Tim Wildmon
AFA president
November-December 2002 – As I sat in front of the television set at the age of eight, I had questions. They were about the evening news and what Walter Cronkite was showing and telling us about what American soldiers were doing in a faraway place called Vietnam. The pictures were of bombs exploding, Vietnamese people running around terrified and our men being taken away on stretchers, bloodied, mangled and sometimes dead. I will never forget watching those daily television news reports from Vietnam. It was my first introduction to war and some of the questions that surround it. I reflected back on this recently while visiting the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. where the names of over 50,000 American men and women are enshrined.
There are very few people who don’t believe that our freedom and our way of life are worth defending, with military force if necessary. I know there are some folks known as “pacifists” who don’t believe that anything is worth fighting for, but their numbers are minimal. I have always been perplexed with the idea of pacifism, because if everyone converted to their way of thinking, then we would not have a country, much less a free one, which – irony of ironies – protects a pacifist’s right to be what he is. In truth, pacifists enjoy the hard won fruits of freedom, without having to risk anything.
However, if you subscribe to the ideal that some things are worth fighting for, and the vast majority of us do, then questions naturally follow. Why are we fighting? Is it worth potentially losing the lives of our troops? The word “troops” doesn’t sound right to me. Sounds cold and detached. Better put and more to the point – is the war worth losing your neighbor’s son, or your sister’s daughter? Or how about your own flesh and blood? And in the name of what might they die? It seems to me, that’s really how we have to think about going to war.
So what do we make of Saddam Hussein and Iraq? Does his potential threat merit an all-out war? President George W. Bush has been attempting to make the case for a war –which would basically be carried out by the USA – against this tyrant and his army.
Basically what President Bush is saying is this: Saddam Hussein is – now or will be soon – capable of killing a lot of innocent people, including Americans, and we’d better do something about it now or risk paying a heavy, heavy price later. The question on this matter really comes down to this: Do we trust President Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld on this one, or don’t we? I do. You may have reasons not to, but for now you are in a minority.
When contemplating this question of war, of life and death, I thank God every day that Bill Clinton is no longer in the White House. By the time he and the people’s furniture walked out of the White House and he had pocketed Marc Rich’s pardon bribe, even most Democrats didn’t trust a word he spoke. Just think, if we had a president in office right now with shifty eyes and a forked tongue telling us things with his fingers crossed behind his back. With respect to leadership, being able to trust what someone is telling you is essential.
Some argue this potential war is about oil. Although I don’t think this is first and foremost about oil, you know what? We need oil. America has to have oil. Say we shouldn’t fight for oil, do you? Do you like driving your car? How about heating your home? If we don’t have a constant supply of oil, our economy and way of life will be severely damaged. So in that sense, oil is worth fighting for. I have a friend who says – tongue-in-cheek, but barely – in exchange for protecting Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War and with our military presence now, we should just go over there and draw a line in the sand, literally, about halfway through the country, stick up an American flag and call it America-East, if you will. Or Saudi America, if you like. He says that would solve a lot of our oil concerns.
But, seriously, America – we are the good guys on the world stage today. The lone superpower willing to live in peace if unprovoked. That’s not to say we don’t make mistakes. We have and we will again. But show me another country that liberates the likes of Afghanistan from the ruthless Taliban while at the same time sending food, medicine, clothing, and cash to the people there who have little or nothing. I’ve said it before and I’ll write it again.
The free enterprise system and representative government undergirded with the Christian value system is without question far superior to all other cultures or ways of life. What AFA is about is defending and, hopefully advancing, that Christian value system which has given America its solid foundation for so long, but which is under siege on so many fronts.
Faith, family, and freedom are worth fighting for, both on the domestic public policy front and on the physical battlefield if necessary. 
