the cost of war

I've written a lot of posts that argue for a interventionist foreign policy, especially in regards to the War on Terror. Consequently, it's imperative that I acknowledge that this kind of policy has tremendous costs. The worst of those costs can be seen in excruciating detail in this story. Please don't follow that link unless you're prepared to see some sickening injuries.

Because the members of the American military pay a horrific price when we send them into battle, the decision to go to war should never be made lightly. War is not a game of chess and it's not an epic adventure; it's brutal, it's nasty, and no national leader should ever forget that fact.

Having said that, I owe a tremendous debt to the men and women who willingly face these dangers because they are ready and willing to fight the battles that I think are necessary. Austin Bay is one those men--he went on active duty in Iraq, understanding the risk, because he believes in the cause. If you want to know why I think America must continue the fight, read Bay's explanation:

Now, once upon a time we could ignore those suffering in the planet’s hard corners. Oh, we could send them a few bucks and the Lefties could bitch about colonialism and capitalism but the hard corners were isolated. A threat to security? Only nuns and missionaries and you are your brothers keeper types thought so. Well guess what — the nuns were right. 9/11 changed that deceptive calculus. Distance? [T]here isn’t any distance. We learned that the destruction of New York and Washington started in the backwaters, of Afghanistan, of Somalia. Technology has done it. We can’t escape one another, for good and for bad. Jet transports . . . put you on the other side of the globe in 14 hours. The internet doesn’t require description. East Asia shares diseases with Africa within days, if not hours. And special weapons? Nukes and nerve gas make every tribal war an international crisis. Goodbye Tokyo, Moscow, or Miami– because a sophisticated tribesman at war with his eternally despised neighbor decides that demolishing the global economy would make everyone pay attention to his neglected, forgotten grievance. Tyrannies keep breeding this insanity. The only solution is consensus, wealth-producing societies, where everyone gets a say and everyone has a buy-in. If it sounds like democracy then call it that. It’s sustainable stability, ever evolving sustainable stability when people police terrorists and don’t promote them. That’s a long struggle, and struggle may be a more apt word than war. But achieving it is so difficult. It takes more than military power, we know that. [T]he politics and economics will be decisive, but as long as the thugs are willing to kill we must fight. Is there a substitute for courage? If there is, show it to me. . . .

I don’t like it. I didn’t like it during the Cold War. Remember 1983? The same creeps who’ve quit now, quit then. Reagan was a warmonger, going to start a nuclear war in Europe [b]y responding to the Soviets deployment of theater nuclear missiles. The defeatists said the Cold War was our fault, we were the threat. Then the Berlin Wall cracked and that jackass calumny disappeared as Marxism’s Eastern European wreckage emerged in drab, polluted, horrifying, undeniable color.

This war follows the same arc, with the same defeatists adding new nouns to old verbs and adjectives. But it’s a war of liberty versus tyranny and they’re shilling for the tyrants.

It doesn’t matter if you and I don’t like it. We know the stakes.

Read the whole thing.