Enemy Identification Issues

Some Soldier's Mom lays it down chapter and verse in as solid and comprehensive a post as I have read in some time about the problems average, decent Americans have in identifying the enemy we face in the current war for and (and on) civilization. This war isn't as "neat" as wars past, our enemies not as "honorable" as wars past, and in some ways, the immediate stakes may not seem quite as high. Unfortunately, we face a death-obsessed enemy, one who views honor as a concept of the weak and enslaved, one who sees the entire earth as a battlefield (including civilians), and one who will "win" by any means necessary. If you don't identify the enemy and the problem, there is no hope of winning the war...I just hope it doesn't take millions of Americans enslaved or vaporized before civilization figures it out...read it all, it's that good.

"I believe that much of the disconnect of a large segment of the American populace with the War on Terror is for three principle reasons.
First, ...They haven't accepted yet that the battlefield is Planet Earth. Any time. Any place.

Secondly, with a "mere" 137,000 troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan -- compared to 16 MILLION deployed in WWII (457,000 in Vietnam) -- 99% of the American people are unaffected by the battles that occur across oceans, continents and time zones and, therefore, disconnected from those who fight and the real face of the war on terror. ... they go to Starbucks, and work and the gym and baseball games and soccer practice every day and never give it a second thought… that there really are people out there that want them and their children dead just because they are Americans. Frankly, just because you are not "them". ...

Finally -- and I think the most significant of the three -- Americans cannot IDENTIFY their enemy. ...

Then, starting in the 1970's, a war broke out and the world hardly noticed. Americans certainly didn't. The enemy -- the attackers in all cases -- wore no uniforms. They answered to no government.

They did not come from any one country… but represented membership in a violent and bastardized form of Islam. They believe that all non-Muslims need to be killed, converted to Islam or forced into slavery and they don't care how long it takes them to accomplish this goal. And they don't care how they achieve it… don't care who or how many they kill or how they die.

They fight under no rules -- not rules of war and not by rules of civilized societies. They are not bound by morals except their own monsterized version of their own -- skewed and twisted and contorted to fit the murder they promote. They are not signatories to any of the treaties and conventions and think of them as "infidel" words. Their tactics are to terrorize and kill. The aim is death -- theirs, yours, ours. Death is both their aim and their reward.

They do not have negotiable goals. They do not want property, goods or money. They want to deprive you of your freedoms which encompass and embrace ideas and ideals that run contrary to their oppressive theocratic doctrine. They use death… preferably civilian deaths, which instill the greatest horror -- the greatest terror -- in the general populace. Their aim is to terrorize -- to deprive citizens of their freedoms. And horrific death of innocents -- children, women, men -- without warning is the greatest degree of terror possible. And they are not afraid to die themselves… they believe that death glorifies their God and grants them entry to Paradise. Life is meaningless to them.

They say that they do this for justice… they say they have political grievances… they say that their religion demands this of them. They lie. Those are excuses to murder innocents… not reasons. They need reason to die and these excuses are expedient.

Until Americans modify how they view war -- how they view this war… and accept that there is a whole new set of "rules" and a whole new enemy, they will never "get it". And sometimes I don't care if they ever understand; I just want them to not get in the way of the rest of us who do.