Sacred Ego

On the eighth anniversary of 9/11, we’ve now been fighting this war for TWICE as long as it took for us to defeat the Japanese – the closest historical comparison. We’re still fighting, and in many respects, we’re losing. Briefly:

Afghanistan – where all acknowledge we are close to collapse, the Taliban are now in control of large swaths of the country. Even after the addition of 20,000 more US troops, our commanders have called for more. This, after 8 years of… what, exactly?

From wikipedia:

On August 10, 2009, Stanley McChrystal, the newly appointed U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said that the Taliban has presently gained the upper hand and that the ISAF is not winning in the 8 year-old war. In a continuation of the Taliban’s usual strategy of summer offensives, the militants have aggressively spread their influence into the north and west Afghanistan, and stepped up their attack in an attempt to disrupt August 20 presidential polls. Calling the Taliban a “very aggressive enemy”, he added that the U.S. strategy in the months to come is to stop their momentum and focusing on protecting and safeguarding the Afghan civilians, while also calling it “hard work”.

Pakistan – The Taliban are gaining control of ever more territory and are threatening to gain control of the nuclear weapons in the one Islamic country that currently has them.

Iran – We are allowing the biggest state sponsor of Islamic terrorism to build their own nukes, despite the repeated threats of their President to use them to destroy our closest ally in this fight, Israel.

Saudi Arabia – Money from the royal family still flows to the Islamofascist and Wahhabi coffers which created Bin Laden and inspires terrorists across the globe.

Iraq – Our refusal to fight a total war left us bogged down for over 5 years in a needless war of attrition where we forced our soldiers to fight with both hands practically tied behind our back. Now that we have left, we see violence rising again, as Islamists come out of hiding to further foment chaos.

Across the Islamic world, in an unbroken stretch of land from Pakistan all the way to Saudi Arabia and beyond in Syria and Lebanon, we see an enemy gaining power, not losing it. Al Qaeda, itself, may be on the decline, but this war was never about just that one group (and even there, Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri remain at large). It was about an ideology, which holds that America as a bastion of Secular Freedom is its mortal enemy.

Why are we losing? We’re losing because Christian altruism demands that we do.

Here’s an article published 3 years ago, on the 5th anniversary of the attacks, by The Objective Standard. Titled “Just War Theory” vs. American Self-Defense, it lays out, in precise detail, how we’ve gone from a country willing to nuke entire cities of our enemies in order to defeat them to one where civilian casualties must be avoided at all costs, impact on the war effort be damned.

In short, we refuse to fight to win.

Go read the entire article, but here’s an excerpt:

We are losing the war on Islamic Totalitarianism because our leadership, political and military, is crippled by the morality of altruism, embodied in the tenets of Just War Theory. The moral code inherent in Just War Theory defines rules that undercut, inhibit, and subvert any hope of success in war, because it demands that one regard one’s own life as the sacrificial object of others. The moral code of rational self-interest, by contrast, defines principles to attain the values that one’s life and happiness require—including success in war and national self-defense. Altruism is the morality of defeat, and rational self-interest is the morality of victory.

America faces a choice between two irreconcilable foes: self-defense or altruism—which are but forms of the basic choice we all face: life or death. Let us choose life.

**This was originally published on John & Ansley, mine and my wife’s blog. We’ve decided to make that more of a family blog with an emphasis on parenting. Sacred Ego will be where I discuss Objectivism and current events. I’m moving over all of my Objectivist posts from that site to here as part of that effort**

Tags: 9/11, Altruism, Just War Theory, Rational Self Defense