'The United States cannot shrink from this fight...'

From the letters to the editor, at the New York Times, "After Beheadings, Pressure on Obama":

To the Editor:

Re “ISIS Says It Killed Second American After U.S. Strikes” (front page, Sept. 3):

For at least the third time in my life, the United States is at war in Iraq. That’s an inconvenient truth for an administration that wanted to end the war there in 2011. Recent bombings and beheadings in Iraq and Syria only underscore this point.

We — the United States, the West and our allies in the Middle East — are at war with the most destructive, nihilistic and radical fanatics we can imagine. Today’s ground zero is on a battlefield the United States abandoned a few years ago.

I served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a military intelligence officer and am under no illusions about this enemy. It is ruthless and clearly not on the run. Its capacity for harm has grown over the last three years, and it has made it abundantly clear that it wants to do our homeland harm.

The United States cannot shrink from this fight, just as it could not declare victory and go home because we grew tired of wars overseas. That kind of wishful thinking ignores hard realities. We tried it in Iraq, and we have reaped the proverbial whirlwind there.

JAMES D. EDWARDS
Herndon, Va., Sept. 3, 2014

The writer is a retired United States Army colonel.

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