I think what a lot of people are upset about concerning our actions are not so much that we took the course we did, many agree with that, but they’re upset with how the war is being fought and managed. In my opinion we should not have slowed down at Operation Shock and Awe. We should have kept it strong, gone in, wiped out the enemy, got political talks going on re-establishing the nation with a new political system, and got out of there. I feel the administration planned excellently for the initial strike to oust Saddam, but then lacked vision on the capability of the enemy, namely, “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” I tend to lean toward the camp that says that the war has been managed in a politically correct manner, where the troops have to step through all these rules and regulations before pulling the trigger, instead of just getting in aggressively, getting the job done, and getting out in the most efficient manner possible. We have instances where some troops are being charged with murder in this war. I find that rather ridiculous. It’s war. If anyone knows anything about history, this has been one of the most successful operations with very few casualties (while not in any way minimizing the casualties that have occurred though). I do feel we are overstaying our visit in many ways, but as with any war from history, there are all kinds of unknown variables that come into play. War is an always-changing environment where you must restrategize every chance you get to always be one step ahead of the enemy. War is what it is though. It’s dirty, brutal, unfortunate, and necessary to maintain peace because of people like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Bin Laden, and many others who selfishly seek the demise of either their own citizens or other nations. You can try to manage a war in the most humane way possible by instigating a thousand rules on what’s legit or not, etc, but somebody else wants to kill you and take away your freedom. How do you respond to that? I’m not just going to sit back, put my head in the sand and hope it goes away, because it won’t. Islamo-fascists want all of us dead in fact. If they had their way, the entire world would be converted to Islam. “Convert or die,” so to speak. 9/11 is one of the first giant proofs they want us dead, though there were many even before that. If they get a nuclear weapon, they will use it. From the radical Islamists worldview, they honestly believe they are advancing the cause of Islam by murdering thousands upon thousands of people. If they are crazy enough to kill themselves by flying planes into buildings, who says they wouldn’t go all the way and wipe out entire cities? Who would have thought they would do something as bad as 9/11? Where does it stop though? That’s the point of the rhetorical question. They won’t stop. They’ll just keep coming. That’s the bottom-line. What are we going to do? Let them do it? Iraq is a pivotal nation in the Middle East, and if it can be established as a solid nation economically, politically, and socially, there’s a chance that the entire Islamic region will stabilize and thwart many of Al Qaeda’s plans to impute radical Islam on the entire area, by force as it were. It’s real easy for us Americans to sit back and criticize everything that our leaders are doing wrong when we have no first-hand experience of what it takes to get the job done, nor do we have all the military intelligence and data our government does to make the decisions they have. I do have to say that after 9/11, we haven’t had another attack on our soil. That says a lot about what’s being done for us with this administration, though not everything has been perfect. War takes time. Americans have become so unbelievably impatient with the progress. Our country sure has produced some real whiners. And I’m getting sick of hearing it. 🙂
Month: December 2005
Just wanted to give everyone a brief introduction to Monergism.com. The breadth of material on this site is astounding, on almost every conceivable theological topic imaginable. Monergism, in its basic form, is about the Gospel; the Biblical, truthful Gospel. It’s about self-deprecation, God-exaltation; it simply describes the very Biblical truth that in our sinfulness, we cannot and will not understand the things of God, His way of salvation in Jesus Christ, or that we are even in need, apart from Him coming and removing our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh. Monergism is all about the fact that it is God alone who regenerates us, we don’t participate in the regeneration of our hearts. To say that we in any way cooperate with God concerning our salvation is to not understand human nature from a properly interpretted Biblical point of view. It is true that God does not believe for us, we exercise our own faith and truly believe on Christ of our own volition, but that volition is dead in sin until God creates in us something that was not there. The only reason anyone is saved at all is because of God applying the work of redemption on those He’s chosen, the work of redemption bought by Jesus Christ on the cross, paid for in His blood. Monergism is an admittance to how unbelievably wicked we are, how we will never turn to Christ apart from His regeneration to give us eyes to see and ears to hear, and how infinitely loving and merciful God is to save anyone at all. This concept can be found in many parts of Scripture, but somehow seems to go overlooked by many pastors and teachers these days. It’s comfortable in our humanness to believe things about God that make us feel warm and fuzzy, but it seems that as soon as you give people a taste of what it’s like to not be sovereign, to be a true subordinate on the eternal level, that’s when people seem to throw up all of their offenses against God, that He is free and can do whatever He pleases. It is in my opinion that this concept unlike any other concept really tests where your faith is. In my experience, most people (not all though) that struggle with this are also in some way struggling in their faith to some degree or another. This is not to say that every person who disagrees with this very Biblical concept is floundering in their faith, but it is to say that the people I have personally dealt with on this issue of God’s election, application of the atonement, etc., almost every one of them were struggling with their faith at some level. So basically, the theme of the Scrpitures is one of Monergism, that God does it all, that we are “dead in our sins” prior to faith, the faith that God gives us on His own agenda. This website is one of my favorite sites, I always learn something new, and it challenges me to always be loving Christ with all my heart in my time spent with Him personally, to love Him with all my mind in pursuing the knowledge of Christ through Biblical theological understanding, and to love Him with all my strength by putting hands and feet to my actions, behavior, and in every other way, to gloryify Christ because He is my lovely Savior.