Looking Forward
Alright. I've allowed it to sink in. We lost. We lost the House, we lost the Senate...we lost. The people have spoken, and I'm not going to cry foul or demand that there be a recount. I'm not going to move to Canada or say that I'm ashamed of my country. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm very proud of my country. I think the fact that the Democrats won control of Congress is proof that something wasn't done right.
The media said the main issue on the table was Iraq, which makes perfect sense. Couldn't really complain about the economy, could we? I think the problem is that people forget what is really going on. This isn't "The War in Iraq" and "The War in Afghanistan." This is the "War on Terror"--and you can make fun of that name and complain about how broad it is all you want.
Iraq is merely a part of this war on terrorism, as is Afghanistan. We're now at the very difficult nation-building stage in Iraq, which is a daunting task, considering you have three very different cultures who traditionally hate each other. At least Germany and Japan had within their countries cultures with something in common. Furthermore, Germany and Japan took much longer than two years after their defeat to become stable democracies.
But back to the War on Terror. Mormon Democrat science fiction author Orson Scott Card puts it best in a recent column written just before the election:
"We cannot name this war for our actual enemies, either, because there is no way to name them accurately without including some form of the word "Islam" or "Muslim."
It is our enemies who want to identify this as a war between Islam and the West. If we allow this to happen, we run the risk of achieving the worst of all possible outcomes: The unification of one or both of the great factions of worldwide Islam under a single banner.
President Bush and his administration have shown their grasp of our present danger by stoutly resisting all attempts to rename this war. We call it a "War on Terror" because that allows us to cast it, not as a war against the Muslim people, with all their frustrations and hopes, but a war in which most Muslims are not our enemies at all."
But although President Bush and his administration may have had a good grasp of our present danger, they still failed both their political party and their nation. Bush failed to make it a clear message to the people of America that we are in this for the long-haul. I personally thought this message was clear from the beginning, when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and it was apparent we were experiencing an attack we had never felt before. But obviously, the message didn't sink in. Tuesday showed this awful truth. So from this point on, I think it's imperative that the President and his administration be more public in their reasoning and motives.
The media said the main issue on the table was Iraq, which makes perfect sense. Couldn't really complain about the economy, could we? I think the problem is that people forget what is really going on. This isn't "The War in Iraq" and "The War in Afghanistan." This is the "War on Terror"--and you can make fun of that name and complain about how broad it is all you want.
Iraq is merely a part of this war on terrorism, as is Afghanistan. We're now at the very difficult nation-building stage in Iraq, which is a daunting task, considering you have three very different cultures who traditionally hate each other. At least Germany and Japan had within their countries cultures with something in common. Furthermore, Germany and Japan took much longer than two years after their defeat to become stable democracies.
But back to the War on Terror. Mormon Democrat science fiction author Orson Scott Card puts it best in a recent column written just before the election:
"We cannot name this war for our actual enemies, either, because there is no way to name them accurately without including some form of the word "Islam" or "Muslim."
It is our enemies who want to identify this as a war between Islam and the West. If we allow this to happen, we run the risk of achieving the worst of all possible outcomes: The unification of one or both of the great factions of worldwide Islam under a single banner.
President Bush and his administration have shown their grasp of our present danger by stoutly resisting all attempts to rename this war. We call it a "War on Terror" because that allows us to cast it, not as a war against the Muslim people, with all their frustrations and hopes, but a war in which most Muslims are not our enemies at all."
But although President Bush and his administration may have had a good grasp of our present danger, they still failed both their political party and their nation. Bush failed to make it a clear message to the people of America that we are in this for the long-haul. I personally thought this message was clear from the beginning, when the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and it was apparent we were experiencing an attack we had never felt before. But obviously, the message didn't sink in. Tuesday showed this awful truth. So from this point on, I think it's imperative that the President and his administration be more public in their reasoning and motives.