For us, we are keenly aware 60% of the American public said it was a “bad war.” We know it cost the American taxpayer $800 billion. We know there were 4,500 dead and 35,000 wounded. We know this because we dressed their many wounds, and we recovered their bodies as if they were our own family member. The sacrifice I personally witnessed from my fellow Marines will never be erased from my memory.

There were Marines like Lcpl. Peter Sora. We became friends during temporary recruiting duty in 2004. Sora volunteered to go on an optional deployment to Iraq, but he never made it there. He was killed in a training accident in 29 Palms, CA. Then there were other Marines like Sgt. Chris Hrbek. Hrbek slept in the top bunk next to my rack in recruit training. We spent many nights talking and sharing stories out of the drill instructor’s earshot. Hrbek was killed in January, 2010 by an IED while on a dismounted foot patrol. One month earlier, on Christmas Eve 2009, Hrbek saved his Battalion Sgt. Major who had lost both of his legs in an IED strike. Hrbek was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star.

Any story of unselfish sacrifice would be incomplete without mentioning Lcpl. Michael Glover and Capt. John McKenna. Mike was a second-year law student at Pace University when he volunteered to go to Iraq . John was Mike’s platoon commander and loved by all of his Marines. On August 16, 2006, Mike was mortally wounded by a sniper in Fallujah. Knowing his Marine was hit, John unselfishly braved a barrage of small-arms fire to recover his fallen Marine and was killed in the process. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for his courage. Weeks earlier, John and Mike had responded to a call of another wounded Marine. That Marine was me.

Then there are other stories for which medals were never presented but nevertheless demonstrated selfless devotion and love for their fellow Marines. Stories like Sgt. Jeffrey Dube, who stood on a rooftop alone after a fellow Marine was wounded to ward off a counterattack. Others like Sgt. Alex Alabachian, who pulled fellow Marines from a burning vehicle and then used his body as a human shield. These are only a few of the many stories I witnessed, and are counted among thousands of other stories of Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, and Airmen of the Iraq War. As long as those who were there carry breath in our lungs, these stories and their memories will never be forgotten. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he who shed his blood with me, will always be my brother.

“America is powerful, has more money, but we are lions here. Lions have the habit of not liking strangers getting into their house.”
Hamid Karzai

There is an old saying that the “old lion” Karzai needs to become familiar with, “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

Americans are sick and tired of this miscreant Afghan leader. I have never seen a country more deserving of Taliban control than Afghanistan. These people were living in squalor when we got there and will continue to do so long after we are gone. America has lost treasure and valuable lives to this moonscape of a country. After all troops are gone it will be back to the Taliban “good old days” of lopping off heads and generalized terror keeping the leaders and people in line with their demented philosophy.

What’s really aggravating is our political leaders continually trying to convince us that this country is our friend when it couldn’t be further from the truth. Friends have a genuine appreciation and respect for the help that they receive from friends. This cozying up to Karzai and his cave-dwelling thugs is repugnant and needs to stop. Afghanistan appears to be content with remaining in the days of yesteryear foregoing modern civilization in the 21st century.

One more old saying that Hamid Karzai might want to familiarize himself with, “be careful what you wish for…”

And while we’re at it, just who are these rebel forces that are poised to overthrow Gaddafi? What kind of government will they bring to bear on Libya? Will it be the democracy that the White House administration is looking for?

There are many unanswered questions and Barack Obama fell short on making his case to the American people during last night’s speech.

The epitome of a pencil-neck geek with zero combat experience McNamara tried to wage a war in which he knew nothing about. He set about controlling the war in a Washington back room with computers, statistics, and analyses while young Americans were fed into a meat grinder of hot, steamy jungles on the other side of the world resulting in over 58,000 deaths. For all of his brilliance and well-intentions his misguided calculations embroiled this nation into a tumultuous decade of unprecedented protests and unrest while propagating a war in a country that few Americans had ever heard of and knew even less of the reasons why we were there.

Prior to McNamara’s appointment as Secretary of Defense he was the President of the Ford Motor Company. It suffices to say the country would have been better off if he had stayed with Ford. At least he would only have been guilty of the possible death of a bad car design. As a graduate of UC Berkley it is ironic that this alumnus would stir up the student body decades later into a fervor of turmoil.

It is reported that McNamara died in his sleep at 93 years old. Thousands of young Americans were cut down in the prime of their life bleeding and dying from horrific wounds in the mud and stench of Vietnam jungles. They were not given the opportunity to die from old age but were sacrificed for political gain and some warped sense of a communist domino theory. Vietnam is still a communist country and if you check your clothing you may find a “Made in Vietnam” tag attached on the inside. Little comfort to those that died there, were wounded or were scorned by an ungrateful nation upon their return. Hopefully lessons were learned but history has a way of repeating itself.

For whatever good Robert McNamara might have done on this Earth it was overshadowed by his inept mismanagement of the Vietnam debacle. It’s easy to despise a man when he’s living, not so easy when he is dead and gone. Maybe it’s best to bury the contempt along with the man.

The fact is the 3,100 Americans who were killed on 9/11 were killed before there was a Guantanamo. The recruits who were going into Iraq were going into Iraq long before Guantanamo was, was a serious factor. The people fighting today in Pakistan are fighting Pakistanis. The people–the Taliban who’s fighting in Afghanistan, they’re not running around using Guantanamo. They’re running around using the existence of America. One of the terrorists in Guantanamo recently threw his television down and broke it because he had a picture of a woman with bare arms. I think we are kidding ourselves about who these terrorists are and we’re kidding ourselves about the power of this. Guantanamo matters because in America and Europe the left has decided the matter. So let’s build a brand-new facility. Tell me how it will be different from Guantanamo and tell me how many weeks it would take before it became the new symbol that was attacked because you’re still going to be holding people in prison, they’re still going to be isolated.
~Newt Gingrich on “Meet the Press”

The alternative to incarcerating enemy combatants would be to exterminate them on the battlefield. If holding them anywhere is such a focal point then let’s not hold them at all. Would this be a more palatable option for the people that are opposed to Guantanamo Bay? Where is the evidence that the United States is less safe because of the existence of Gitmo?

“Guantanamo is not the only reason that inspires terrorism around the world against the United States. But let’s be honest about it, since 9/11 we have seen al-Qaeda become a global franchise. And their recruitment tool, the one that they’re using repeatedly, is the detention techniques used by the United States at specifically Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”
~Senator Dick Durbin on “Meet the Press”

Recruitment tool Senator? Where’s your evidence? Did our troops confiscate a recruiting poster that indicated this? Now there is talk of moving detainees from the tropical island base of Guantanamo Bay to a United States federal super-max prison. Tropical paradise to super-max lockdown. Wouldn’t this further infuriate Muslim extremists?

It would appear that there is no satisfying solution to this problem.

That being the case then why not just keep Gitmo open for business?

“The record is clear: rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security.”

“It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it.”
~Barack Obama during an address on national security at the National Archives in Washington

The assertion that we are less safe and American national security has been weakened because of enemy prisoners being incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay is a ludicris conclusion concocted from a baseless assessment and lack of evidence. There should be no question that releasing enemy combatants back into the wild or holding them in any other prison would result in further American casualties and a weakening of national security. Furthermore, the ideology that suggests if we did not mistreat captured enemy combatants then our captured military would not be mistreated cannot be substantiated. There are no American POW’s to test this theory. Taliban and Al-Qaeda extremism is not based on Barack Obama’s perceived utopian philosophy and principles. Until now our military members and citizens that have been captured were either rescued or suffered brutal torture before being killed.

Obama was given a round of applause when mentioning that it was he who was responsible for ending enhanced interrogation. Does this mean that national security is now stengthened? Time for the history lesson. The terrorist attacks on our country occurred prior to enhanced interrogation. Daniel Pearl was beheaded prior to enhanced interrogation. Now exactly how will our country be safer with discontinuing the practice of enhanced interrogation?

“When an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.”

“Our government prevented attacks and saved lives. Only detainees of the highest intelligence value were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“The president will find upon reflection that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come,”
~Dick Cheney in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute

We as Americans should be grateful that Dick Cheney is stepping forward and defending the policies that have kept us safe from further attacks since September 11, 2001. This is a thorn in the side of Democrats who have never been able to dispute this fact much to their chagrin. To see these policies overturned by the Obama administration to satisfy nothing more than political promises and appease a select few attempts to perpetrate a false sense of security to the citizens of our nation.

This speech from the President today falls far short from achieving convincing evidence that our country has been weakened by the Guantanamo Bay prison and that our security would be enhanced by closing this facilty and dispersing the enemy within.

Would not any prison anywhere that contains captured combatants of the United States result in the same “rallying cry”? Will our warriors now adopt the practice of catch and release on the battlefield for fear of offending and enraging our enemies if captured alive and put in confinement? This would effectively end the care and feeding of detainees which would in turn greatly increase our national security under Obama’s theory.