May 15, 2004

Dear Mr. President:

As I have watched the events of the last few weeks unfold, I have pondered two important lessons from our nations warring history and I would like to share them with you. One is from Vietnam and the other from the conclusion of the Pacific War of WWII.

Vietnam shall be the first up. I was a young man during that conflict, younger even than you were. Young enough that service there was never a real possibility for me. But one thing seems painfully obvious to me from that war, even though I viewed it with such young eyes. The only force on earth capable of beating the United States Military is the will of the people of the United States. It seems to me that Bin Laden and the powers that be in Iraq have learned this lesson well. They have accused us of being soft, and we are looking more and more so. No longer are we so soft that dragging our dead soldiers through the streets goes unanswered; thanks largely to your policy. Our public; however, appears to be so soft that it has lost its taste for sacrifice. If we are indeed that soft, we will lose.

I have said since 9/11, that if you have made a mistake in all of this it has been in telling us early on to "go back to work" and to "get on with our lives." I seem to recall you using those very phrases in speeches later in 2001. This is our war, not just the government's war! We all sacrifice - we lose fathers and brothers and sisters and friends, heroes all. We are not all combatants, or intelligence officers, or government officials, but we should all be warriors.

It is up to you as the leader of this nation to fire us up -- to ignite our warrior spirit. Right now, your political opponents, aided seemingly by television and major print press, are trying to quench that warrior spirit. You must fight back, hard. When I feel my spirit sag, I visit a web site featuring images on 9/11, and every time, after the tears comes the rage -- comes the desire to destroy those that would do such a thing, and the capability for others to do it again.

One would hope that the horrific images of Nick Berg's slaughter would ignite the same passion, but alas they do not. Those images are on too small and too personal a scale. It is too easy to remove those images from their context and be left with a brutal and barbaric crime. They might excite revenge killing, but not a war.

If you wish to ignite that warrior spirit, I think you can start with the 9/11 images. Address the nation, show on your time that which the press will not show on its time. Return then to the rhetoric of enemy and evil. The liberation of Iraq is but a by-product of the destruction of the evil therein. An immensely valuable by-product to be sure, but to focus on that instead of the actual product dampens the warrior spirit.

The press is fond of saying that you sound like a preacher. Now more than ever we need you to preach. Preaching is not just about imparting information -- it is about raising emotions and lifting spirits. Do it now, Do it well.

As to the second lesson I have pondered this week, I am reminded that we have once before warred against suicidal fanaticism. Of course, I speak of the Japanese. Now truly, that was a nationalistic fanaticism and not the religious fanaticism we now face, but effectively they are the same. Fanaticism produces the desire to fight long after the war is lost and regardless of the perceived cost.

Ultimately, we defeated the Japanese because we raised the cost of fighting to levels previously unimaginable. With the atomic weapons we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a new reality became apparent to them -- we could destroy them so utterly there would be nothing left from which to rebuild. Continuing to fight did not entail an overwhelming cost; it would result in total and complete annihilation.

While your efforts to spare the average Iraqi the effects of this war as much as possible are admirable, they are hurting us. There are no average Iraqis. You yourself said early on after 9/11 that anyone who is not for us is for the terrorists. The efforts of the insurgents/terrorists in Iraq are on too large a scale to be invisible from the nearby public. If that public does not tell us about those movements and give us the opportunity to fight the immediate enemy, then that public becomes the enemy as well. After sufficient warning and opportunity to do the right thing, overwhelming force should be the order of the day.

If I could sum up what I am trying to say here Mr. President it is that war is an all or nothing proposition. Anytime we try to restrain it, or put boundaries around we create an opening that the enemy can exploit. The more fanatical the enemy, the more willing they will be to ignore their own restraints and boundaries to exploit that opening. Our military is well able to win any war and remain within the bounds of civility, but they must be allowed to fight to the full extent of their capabilities. Restraint only produces frustration - which may account at least in part of the ugliness at Abu Graib.

A friend of my family and business associate of my father's was a guy by the name of Burt Servass. Burt was very active in Republican circles, served as President of the Indianapolis City/County Council nearly forever, and was a good friend of Richard Nixon. When it came to employees Burt used to say "You fire them, then you help them." I think a paraphrase of those words may apply here as well, "First you conquer them, then you help them rebuild."

Perhaps the religious analogy would work best. You know well the recreation possible only in Jesus. But to achieve that recreation, we must first "be crucified with Christ." Good newness can only come out of the utter destruction of the old badness. Our spirit of sin must be broken before the Holy Spirit can fill us. So perhaps it is with a nation such as Iraq. We must break them completely before they can rebuild democratically.

Given what I am seeing from Iraq, we may have won the war, but we have not conquered the people. I am beginning to think that conquest is necessary to achieve our ultimate goal of a democratic Iraq. It will be ugly and painful, but necessary.

God Bless you Mr. President. I pray for you daily. Stay the course.