Perseverance will pay off eventually

Regarding Ray Shelton's Community Commentary, "Another perspective on duty and service," on July 28: This commentary was so vitriolic I thought I was reading the Daily Worker of about 1950 ? and just as slanderous.

As Shelton seems very confused over the status of a nation at war, let us go over the basics. There is all the political difference in the world between a "nation in arms" of citizen soldiers conscripted by the state and a professional fighting force that consists of paid warriors who choose to be so. The policy of a democracy is immediately hemmed in when it has conscripted its citizens and sent them into battle.

No such limitation of policy applies when the force is one of professional warriors. If you take the king's shilling, then you fight the king's enemies. Who they are and why they are your enemy is not for you to worry about; being the province of your political bosses. Your job is to fight cleanly and defeat them. You are an extension of the state's foreign policy, its enforcer, and the protector of its interests. Anyone like Col. Mark MacCarley who has done that can say as a bare minimum, "I have done my duty," and be proud that he served his country. We are blessed to have men such as he today.

Shelton is wrong on a soldier's choice. The professional warrior serves at the behest of the state, and is headed for a court martial at best, or a firing squad at worst, for refusing to obey orders. Where he serves is not his choice. We are not willing to wait until the enemy is coming up the Hudson River, we prefer to fight on their territory, rather than ours, to protect ourselves.

We are the world's major power and our position is analogous to that of Britain in the days of Lord Palmerston when, as Britain's foreign secretary, he said: "Britain has no eternal friends, Britain has no eternal enemies, Britain only has eternal interests."

As for Shelton's "we can run away, and we should run away," well, this approach was used by Prime Minister William Gladstone on two occasions in the late 1800s. The first fiasco that resulted was only corrected by a massive expedition into the Sudan, and the second encouraged the Boer Republics to be intransigent, leading to the Boer War with all its casualties and destruction. Yes, "we can run away," but we had better not. (I apologize for having to get into such a basic history lesson.)

The problem we have today is going to last a long time, maybe 20 years. Being left behind by the world is empowering the radical religious elements from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas to assail the Western world wherever possible.

We can counter this and show the people a better life by being there. President George W. Bush has certainly put us there, and we have everything to lose by "running away." Perseverance will pay off eventually.