Look, let’s face it.

We’re going to go to war. The machine has been started and set on track, and stopping it is at this point virtually impossible. No one is going to debark tens of thousands of men and women and thousands of tons of materiel and then throw their hand up and go “Just Kidding!”

The Left in America and the West has done an immense disservice to their stated cause of peace by embracing a wooly “anything but war” stance instead of making any attempt to grapple head on with the problems that are presented by radical Islamism and the failed kleptocracies that are embracing it.

As a side note, “anything but war” neatly captures what I see as the failures of modern liberalism, which seems to only stand for “anything but…” a long list of things. But that’s another subject for another time.

I’m deeply conflicted by this war that’s coming soon; unlike my blog-mates, who seem to have pretty much made up their minds.

If this was Risk, or a war game, I’d be all for it. But I’d be for it for a different reason than the one you probably think; not because it wouldn’t involve real blood and death, I’d be for it because I knew we would stick it out. What I know about people tells me that they are good at sticking to things when the costs are low. But as any decent gambler can tell you, it takes heart and stomach to stay in when the stakes get significant and painful.

And this is not going to be a test of our arms; Trent and Joe have covered many of the reasons why in the blog below. This is absolutely going to be a test of our stomach and heart, and I am worried about both of those.

It’s not even a question of whether to go to war.

As I’ve said before, I think we’re in a war; in an anti-modern, anti-Western war led by elements of our own intelligencia on one hand, and by the enraged, disenfranchised population of parts of the Third World, led by dictators who find that railing against America buys them time to loot their countries by selling their natural resources and moving the money to Switzerland or Panama.

And we really have no clue how to respond. Oh, we’ll go kick the hell out of whatever organized or semi-organized military forces are out there.

But then what?

It’s “Yes, but…” this and “Yes, but…” that and the only consistent vision of the Western-led future looks to many of the average people of the world a helluva lot like the masts of yachts seen from the outside of a marina fence littered by a stack of annual reports and deposit slips to Bermuda banks.

Our failure of vision and nerve has brought this about. We founded America to get the little guy out from under the thumb of the oppressive nobles, and instead of offering the average person in the rest of the world a path they could follow, we turned around and cut deals with their nobles so we could have cheap gas, Nikes, and chipboard. (I know, this is hyperbole, but I’m trying to make a point here…)

This isn’t some lame-ass “give peace a chance” argument; we are not at peace today, and if we brought all the soldiers home from the Middle East tomorrow and forced all the Jews out of Israel on the day after, we’d still be at war.

I’m standing here waving words in your face because if we are to shed American blood, I’d really like to feel like we’re getting something for it. And that something needs to be a lasting peace. And to accomplish that peace, we need to rediscover some basic American values in order to export them. It’s never really been done before. And we have no choice but try.

I’ve never been a soldier. Even my dad, who got medals in WWII, got them while sitting and basically running a Hollerith card-sorting machine over in India. He was a cryptographer in Army Intelligence (yeah, I read “Crytonomicon” pretty damn intently, thank you), and the only guns he ever saw were on the Rangers who were there to keep him and his peers “at least 200 miles from any known or suspected enemy activity”.

But I’ve been honored to know a fair number of soldiers…particularly of “pointed end of the stick” kind of guys who I’ve trained with and been trained by in my various martial hobbies. And I keep thinking about them and their attitudes as I try and figure out where I stand in this mess.

And the principle I keep coming back to is this: How do we make their sacrifice…of their own blood and of the blood of others they will have to shed…actually lead to a change? How do we do this in a way that won’t mean that we’ll be back next year, and the year after, and the year after that?

Because otherwise, we’re playing King Canute, lashing the tide as a demonstration of the limits of our worldly power. We can push back our enemies. We can weaken them. We can even kill them all, if it comes down to that.

But can we stick this out long enough to make peace with them? Or rather, to fight them hard enough and long enough and still have the stomach and heart to offer the average person on the ground in Tikrit or Jakarta something worth living for? Because that’s what it will take to have a chance that they will make peace with us.

This is uncharted territory. I can’t think of an example in modern history where it has worked.

I think we’ll readily win the clash of arms. But as the Israelis have discovered, I believe that this is more a war of stomach, heart, and backbone than one of arms.