Al Qaeda doesn’t care about Obama’s Cairo speech. They feel the same way about Americans regardless of whether one president is hosting a Palestinian terrorist at the White House more often than any other foreign leader, the next president has a Texas swagger and says “bring it on,” or the president after that apologizes for the alleged sins of our past and sets European hearts aflutter. During my year in Iraq, I looked into the eyes of more than one hundred Al Qaeda leaders and foot soldiers. What I saw was not an eager desire for “understanding” or “nuance” but an intense and focused love of death and destruction.
Our own soldiers don’t care that much about politics either. When I went to war, I figured I’d meet at least a few other political junkies. However, what I found were line troops who - with few exceptions - would rather watch ESPN than Fox or CNN and were only vaguely attuned to the political debates raging in Washington. The things that really mattered were the next mission, the next fight, and the next call home.
My entire life, I firmly believed the pen was mightier than the sword and that great armies moved under the inspiration of great men. Now, I’m not so sure. In one year, my small unit — an armored cavalry squadron of less than 1,000 men -- liberated hundreds of square miles of Diyala Province from the darkest evil. It was not stirring rhetoric that stopped AQI terrorists from torturing and beheading entire villages, or shooting children in the face to “send a message,” or imposing the worst forms of Sharia law while they spent their days high on drugs, raping women, and watching Turkish porn. It was not the pen that cleared mine-laden roads or brought the first signs of economic life to communities trapped in grinding poverty.
As long as Obama continues to draw the sword, I don’t care much what he says with his pen. It should humble our political classes to know that the important decisions— the actions that truly decide the fate of nations — are made by Americans who care more about the NBA playoffs than a speech on the floor of the Senate, who rarely watch a cable news broadcast, and for whom Facebook is the lifeline for all the news that truly matters . . . of first steps, birthday parties, and little league baseball games far, far away.