Memorial Day Prayer

This is the day we remember those who have fallen in battle, thereby making the supreme sacrifice in service to our great nation. Too many of us don't fully recognize what this day symbolizes. So I am offering a Memorial Day prayer, both to give my thanks and hopefully help us all be a little more appreciative. Here it is:

Dear God:

I pray for the fallen, those brave souls who gave their all for this country, never flinching from their duty, whatever they were called to do, and whether the leadership decisions that brought them to their last mission were well considered or not. They have given all they had, without question.

But I pray especially for the fathers and sons, mothers and daughters of these fallen princes, for they have to live on without, and doubtless would have taken their place without question, even if only to save themselves from such unbearable pain. Nothing can compare to the suffering endured by a mother who loses her child, or a child who loses his mother or father before their time. The fallen sacrifice their lives; the family sacrifices the rest of their lives. They will never see what their beloved’s life could have become, will no more share life’s trials and triumphs with them, never again see their smile or share their warmth on a cold winter’s night. They live in a sea of grief and will carry that wound for eternity. So, please God, bestow Your Tenderness and Grace especially on these families, whose loss can never be repaid.

But God, I pray also for the rest of us, for we lose too. We lose what could have been, from among the most selfless, principled, promising souls of our living generations. I would gladly exchange any ten Harvard graduates for one serviceman who willingly walks at the knifepoint. He has more guts, more integrity, more fortitude and likely more resourcefulness than the lot of them combined.

So, God, please let not their ultimate sacrifice be in vain. See to it that the objectives they were deployed to obtain are achieved. See to it that we have the satisfaction of realizing their mission successfully concluded. God, preserve this country for which they gave their lives, and give us all the wisdom, humility, and virtue to fully comprehend and gratefully acknowledge their sacrifices for what they are; for "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13).

Amen

Finally Someone Gets it Right

By Jim Simpson

In 2003, I wrote an article titled "Regime Change Means Eradicating the Ba'ath Party." In it I argued that the brutal, many-tentacled secret police apparatus of the Iraqi Ba'athist party would make long-term victory in Iraq very difficult. The ONLY option for creating a viable, peaceful Iraqi future lay in untangling that infrastructure and eliminating the vast network of vicious, corrupt Ba'athist apparatchiks and their informants.

I must give credit where credit is due here, and interject that there has been one prominent analyst, alone in the US foreign policy establishment, who has been bravely articulating the dangers posed by Saddam and his Ba'athists for years and that is Laurie Mylroie. Her studies of Saddam and his monstrous regime are more authoritative, by magnitudes than anyone else out there that I am aware of, and formed the basis for the Bush administration's original decision to invade Iraq. She has continued to raise the alarm about the mistake we make in misidentifying the enemy in Iraq. It is the Ba'athists.

Anyway, the first Coalition Provisional Authority chief, Paul Bremer, was widely criticized for being too tough on former-Ba'athists and has implicitly been blamed for the insurgency that supposedly arose when frustrated Ba'thists couldn't get their jobs back. But now Ali A. Allawi, an Iraqi insider long familiar with Saddam and his hideous Party, argues in a new book, The Occupation of Iraq, Winning the War and Losing the Peace, that Bremer's mistake was in not going far enough. As described in a Washington Post review:

In all of the back-and-forth, nobody of any stature has suggested that Bremer's approach toward the Baathists was too soft. But now, in a compelling, detailed history of the occupation, Iraq's first postwar civilian defense minister makes just that argument. In the first major account from an Iraqi insider, Ali A. Allawi contends in The Occupation of Iraq that one of Washington's principal mistakes was that Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority did not go far enough in dismantling the Baathist structure of Iraq's bureaucracy.

As you might imagine, I adamantly agree. Furthermore, I will add that Iraq is the final acid test for us. We have faced this kind of situation before. We failed to bring victory in Vietnam and Korea because of our unwillingness to fully appreciate the relentless, vicious nature of our enemy and his tactics. We are failing in the defense of Israel and Lebanon for the same reason. If, at this late date we cannot learn to confront and defeat this enemy and his methods, then it is only a matter of time before this same monstrosity is visited upon our shores.