December 7, 1941
September 11, 2001
Those dates are etched in our collective consciousness as the two most major attacks on our homeland itself: Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) and The World Trade Center (New York).
Both led us directly into war.
And now on the 13th anniversary of 09-11-01 we are on the verge of another war against the group calling itself The Islamic State (or ISIS or ISIL).
Yes, the president did not call it war; but calling it "extended counter-terrorism" does not change the fact that this is a distinct escalation of our involvement -- back in Iraq and now possibly Syria.
President Obama was in a very tough spot. Nothing has changed since he had justified a more modest response of airstrikes -- nothing, that is, except the very deliberate, provocative release of videos of a masked, black-clad executioner beheading two American journalists.
Almost overnight, the American people's support for taking further action against ISIL leaped to a sizable majority.
I am very divided in how I'm thinking about this; but one thing is clear. We are extremely fortunate that our president is taking time to build a coalition that includes other Muslim nations. We cannot again go into a Muslim country on our own; we must have other Muslim nations as allies. It would only provoke a surge in recruitment for their cause.
In fact, that is exactly what ISIL hoped to incite. That is why they released those videos, trying to make it inevitable that we would escalate our attacks.
The other important thing for President Obama and his advisers to consider is that we must plan for what happens after we achieve the goal of taking down ISIL.
That is the lesson we hopefully have learned from the debacle of our Iraq invasion in 2003 and its aftermath -- which led directly to this.
Ralph
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