Monday, May 3, 2010

The War is HERE...and its Not a Revolution

In November of 2008 when my son’s brothers came home from Iraq I wrote this

“As we drove on Veteran’s Day I thought about how lucky the people in this country are to have the men and women of our military. Between it being Veterans day and where we were heading I had no choice but to see things from a perspective most Americans fail to look at. We drove without fear of IEDs. There were no check points. We could stop along the way and not fear snipers or suicide bombers. When we were hungry we had a multitude of options. And I knew without a doubt that these freedoms and this security are due fully to the fact we have such an outstanding group of people who made the choice to wear the uniform and defend these things.” http://knottiesniche.com/2008/11/16/theyre-home/

This past Saturday there was an attempted car bombing in New York. If they had succeeded the results would have been devastating. This is not the first attempt to set off a bomb in the US. There was the Underwear bomber last December. There was an attempt in Dallas last fall. There have been 2 shootings I know of that have cost lives carried out on US soil in the name of jihad in the past year. The Little Rock recruiting station shooting cost Pvt. Long his life. And 13 members of our military fell victim at Ft Hood last fall.

“Federal authorities arrested a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent Monday night on New York's Long Island in connection with the attempted Times Square car bombing, Fox News has learned.

The man was identified as Shahzad Faisal of Connecticut.” He was a naturalized citizen..not home grown as some may say. He was what some call a sleeper cell.
Tomorrow the DHS will say the system worked because he was arrested. The TSA stopped him trying to leave the country. But that is a lie. If the system had worked he would have been stopped returning from his recent trip to Pakistan and the bomb he failed to detonate properly would never have been parked in Times Square. The system failed once again… inept terrorists are not a success of our National Security system. How long before one of these "unsophisticated" terrorist get lucky and manage to detonate their bomb?

I can no longer have the mind set I have in November of 2008. I can no longer feel secure that the war is not on our shores because our military has kept it contained. I don’t blame the military for this. I understand that their ability to do their job has been very limited in the past year. I also understand that in the name of diplomacy that our government has emboldened our enemy. I know also that the American public at large is so oblivious to the reality of the threat against our nation they do not demand that actions be taken to better protect us and stop our enemy.

It’s a sad day when we in the US have to start worrying about car bombs, suicide bombers, IEDs, and EFPs . It’s a sad thing that so many other countries already do but I never thought I would see the day that the US became so weak that we would allow an enemy this much free reign in on our own soil.

At what point do we as a nation realize this is no longer a war being fought “over there”?

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