To expand on my thought a little.
I think my quotation of Sun Tsu should make clear that my answer to the question is no, killing or dying for any country is not a good idea. And I agree with the ancient master of War that the job of our leaders is to make sure that our enemies are so aware that attacking us will lead to their own demise that they do not take the step of attacking us in the first place. To have to go to war is usually a failure on the part of a country's leaders of some sort or another.
That being said, I also realise that there are folks out there who can't be dissuaded from attacking others by any means short of assasination. The Quakers learned that the hard way dueing the French and Indian war of the 18th century. The result is that Quakers, who are committed pacifists for religious reasons, are now permitted and do take up arms to defend our country under certain circumstances. Richard Nixon, a Quaker, was an officer during the second world war. We learned the same lesson on Dec. 7, 1941. The pacifist factions were so powerful that they kept us out of the war, thinking that if we stayed out of Europe's business we would never have to fight. However, staying out of the fight didn't work and we were dragged into it by the Japanese anyway.
The problem we have now is that those who want to blame the US for all the world's problems refuse to wake up and smell how rotten the roses really are, period. They stay in denial, despite the fact of 3,000 dead here in the US and others dead in Brittain, Spain, Indonesia, and Israel should be more than enough evidence that we are now in the midst of another war with folks who resent the fact that they couldn't conquer Europe when they tried both before and after the crusades. Those humiliating defeats have festered, added to by the prosperity of our culture in contrast with the poverty of their own. Instead of fixing what is wrong with their economies, they want to blame us for all of their troubles and that resentment is now boiling over. They long for the days when the world trembled at the sound of the boots of the Moorish and Ottoman armies!
Some four administrations failed us before Bush Jr. even took office. Carter failed to deal effectively with the Ayatollah and sat by while he put together a network of terror which was a clear danger. Reagan, was so focussed on ending the cold war with the Soviets that he sat back while the Iranians further built that network thoughout the middle east and didn't bother to take action against them when they attacked and killed our own troops in Lebanon and elsewhere. Those two can almost be forgiven their lapse because the cold war with the Communists was the big issue of the day and it had the highest priority in the public eye. Note, I said thay could almost be forgiven. If they had nipped that one in the bud when it was still in the womb, so to speak, Iran wouldn't be the danger it is now. That is one case where even the fundies would've agreed with a form of abortion!
There is no excuse for Bush Sr. and Clinton. The danger was there, plain for any to see who just looked. But these leaders from both ends of the political spectrum ignored the threat and hoped that if we didn't bother the Jihadists they would just go away. Talk about wishful thinking! Rather than deal with the growing threat from both Wahabists and Shia, Bush Sr. chose to start reducing our military strength at a time when we could ill afford it. Clinton carried on that policy with a vengance to the point that when he left office our military was at only half the strength it had when he took office with more reductions mandated by law. He also shit-canned vital weapons programs (reduced the order for F-21s by around two-thirds and delayed the production and deployment of those few left in the order for one such example) and wasted a whole lot of advanced weaponry in Bosnia without bothering to replace it. And all of this with one attack on the World Trade Center, attacks on several American embassies, and the attacks on our troops in Saudi Arabia, among other things which should've made it plain to a blind man that making our military weaker was the wrong thing to do.
Since military strength is such a vital component to deterence, as Sun Tsu observed some 2,500 years ago, is it any wonder that what Bush II inherited from Clinton both in terms of military strength as well as effective intelligence capacity was so weak that it had ceased to deter our enemies and we were gifted with 9/11? Our military and intelligence complex was so gutted that even if Bush had tried to start fixing it the day he took office 9/11 still would've happened.
The sober truth is that by Sun Tsu's definition every president since Gerald Ford has been an abject and utter failure, and that includes Reagan even though he did his best to build, rather than reduce the deterent effect of our military, something all the others did the exact opposite of. The lessons which should've been learned by being caught with our pants down around our ankles by WWI and WWII, weren't.
What has to be done is to build our military to a strength which will make anyboy else think three or four times before tempting fate by messing around with us. We also need to build an effective intelligence community, which Sun Tzu observed in the last chapter of his book, The Art of War, is so cost effective and vital to our security that only an idiot would short it. Then we need to have the will to use that intelligence appratus to uncover threats to our security and deal with them long before it becomes necessary to do the bad thing and send our troops out to kill and die.
Unfortunately, the crowd which is in denial and wants to blame America for all the world's ills refuses to face those facts of life, and they own the media and educational system and use them to form public opinion along their own line of thinking (with the exception of Radio and part of the net of course). The last few years have proven that it is going to take alot more than the bones of the 3,000 dead which have already littered the streets of New York City to wake those people up to reality.
Its a little late now to debate the merit of killing or dying for our country. And the real irony is that all of this could've been avoided long before those towers fell.
Forscher
