There is no Greater Love than to Lay Down Your Life for a Friend . . .
Pfc. Ross McGinnis (assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment “Blue Spaders”) from Knox, PA, died from a grenade blast in Iraq on December 4. It is being reported that he threw himself on a live grenade in his humvee, saving the lives of four other soldiers. How can America refuse to honor such heroic selflessness? Shouldn’t we do everything possible to ensure that extraordinary young men like McGinnis and the other fallen heroes will not have died in vain?
This is not WWII. It’s a different war, different enemy.
Sen. John Warner said War in Iraq longer than WWII. You would think a WWII veteran and US Senator would know the difference between Iraq and World War II. As brutal as the Nazis were, have we ever faced an enemy before that routinely and randomly attacked its own civilian population as a military tactic? In the larger sense, especially in conventional terms, the military objectives in Iraq have been achieved. Saddam was deposed, hunted down and captured, tried and convicted, and executed. And a new government was instituted. The phase we are in now–occupation or “nation building”–is not going as well, but how can it when the Islamofascists are using the tactic of wanton, random killing of the country’s civilian population? Analogies to Japan and Germnay post WWII don’t really apply. But if you want to make the comparison, how long did we occupy Japan after WWII? We didn’t turn over Japan to the Japanese government officially until 1952, although Okinawa remained under U.S. control until 1972. And we had military forces stationed in Japan until . . . Oh, WE ARE STILL THERE. Same for Germany.
Vanity Fair Gets Whacked by National Review
I was prepared to unleash a diatribe against Ricahrd Perle and the other neo-cons who pushed for the Iraq war and had supposedly since come out against Bush and the war. I should have considered the source, which was Vanity Fair. Thanks to National Review, which has interviewed each of the featured “neo-cons” and set the record straight, by providing a fuller context and more balanced presentation to their comments. I thought the elite liberal news organs were way into subltely. Apparently not in this case.
