Fight Ideas, Not People

Reading this morning of war and the victims of war, I wonder if perhaps we are fighting ideas by killing people, and perhaps this is all wrong.

We fight with the army we have. Rumsfeld's problem. We have an army that sets things straight by killing people.

We kill people who have gotten the idea that we're up to no good over there and that we should be made to leave. We kill people who, in a vacuum of power, take it for themselves and use it in ungodly ways. We kill people who are fed by militias. We kill people who syphon gas from tankers captured by militias. Steal our tankers? Hell, we'll blow up the tankers in their faces!

The Blackwater contractors are themselves on a Christian jihad and clear traffic from the road ahead with machine gun bullets, killing people. The Wackenhut guards at our Afghanistan embassy drink alcohol out of each other's butts, making our very presence there obscene.

Who are we trying to impress? And with what? The bright and shining new president we gave them now stuffs ballot boxes.

Our ability to destroy someone else's world and to deface their culture means that we should be tolerated?

Ideas contend.