Uncle Charles Flannery and the author

I remember as if it were yesterday my Mom crying, a soulful wound torn open upon hearing that my Dad’s brother, Charles, died of internal bleeding because years earlier he’d been shot in World War II.

President Woodrow Wilson’s promise that World War I was the war to end all wars didn’t prevent World War II.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in WWII, said, “There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.”

We could therefore erect no finer memorial to our war dead than to rededicate our nation to peace.

Eisenhower, in his farewell address in 1960, told the nation, “We must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”  It is past time for us to reconsider his advice.

Our wars since World War II have been about property – the differences by and between communism, socialism and capitalism.  Also about ethnicity – over nationality, color, religion and region.

The nation state now caught in the congressional and executive cross-hairs is Syria.

We insist our wars are honorable because we are fighting for individual freedom but those we would “save” all too often recoil at the definition of “freedom” we seek to impose. Continue reading →