Questions for War Protestors

If you are a war protestor, I think you have to ask yourself a couple of questions if you want to be intellectually honest. The first question would be, "Could my actions possibly prolong war, and thereby contribute to more deaths by offering aid and comfort to an enemy whose best hope is a bloody stalemate? Am I making the situation better or worse?" No American government, not even a John Kerry government, is going to cut and run from the places our military is currently engaged. It is also now a known fact that the anti-war movement in the late 1960's and early 1970's boosted the morale of a nearly defeated North Vietnam after Tet, and that boost of morale allowed the North to continue to fight the war. Are your protests today telling our enemies that if they shed enough blood, that sooner or later the rest of us will get worn down by you protestors and we will all want out? If so, realize that you are prolonging this war. If we subdue the opposition in Iraq, we will go about our rebuilding and leave. If the opposition remains agitated, blood will continue to flow for quite some time before we decide to leave.

The second question you need to ask yourself is "Do I really care if war comes to an end, or do I just want to see the United States lose?" I suspect a small number of you outright want to see the U.S. lose. I also suspect a large number of you think that this is all about peace, but if you look down deep inside you'll find that you are cheering for our enemies. For some of you, that may be sobering. For the rest of you, that realization leads to my next point.

Protesting war during a time of war is an extremely self indulgent action. There are many different reasons people do it. Some do it because it's an easy social group for them to fit into, and they don't have the greatest of social skills. If you say you are against war, you automatically fit in with this group. The socially uneasy then tend to conform to the group think, which is set by the most radical of protestors. Some people do it because they realize that war protesting can be a means to an end. Take John Kerry for example. The road less traveled, the road that would have required the greatest leadership in 1970 would have been to say "We are doing the right thing for South Vietnam. We are sparing them from the brutal dictatorship of a communist government." Instead, Kerry went the easy route, taking the popular opinion amongst his age group, and he became the mouth piece for it. He did not care of the consequences of his actions, he just knew that this was a quick route to national prominence, because protest leaders get a lot of airtime. Others do it because they have ulterior motives. For an example of that, look at ANSWER and its communist ties. Very few do it because they are truly pacifists. In turn, the protests cost lives, prolong wars, and generally produce results counter to the stated intentions, namely ending war and death. The time to protest a war in hope of actually achieving results is before the war. Once the war has begun, protesting does little but make things worse for everyone involved but yourself.