In 1860 after Abraham Lincoln was elected in a three way race as President successor to a paste over the problems, Buchanan Admin,....."My earliest recollection," Woodrow Wilson said many years later, "is of standing at my father's gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was 4 years old, and hearing someone pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war."
Why?
Lincoln, having repeatedly stood against slavery had also stated the Union was far more important, and that if he could keep the union and keep slavery he would. But yet something (maybe the Cooper Union speech) was a bellweather to many of his true nature and his true cause, revealed in Sept 1862 against the advice of most of his cabinet.
Today we see so many of our politicians struggle to cast the mighty conflict dividing civilizations in economic terms ( if 'they' had job, terrorism would melt away), in political terms (Abbas' agreement with Hamas meet they 'tacitly' recgonize Israel), or in any set of parameters in which this is the modern boogeryman's (the USA's) fault (so as to avoid responsibility for non-denial).
I have said many times that the Iraq campaign was properly entered, if in the silence of a measured room of deicsion, a conversation was held in which everyone there was compelled to answer the question of whether the winning of the REAL WAR entailed destruction of the horrifically failed political mien built by Messrs. Sikes and Picot, and it's replacement by the only force that MIGHT avoid hundreds of millions of deaths, democracy.
I believe THIS CAUSE like's Lincoln's bellweather moral force on slavery, has been sensed by our deadliest enemies.
No WMD
No Saddam
No rape rooms.
Strategic decision, strategic cause, strategic warfighting and policy.
Crusade.
It is our purpose to avoid Huntington, or bring on, on our terms, thru destruction of despotic fascist regimes whose prime method of survival is stoking by religious fervor, racist and cultural hatreds of our way of life, or worse who truly believe their religion has given them god's authority to murder, and call the victims, 'not the innocent'
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