WASN'T THAT LONG AGO . . .

No one who was alive that day will ever forget where they were. I was in Springfield, Virginia - not far from DC - I believe I have written about it before. Oddly, I am on my way to Springfield today. Work, and a writing project that is nearing completion, has kept me very busy this past six months but this date cannot slip by without a mark of acknowledgement, and respect.

Our reaction was terrible, extremely violent and swift - the way it should be, in proportion to as horrible was the casus belli. But even from the start, the ten thousand pound gorilla in the room was the knowledge that we should not let ourselves get tied down into a conflict that involved taking and holding real estate - this is not a conventional war, And yet, we did just that. The concept of a series of pin point raids to kill people and break things - "Do unto others then split" - was too primitive for Western sentiments, despite the effectiveness of these kind of counter-guerrilla tactics. Western ethos demanded that we go in and put a bandaid on the people we had just steamrollered. And so we got what CNN in the second week of the war prematurely called 'quagmire'. And since 2012, when our national leadership decided to take our bat and ball and go home, an insidious evil decided to fill the vacuum left behind.

Unconventional war is difficult to visualize, especially for the untrained - military and civilian alike. A historical example would be if, after three long years of struggle in the Korean War - and 50,000+ casualties - having fought the enemy to a standstill at the 38th Parallel, we packed up and left the South Koreans to themselves.

As in nature, geopolitics hates a vacuum. In such a scenario, the North Koreans and their Chinese sponsors would have gleefully spilled over the DMZ and in a matter of weeks undone all the hard work of the United States, RoK and UN allies; certainly less than the three years it took us to sort out their initial invasion. As it was, during the sixty-two years since the armistice, the North Korean Communists have continued to commit extremely lethal acts of terrorism and outright acts of war. And yet nobody denies that the US presence in South Korea has ensured the kind of security required for the Korean economic miracle to unfold.

We left such a vacuum behind in Iraq, and a determined enemy emerged to fill it. The sea change came when we changed the name from the Global War on Terror to "Overseas Contingency Operations". Sadly, we let our eye slip off the ball . . .

The Islamic State now has a safe haven and resources of which al Qaeda in 2001 could only have dreamed. Every day we lazily, arrogantly provoke them without finishing the job. No one should be surprised by the consequences, which are as predictable as they are terrible.
- Aaron MacLean, Manipulated Intel and the Kabuki War against the Islamic State

This is why we must never forget. We must also never forget that the stated objective of the Evil we are up against is to kill us all, and to make slaves of our children and women of child-bearing age.

STORMBRINGER SENDS