Another year of war, another year of the unknown

They call today "Patriot Day", but in reality it's a reason for us to reexamine our ongoing war against terrorism and to weigh our successes and failures. I've heard many politicians, commentators and bloggers draw similarities between Sept 11th and Pearl Harbor. I wonder if Americans who lived through that attack celebrated the disaster by wondering if the United States would ever defeat the Japanese?

It seems that this solemn commemoration has become more of a sore point for some people. It reminds us that we are still vulnerable, that we are fighting a two front war and that control of the Middle East is slowly slipping into the hands of radical Islam. It reminds us that we as Americans have more to lose than the terrorists who threaten us.

Just as surely as there can be no great war to end all wars, there can also never be a decisive battle in the war against terror. Terror is something that men and women feel in their hearts, it is not some place or some mission objective that can be captured and held.

Conflicts of ideology are difficult to explain and even hard to maintain support for once the cost begins to rise. While I reject many of the parallels of the Vietnam War and War on Terror I do believe that we are fighting a very similar threat. Communism was and still is against nearly everything we believe in as a free democratic society. Likewise, radical Islamic rule also stands against our core beliefs. We can neither allow it to flourish in the free world nor can we allow it to compromise our pursuit of life and liberty.

That said, communism's greatest defeat came not at the hands of the US military. We can not expect to bomb, suppress and police our way to victory. If we are to truly become the "shining city upon a hill" that President Regan spoke of in 1989, then we have to face the reality that this conflict will not be won by force alone, but by the will of the United States, her ingenuity and the resolve of her people. That should be the lesson of "Patriot Day", that we stand united and steadfast in our resolve to protect freedom and to live the American dream no matter who threatens to take it from us.