It has been said that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the real war on terror. Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11, Saddam did not. The war is a mistake.
After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war. He asked war to be declared on Japan and also on Nazi Germany. Why? Germany did not attack us. Germany was not involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Roosevelt asked us to go to war against Nazi Germany because he knew that our enemy was not just the Emperor of Japan. It was not just the Generals that plotted that one attack. He knew that the enemy was an ideology of hatred; an ideology of hatred of which the attack on Pearl Harbor was just one expression. He knew that America would not be safe until that ideology of hatred had been defeated everywhere it was found.
On September 11th, we were attacked by a new enemy based in a new ideology of hatred. An ideology from a different part of the world, speaking different languages, but dreaming the same fascist dream. An ideology willing to do anything, kill anyone in any numbers, anywhere to impose their twisted vision upon the world. Like 60 years ago, the American people and the people of the world will not be safe until this ideology of hatred is defeated wherever it is found.
Some will say that the comparison is wrong. Iraq is not Nazi Germany.
Torture chambers…secret police dragging people from their homes in the middle of the night never to be heard from again…mass graves filled with uncounted tens of thousands of men, women, children. With due respect to those who opposed the war, we have seen all this before. While it is true that Saddam and his henchmen did not equal the numbers of victims we saw in Europe decades ago, he did equal their cruelty and it would have continued. The mass graves would have continued to fill year after year, thousands upon thousands of new victims, if we had not acted.
Early in the second world war, it was believed that Germany was near to producing the worlds first atomic bomb and as a result, America poured unprecedented manpower and resources into the Manhattan project. After the war, we discovered that they were never close. That fact did not make fighting Germany a “diversion” from the war against Japan.
Our fathers and grandfathers fought and sacrificed to defeat fascism, to leave to their children and grandchildren a freer, safer world. Now is our time to repay that debt. It is up to this generation to fight the ideology of hatred. It is our choice with courage and sacrifice, to defeat it and leave to our children and grandchildren a freer, safer world, or retreat and leave to future generations a world too dark to imagine.
