let me share this letter by General Hawley. He retired 3 years ago as a 4-star. He was a Vietnam hero, later flew A-10s and F-15s, and was commander of Air Combat Command.
His letter is a classic. I don't know if you will find it anywhere else--it was e-mailed by him and published as a letter to the editor for The Southern Aviator in a copy my dad (also retired) sent me. I might post it as a seperate article....it is that good..
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Since the Sept. 11 attacks, I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.
1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative."
Listen carefully. We're good, they're evil, and nothing is relative. Say it with me now and free yourselves. You see, saying "We're good" doesn't mean "we're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is Jesus.
The plain fact is that our country, with all our mistakes and blunders, has always been and always will be the greatest beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity and affection in history. If you need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens. In about half a day, the entire world would be a ghost town and the U.S. would look like one giant line to see "The Producers."
2) "Violence only leads to more violence."
This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky half-measures lead to more violence.
Complete, fully-thought-through, professional, well-executed violence never leads to more violence because afterwards the other guys are all dead. Not "on trial," not re-educated, not nurtured back into the bosom of love. Dead.
3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community has failed us."
For 25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us. Starting in the late 1970's under Jimmy Carter appointee Stansfield Turner, the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided the best way to gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites. After all, they reasoned, you can see a license plate from 200 miles away.
This is very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately, we were attacked by humans.
When we bought our spy satellites, we fired our humans, and here's the really stupid part. It takes years to infiltrate new humans into the worst places in the world. You just can't have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say, "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure would like to meet that bin Landen fella."
4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us.
Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and, ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor, helpless people are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power.
Mohammad Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes in the killing grounds, is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this too. In the '60s and '70s, the marchers against the war were upper-middle class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. It is the same today.
5)"Any profiling is racial profiling."
Who's killing us here, the Norweigians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article saying dozens of members of the Bin Laden family, living in America, were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to return to studying at Harvard. I'm crushed. I think we're all crushed. Why don't they just change their names? It's happened in the past. How many Adolfs do you run into nowadays?
Shortly after that, I remember watching TV with my jaw on the floor as a government official said, "That little old grandmother from Sioux City could be carrying something." No, she couldn't. It would never be the grandmother from Sioux City. What are the odds? Winning a hundred Powerball lotteries in a row? And then a Secret Service guy gets tossed off a plane and we're all supposed to cry about it because he's an Arab? Didn't it have anything to do with the fact that he filled out the form incorrectly---three times? And then left an Arab history book on his seat as he strolled off the plane? And came back? Armed? Let's stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a plane four seconds away from hitting Mount Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them."
So, here's what I resolve for the new year: Never to forget our murdered brothers and sisters. Never to let the relavists get away with their immoral thinking. After all, no matter what your daughter's political science professor says, we didn't start this.
Have you seen that bumber sticker that says, "No More Hiroshimas"? I wish I had one that says, "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Richard Hawley
General, USAF (ret)