. The soldiers wounded in the Fort Hood attack had to struggle for their recognition against a tide of bureaucracy and political correctness. Arming soldiers in recruitment centers, like those shot and killed in the Chattanooga attacks, was another uphill battle. The National Guard has been sent to the border, but their hands have been mostly tied.
When we segregate the home front from the front line, we not only fail to grasp the nature and scope of the war we are fighting, but we also segregate the men and women who serve from everyone else.
The central principle of the militia was that everyone was at risk and so everyone was obligated to serve.
Not everyone ought to serve in the military, but everyone ought to understand the responsibility of that service and have a role in defending their community in even the smallest possible way. Every passenger who boards a plane is informed of his or her responsibility in the event of trouble. But when he lands, he walks off the plane with little idea of what he can do in the event that his country is under attack.
After 9/11, Americans were told to go shopping. They’re still shopping, and being targeted in malls.
In an age of endless war, the best way to honor those who take on the responsibility of that great service is to share their burden. There are important charities that help veterans. And it is always a good thing to thank those who serve for their service. But as a society, we must do more than thank, we must rebuild a society in which protecting the country is not only the duty of the fourth son of a poor family, but the duty of every single American. And in which it is what qualifies you to be an American.
That society will not be born overnight. But it is a society whose existence is intimately tied to our national survival. And it is a society worth fighting for.
The colonies and colonists prevailed against impossible odds to build the greatest nation in the world through a shared sense of solidarity, duty and sacrifice. America cannot expect to prevail through a civilizational war that may last centuries by expecting only a few percent of its population to take on that solidarity, that duty and those sacrifices. If we go on that way, we will not survive. And the sacrifices of those who fell in defense of the nation throughout the centuries will have been made in vain.
This Memorial Day, let us not only remember the sacrifices of the dead, but their sense of duty.
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Louis Foxwell
You “honor” the soldiers by turning them loose and letting them clean house, once and for all.
Leave the Islamic world with one big fear...that America MIGHT come back if they don’t behave.
<>The Islamic resurgence has placed us in a state of permanent war.<>
Quite right. It is past time for a declaration of war against islam. Eradicate it from our land.
It is my understanding that a war must be declared and approved by Congress. This police action was. However, there was a caveat attached and that was restraint and some very odd Rules of Engagement, especially for the Marines who are not trained to hold back. It’s just at that point I knew that although it had been approved this was not a war we should be engaged in, primarily because we have our own resources to draw from in the areas of strategic stockpiles of fuels, Metals, Etc. I am not sure why we’re there, except to try and maintain some stabilization in an area which has been unstable for centuries.
I do not see an end nor an exit strategy.
It is not “We The People” that start war but we are responsible to finish them. The “Military Industrial Complex” as IKE called it or Swamp, Globalists.... are the ones that want war for their own profits.
We mourn the loss to those we knew, the ones that got caught up in the profit scheme of the super rich.
God Bless America
Win or go home.
“..Win or go home....”
Amen, Bro.
Don’t engage, IF the overall intentions are not to win.
If the so-called military and political leaders are not willing to use nuclear weapons in a declared war against the enemy, then they should not be allowed to serve up American fathers and sons as cannon fodder in restrictive-rules-of-engagement farces for their own advancement in military rank or in re-election (or for the profits of their military-industrial supporters).
Win wars?
Sorry. We haven’t had enough practice since WWII.
I don’t believe in nation building.
I think we should leave them alone, if they leave us alone.
And if they don’t leave us alone, I think we should mess them up something fierce and then walk away and let them spend a century putting themselves back together.
The war is expected to be endless. No matter we do in the ME it will turn out badly. It has ever been thus. The unending tribal conflicts will never be solved militarily.
Bring the troops home now. There is no chance of a good result.
We honor them by ending the war with victory.
Victory, accept no substitutes.
Leave the Islamic world with one big fear...that America MIGHT come back if they don’t behave.
On the Inhabitants of the Middle East200 years from now, I want their children's children's children's children to cower and cringe in fear whenever they hear the sounds of jet engines overhead because their legends tell of fire from the sky.
I want them to hide in dark caves and holes in the earth, shivering with terror whenever they hear the roar of diesel engines because the tales of their ancestors talk about metal monsters crawling over the earth, spitting death and destruction.
I want their mothers to be able to admonish them with "If you don't behave, the Pale Destroyers will come for you", and that will be enough to reduce them to quivering obeisance.
I want the annihilation to be so complete that their mythology will tell them of the day of judgment when the stern gods from across the sea .. the powerful 'Mericans .. destroyed their forefathers' wickedness.
By BlueLancer
13 SEP 01
We will find
sooner or later
if Achmed'll pray
to a glowing crater
Bingo!
By not having America in constant war
The US government would do well to defend our own borders than to worry about other countries.
“Win or go home.”
Actually, it should be have a plan to win before you start, or don’t start it at all. We have George W. BOOSH to thank for the ME mess. Because he dicked around for years with a no-win strategy, giving rise to Obola and an even less coherent ME strategy. We have to support our ally, Israel, but that should be our limit, other than perhaps bombing the $hit out of Iran’s nuclear facilities. We should not waste one more drop of our young people’s blood nor another effing dime on the “Arab World.” Our mission should be to simply make it impossible for a single one of them to migrate beyond the bounds of Africa. Europe is gone, because the Muzzies there are procreating 24/7, and will be the majority in a couple of decades.
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