Doug Riddle's Comments and Thoughts on the War Against Terror:

   What is "Enduring Freedom" actually about? Why do we find ourselves faced with the attacks we are facing? Why do we have our soldiers in harm's way? To answer those questions we need to answer other questions.
 
   Why do they hate us? Why do all of the extremists seem to come from Islam? Why can't they see we are trying to help? Why would someone burn and loot their own neighborhoods if they are mad at us? What can we do, what must we do, to protect our children and our society from this madness?
 
   Desperation is a more powerful force than almost anything else in the world. Desperate people can rip car doors off to save a loved one. Desperate people can go mad and suddenly enter an office building and start killing former friends and coworkers. Desperate people are dangerous. A country full of desperate people is a wellspring of the full spectrum of human emotions and reactions. From Calcutta we got Mother Teresa. From Post WW I Europe we got Hitler. From Afghanistan and the Middle East we get terrorists.
 
   When I bought my house the back fence was impossible to see. Along my back fence I had poison Ivy and the most persistent collection of noxious weeds, trash bushes and vines you could imagine. My land backs up to a small creek and stand of forest in southern Louisiana. I tried every type of poison you can imagine. I tried fire. Nothing worked. I could clear it from my side of the fence, but within weeks the curse was back. I poured a small fortune into this endeavor. Then I faced facts. The environment back there was beating me. These plants were adapted to it, and it was fostering their growth.
 
   I altered the environment. The analogy breaks down beyond that point, but the approach was the same. I dug up the dirt, killed the roots, trimmed back the overhead trees to let in some light and planted beneficial vines and dense growth of my own choosing. The fence area is still a wilderness, but now it produces blackberries and pretty flowers and the trash vines are no longer around.
 
   As I said, the analogy breaks down, but the approach is similar. To stop the extremism, we need to alter the environment to remove the desperation. Poverty, ignorance, and oppression breed extremism like rotted flesh breeds disease. Remove the desperation and you remove the environment that fosters the terrorists. Therein lies the rub.
 
   How do you raise an entire region out of poverty and ignorance? Worse, how do you raise an entire region out of poverty and ignorance when many of their governments and many of their religious organizations depend on the poverty and ignorance to remain in power? If the governments and institutions of the area convince large portions of the populations in the area that you are evil and your purpose is evil, how can you help the people? If the institutions do not aid your efforts to raise these people out of ignorance and poverty, how can you change the environment?
 
   I do not ask these questions to point out the difficulty of the problem. I ask them to highlight the solution. Are the desperate people the problem? Is a man who has become so angry because of the squalor and the poverty his brothers, sisters, parents and children have to live and die in that he has snapped the problem? Is the mother that buries child after child, whose heart has swelled with hate, the real problem? Is the little boy who has watched his family be brutalized to blame for the rocks he throws? Is the teenager to blame when he joins the militia to fight those whom his trusted institutions say are to blame? Tired of watching the fear in his mother's eyes, tired of starving and dying by inches he lashes out in anger, and they are ready for him. These institutions of misery have a target.
 
   Listen to their messages: Do not hate your government, who keeps you in poverty. Do not hate your teachers who waste your resources. Do not hate the thugs and heretics who oppress you. Hate the West. Hate the others. They are not like you. They do not worship your God. They are evil. Hate them. They are successful; it must be by stealing from you. Kill them. That will solve your problems. Hate them, it will feed your family and get you into heaven.
 
   Who are our targets? Is it that hard to see? No, it is that hard to say out loud. Speaking it out loud makes it too real. They will not go willingly. The governments and institutions that maintain this evil environment will fight to keep what they have. They will make it a war. They will make it ugly and horrible. Some of them actually believe the poison they preach. Being sincere only makes them more dangerous. They do not think of themselves as monsters. To them we are the monsters. We cannot ignore the evil they do because they are well intentioned and far away. We cannot ignore them if they are a lesser evil than some others and have helped us in the past.
 
   The problem is that the world has grown small. It is no longer possible to ignore the evil across the world. Globalization is a fact. It is not a movement to protest, it is reality. Protesting the corporations that do business globally is like blaming the fish for the ocean. Our borders are impossible to guard, too much passes through them to check. Too many people come and go to track them all. The only way for us all to be safe is to remake the trouble spots into something that fosters good conditions for the people who live there. Give the people there something good to live for and the resources to maintain a decent standard of living and they will protect themselves. If they have true peace and freedom, so will we all.
 
   If we do not remove the totalitarian governments, eradicate the poverty, educate the ignorant and contain the population growth in the desperate places on the planet, we will never know peace, much less safety.
 
   Sadly, just reading that last sentence shows we cannot have peace without fighting battle after battle in a terrible and drawn out war. We will have to fight in the schools and religious centers for their hearts and minds. We will have to fight in the fields to grow food instead of drugs. We will have to fight in the streets and mountains to topple the governments, institutions and thugs that profit from human misery. We will have to fight with economics to strangle the growth of the factories of human misery and promote efforts to bring prosperity.
 
   We, you and I, will probably not know peace. If we are diligent and thorough, our descendents will know peace. It will not last forever. Strife is part of the human condition. That does not mean that we should not fight this war though. We have no choice. We cannot and must not tolerate governments, institutions and people using children, women and the elderly as pawns. Victimizing the defenseless is intolerable. All the people of the world must be fed, educated, and given a way to raise and feed a family. Unless this is accomplished the four horsemen will continue to ride. Fear, Famine, War and Pestilence will visit these people time and time again, and as often as the desperate can make it happen they will visit us as well. You can saddle up and ride against them, or you can saddle up and ride with them. If you stand still they will run you down.
 
   President George W. Bush has recognized the problem. He and his advisors and staff see the full scope of the problem. It is time for America to turn off the twenty-four hour newscasts and settle in for the long haul. This is going to take time. This war will cost lives, money and a lot of each. The road we are marching down will be dark and frightening. The risk is terrific. The struggle will be horrible. The alternative is chaos. The ultimate reward is a better world. From the start of this endeavor it is hard to see the outcome. We must have faith. We must be patient. We must be determined. We must be diligent. We must be courageous.
 
   We can no longer simply enjoy the freedoms that others purchased for us. It is time for us to defend our freedoms, and to give them to others who need them. One day they will repay the purchase by defending their freedoms and extending them to others. Saddle up America it is time to ride!