Austin Bay thinks that Time Magazine naming "The American Soldier" as Person of the Year doesn't go nearly far enough. Amen.
Person of the Year should be the first in a crescendo of honors. Frankly, the grand accolade U.S. GIs have earned is the Nobel Peace Prize.Posted by Alan at December 26, 2003 08:01 AMPeaceniks perish the thought? It's high time, actually. Pacifists didn't liberate Nazi concentration camps, American GIs and British Tommies did. This past year, U.S. Central Command and crack line units like the Army's Third Infantry Division did far more to promote and secure real peace and justice on this broken and brutalized planet Earth than decades of posturing peace marches and thousands of toothless U.N. declarations deploring dictators and genocide.
In the raw mathematics called body count, dropping Saddam's fascist death machine saved 50,000 to 60,000 Iraqi lives -- the innocents his henchmen would have slain during 2003 while the United Nations fiddled and France burned with anti-American ressentiment.
Iraqis freed of Saddam's moment-by-moment terror know American GIs brought that blessing, belated as it is.
It is an intricate, complex paradox that warriors waging just war are the source of a more resilient peace.
via the Houston Chronicle