The first and foremost question about the war on terror would be has it been worth the effort so far? Well I am not going to attempt to answer that question but I will discuss some of the negatives and positives and let you draw your own conclusion. I will say that we have spent an awful lot of money on this war, and that many young men and women have lost their lives and limbs. That in and of itself is a high price to pay. Many lives have been shattered, both of Americans at home, and in the military along with the lives of many of their family members. Many innocent Arab people have had their lives shattered also. There have been countless Arab lives lost due to American bombs, missiles, and bullets. There have also been a countless number of Arabs killed by terrorists who killed them in order to intimidate others, or by using them as human shields. Unfortunately we never hear about these lives because the American press is interested in reporting American casualties. The Arab press will report these deaths if they are caused by the US but it seems that when they are caused by terrorists they tend to not give it a lot of attention.
Should we have committed so many troops and so much equipment to this cause? I dont know. It certainly seems like overkill but it did accomplish one major purpose. It caused terrorists to travel to the Middle East to fight Americans who are trained and well equipped to fight rather than have them come here and kill innocent defenseless US citizens.
The invasion of Iraq seemed to be drastic overkill if you asked me but it did topple Saddam Hussein. The bad thing is that the people of Iraq never asked us to topple Mr. Hussein. Many of them do not appreciate the American presence in their country.
The scary thing is that after all of the lives of our servicemen have been lost, Iraq remains in a precarious condition. The same is true for Afghanistan. As a matter of fact I believe that Afghanistan is in more of a precarious condition than Iraq. Once we leave both governments may freefall back to the same condition that they were before. If this happens it wont speak well at all for the time, lives, equipment, and money that we lost over there during the war.
We dont know what the outcome of this situation would have been if we had never committed these troops to the war. There may have been more serious consequences here in the US. Unfortunately we will never know. In that sense we can never make an accurate assessment.
Moammar Gadhafi was neutralized because he woke up and smelled the coffee. We can never tell the benefits of this action either. Many of al-Qaedas leaders have been killed by US troops and drones. We dont know if this would have been possible without the war.
Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been eliminated. I doubt if that could have happened with anything less than all out war but the fact is that it did. The bad news is that al-Qaeda has elected another leader to take his place. So this leads to the question of, what good did it do?
The best thing is that the US has cracked the code on fighting terrorists and has al-Qaeda on the run. We have developed technology to use against them and it works with deadly effectiveness. Now we can remove of our ground troops from the action which is a definite plus. We have had them backed up so far on their heels that they havent been able to mount a successful attack in the US since Sep 2011. Now that fact is worth its weight in gold.
Military Ring Express
