It was fitting that I would read my Great
Grandfather’s words today for the first time.   This morning President Obama gave his speech
addressing the world and specifically Congress with the need for military action
in Syria.  Talking heads will debate the politics
of it all: should the President have acted as the Commander in Chief and just
initiated our troop movements while waiting for Congressional support for a
sustained campaign or the approach the President took.

No doubt there will be those who said the President chose
his actions as a cowardly way out.  If
Congress chooses not to act Historians and the Press will overlook his actions
and say it was Congress that failed to act. 
These political actions however mean little in the long haul.  They mean even less to the troops and those
who swear an oath uphold the Constitution of the United States.

My tour in Iraq was at the tail end.  I did not see combat, I did not suffer gun
fire, I can count on one hand the total number of times the sirens went off
because of indirect fire.  While I was
never in a convoy that was hit by an IED, there were plenty especially within
our region and I did play a small role in the decline. 

If we go into Syria we will be doing the same thing in a
different place for the same reasons. 
Naysayers will vainly try to point out that we are not objectively
morally superior.  They will point to our
failures; they will point to the two nuclear bombs that brought our conflict to
a halt in our War with Japan.  They will
point to the days of slavery and any other dark time in our nation’s past.  But that is all those things are, dark times
and past. 

When we dropped the bomb we did so to end the war.  While a great many people died and while
there was a great number of consequences that were not understood at the time,
the dropping of the bomb saved more lives than it took.  The war ended and it sent a message to the
world.  We had a weapon of unbelievable
power, we could reproduce it, and we used it with discretion.  We can all thank God we never had to use it
again. 

As my Great Grandfather so eloquently put it, we have made
errors of the hand and not of the heart. 
No doubt we will make more errors, but ours is a Nation founded on a
lasting principal best described by Dennis
Prager:  Liberty,
E Pluribus Unim, and In God We Trust (outlined in great detail in “Still
the Best Hope”)    It is important to pass this principal down
to our children and our children’s children. 

Our Nation is tired; our children have grown up in a world
transformed by 9/11/2001.  We have been
at war for a Solid 12 years.  Evil in the
form of Fascism, in the form of Communism, in the form of Jihadist Muslims… it
isn’t stopping any time soon.  For the
bulk of my lifetime I have been taught that we must fight with words.  We fight in courts, we fight in elections, we
fight by waging a campaign of propaganda against false evils such as health and
cigarettes.  And in fact we fought
against evil with a great many of young men and women giving up their lives for
no other reason than we valued freedom enough to give up our lives to preserve
it. 

As civilization continues to drive forward we will fight the
battle of words, we will fight the battle of the courts, and ultimately we will
fight the battle of the bullets.  We will
know periods of peace and periods of war, because with every peace a new evil
will rise to challenge us.  They will
test our will, they will test our courts and eventually when evil feels strong
enough it will push forward with force against us and the world around us.  Twelve years may feel like a long time, but
in truth it is microscopic compared to the struggle we are up against.  We must not grow weary, we must stand tall
and we must stand for something other than just our own sake.  Without principals our leadership will waiver
and our people will lose not only their way but their purpose, and that is when
the war will be waged from within.

We don’t just value
our own freedom; we fought for the Freedom of Slaves.  We ended the institution with a brutal bloody
war.  We fought for the Freedom of Jews
and all of Europe from Nazi Fascism.  We
waged a war against Communism and Fascist Socialism for over 50 years,
sometimes by killing but more often than not by competing in the largest arms
race in modern history.  In Iraq we went
in liberating a people from a Fascist Dictator who we knew gassed his own
citizens and whom had been sympathetic to those who would wage war against
us.  Each conflict produced its own set
of challenges but we rose to meet them.

We will continue to fight. 
We will continue to sacrifice our blood, our sweat, and our tears.  Continuing on the Churchill theme  we shall defend freedom “whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we
shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the
streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”