Why?

From Lt. Smash

I'm here because there is a hole in the ground in New York, where a couple of the world's tallest buildings used to be.

I'm here because I knew some of those people in the Pentagon.

I'm here because my seven-year-old nephew has nightmares about terrorists.

I'm here because whether Saddam is responsible or not for those terrorist attacks, he has the will and is developing the means to do much, much worse.

I'm here because if History teaches us anything, it is that evil men cannot be deterred by sanctions, containment strategies, diplomacy, resolutions, or weapons inspections.

I'm here because I don't believe in appeasement.

I'm here because someone has to be.

This concise and moving argument from a serving soldier leaves no room for evasion. That is why he is there. That is why we support him and his comrades.

May they achieve their purpose soon and return home safely.

Do they all know why they're there?

I read that a marine said that if a bunch of people had come to his hometown and did to them what he had been doing to Iraqis, he wouldn't be too happy about it either. As though the two situations are morally indistinguishable. They don't all get it, do they? Could this adversely affect what they're doing?

There's always a few

We don't know how representative that Marine is - or the context in which he said that. From everything else I've seen, the soldiers in general seem to have a remarkably coherent and nuanced take on the objectives of the war and its moral basis. Of course there are always the weird people on the far edges of any Gaussian distribution, like this guy. But my guess is that they are vanishingly few

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