Copyright Ó
2001-2005 by Rodney G. Graves, all rights reserved.
The Rebirth of Empire
13 September 2001
On September 11th, 2001, the Republic gave
birth to the Empire.
It wasn’t planned.
It wasn’t desired. It
was forced on us by necessity.
Through our recorded history this has never
been a peaceful planet. There
has never been a calendar year in which a war was not being fought
somewhere. Many have been small, and have escaped worldwide notice.
Only a few have demanded the attention of the majority of the
planet.
Since the end of the Second World War, the
United States has limited itself to conflicts of containment and reversal.
The wisdom of this approach is open to question.
During that period a new form of warfare has
evolved. Just as the
Guerrilla (Spanish for Little War) evolved on the fringe of more
conventional wars, only to become mainstream itself, so has terrorism
emerged as a new mode.
The key is that both the “Little War” and
the war of terror are wars.
When a Nation State goes to war, different
rules apply.
The United States now finds itself at war with
forces which believe they can strike at will, with impunity, from beyond
our borders without fear of consequences.
Nations and organizations which rightly fear the might of the
United States support and succor these forces as a way to evade the
consequences of making war on us directly.
One of the primary reasons Nations go to war is
to protect their citizens and their interests by demonstrating that
engaging in war like acts against them carries a cost too high to be
borne. Nations which fail to
demonstrate this will eventually are absorbed by their neighbors.
A Nation which allows terrorists to dictate the rules of engagement
will be a Nation in name only, and not even that for long.
The United States must resolve to fight an
unlimited war against the forces which have committed this act of war
against us, and against every group and nation which has been an accessory
to this act, whether before or after the act.
We must settle for nothing less than the
un-conditional surrender or utter destruction of every individual,
organization, and nation which has been a party to this act of war.
Such a war will not be quick. It will be long and bloody.
It will exceed the horrors of the Second World War.
And its successful prosecution will be no less essential to freedom
and liberty than was the Second World War.
Declaring victory and walking off will not
suffice.
We will become an Empire.
Not because we want to. We
will become an Empire of necessity, because we cannot trust the enemies we
will have to conquer to rebuild themselves without close supervision.
We will not be refocusing a pair of formerly civilized nations
which fell temporarily into madness, we will be instilling civilization
into barbarians. It will be a
long, arduous, and un-appreciated task.
We will rediscover the burden that Kipling
warned us about as we assumed responsibility for the Philippines more than
a century ago. That
experience should inform us, but it will be a pale shadow of the
challenges we will have to overcome.
Nor will the rest of the world much care for what we must set
ourselves to do. The
questions, challenges, and affronts we have received for years in the
United Nations will pale to insignificance when compared to the howls this
new Imperium will evince.
We dare not shrink to less.
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