1 Response to Professor Sterio’s Letter to the Editor on Proposed ISIS Strikes Published in Plain Dealer

1. Alan Jay Rom says:

   September 18, 2014 at 2:45 pm

   Dear Professor Sterios, You sent a very good letter. After yesterday’s vote, I sent a thank you email to my representative, Rep. Niki Tsongas. She voted against the funding.

   Dear Congresswoman Tsongas,

   I want to thank you for your vote today against this administration’s unfortunate foreign foray that is doomed to failure. Each president thinks that, “if only it had been done like this…” and then they proceed to make the same mistakes their predecessors made and young men and women pay for that mistake with their lives. There are any number of lessons we should have learned from Vietnam, but one of them is that you can’t go in “surgically” and take out a particular “cancer.” If you are making a commitment, it has to be like the one made when we went into WWII – to win -with no withdrawal date until it is won. And in the case of the Mid-East, that date is “never.” But the other lesson is about what it is we are to win. Vietnam taught us (or should have) that we should not get involved in someone else’s civil war, or in the case of the Mid-East – a tribal war. Those disputes have been going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and we cannot solve other people’s cultural and historical problems. While we can play a diplomatic role, the people who live there themselves have to find a solution they can live with – nothing else will work and the proof of this exists throughout the Mid-East and elsewhere. Those are only two lessons. A third lesson is that if the conflict is so important, where is the rest of the world? Why should we be fighting wars we deem important if those who live in the area don’t take it seriously to be involved with “boots on the ground?” We should not be, as the song goes, “cops of the world.” When an issue is so important that it affects global stability, the rest of the world should be as concerned as we are and join together. Now they have no incentive for, in their view, “the Americans will do it [the dirty work].” The so-called “coalition of the willing” is as much a joke now as it was when President Bush first used it. What do these presidents think we are – fools? Just as people of my generation opposed and refused to go to Vietnam, I can only hope that the young men and women now will refuse to fight President Obama’s foolish war (and it is now his; the blame can no longer be put on President Bush). Though you may not have used the same words, I thank you for your act of voting against this grievous mistake. Sincerely, Alan Jay Rom

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