Conservative View

“You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery.” Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964.
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Over the next six years Europe that we knew would be destroyed. Yet, as Hitler’s armies ravaged France, Poland, Russia, and the UK, The United States did very little to aid our allies over the sea. We were isolationists. This is a reoccurring theme for our country and, usually, with good reason. This was a war unlike anyone had ever seen. While our citizens scraped up from the ashes of a massive depression, millions of Jews, Polish, and Slavic people were being systematically exterminated overseas. The Jews call it ‘Shoah’, a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction. We know is as the holocaust.
We all know the end to this story, the triumphant emergence of the world’s two great superpowers, with America eventually mobilizing to save the day. But what if we hadn’t? What if Americans had thrown up their arms and said to ten million Jews ‘We understand how bad things must be for you, but we don’t want to carelessly let our sons go off to war, so to save our own skins we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.’ This is what was happening. It took an attack on American soil to force us out of our shells. As soon as the problem had become personal everyone finally shouted out the answer that we knew in our hearts all along. It was, and still is, not an easy answer. Finally, six years after the invasion of Poland, the Shoah ended. This was an entirely preventable event, caused simply by taking the things we have for granted.
This piece of history serves as an invaluable lesson to the present. While our enemy is less apparent, and the line between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ has been blurred. The objective, the fundamentals, and the standard of humanity remain exactly the same. The war in Iraq is not a worthless one. Saddam Hussein put his citizens under living conditions that seem unreal and distant to the typical individual. He has killed thousands of Kurds with nerve agents and other chemicals. Do not believe that just because the Middle East is a different culture, that it is alright for them to be oppressed and slaughtered at the hands of cruel dictators. Our war in Iraq is not lost, nor wasted. Progress is being made, and democracy has been established.  Knowing the past allows us as a country and as a global community to attempt to identify threats before they become a global catastrophe. We cannot permit complacency, isolationism, or fear to allow another Shoah, because this time the result might not be as heroic.
Those who oppose this view would have you labeled as war mongers. They would have you believe that this is a war that cannot be won. They would tell you that Iraq is a losing fight, and that it is causing American bankruptcy. This is not the case, this is defeatism. The answer today is a simple one. Not easy, but simple. As former President Reagan put it, “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”