Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.  (Let him who desires peace prepare for war.)
                         - Vegitius (Roman writer of military strategy, c. 375 AD)

Even though I only spent three years on active duty and another five years in the reserves, my military service was and still is very important to me.  I consider it to be a large part of who I am today and every day I encounter young men and women who I believe are on a one-way trip to either jail or lifelong underemployment and poverty unless they enlist in one of the armed services and learn to take care of themselves.

In Robert Heinlein's book "Starship Troopers" (which was nothing like the shitty movie from a few years back) he describes a society in which the only people who are allowed to hold office or vote are those who have satisfactorily completed a term of service in the military.  It is exceedingly difficult to join the service, and once in you can quit at any time for any reason.  The idea is that by limiting involvement in the government to veterans only then the government will be run by people who have already demonstrated that they are willing to sacrifice their own safety and security for the good of society.  That's an oversimplification, of course, but it's not a bad summary.  To me, the idea sounds good.

I am not by any means a violent person.  However I don't agree at all with those people who idealistically say: "Violence never solved anything."  To borrow another thought from Heinlein, why don't we ask the citizens of Carthage what they think about the idea that violence never solves anything?  Of course we can't, since violence seems to have settled their fate pretty thoroughly.

I believe that the United States is at war and has been since the late 1970's.  But there are a large number of people who want to say we are not, and they are generally motivated by political reasons.  They know that some people in this country are inconvenienced by various rules and regulations designed to make it more difficult for us to be infiltrated and attacked by terrorists, so they attack those who design and enforce those regulations in hopes of currying favor with the inconvenienced masses.  Just the other day there was some political hack on the news saying how important it is to repeal most, if not all, of the legislation passed after 9/11, because that legislation gave the FBI too much power.  Now, I happen to believe that section 215 of the PATRIOT Act is a little too broad, and appears to be in violation of the Fourth Amendment.  Even so, it's amazing to me that this sort of stuff can go on in what is generally considered to be an educated country.  If hijacked airliners aren't smacking into office buildings every week, it takes virtually no time at all for people to successfully convince themselves that the threat is over and done with and we can all get back to business as usual.  I would have thought that Vietnam was a sufficiently unpleasant object lesson in the perils of trying to fight a war with one hand tied behind your back.  Apparently it was not.

It is dangerously naive to think that we can solve any crisis, no matter how resolute our opponents, no matter how much violence has already occurred, through negotiations and economic sanctions.  There seem to be a lot of people who think that simply defending ourselves is morally wrong.  To many otherwise intelligent people in this country it is acceptable for Americans to suffer violence while at the same being totally unacceptable for us to inflict it.  That outlook is a tragedy, a short-sighted tragedy.  If we don't defend ourselves now then we leave the job of doing so to our children.  That should not be acceptable to anyone.

The following quote by British author John Stuart Mill is on point, I believe.  See for yourself: