Win Hearts and Minds at Gun point?

Are we trying to win hearts and minds or steal hearts in minds in the ongoing war in Afghanistan that has now expanded into Pakistan. It seems to me that if you want to win people over to your way of thinking you don't bomb them via remote controlled droids and you don't set up barbed wire to separate you and them when you are trying to help them (as in the medical visits to villages by our forces).

Now don't get me wrong. I was in the Marines Corps for several years and I believe that all of the people in our military are brave and deserve any benefits that they get. But they do not make policy and create strategy. They follow orders - some a little more aggressively than others - but the bottom line is that most of them are following orders and protecting each other.

Didn't we try to win hearts and minds in the 60s and 70s with our various Vietnam strategies. That worked out well, didn't it? Pardon my sarcasm but my understanding of the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.

Here's a great article titled "Democracy at Gunpoint Guarantees U.S. Defeat". I wish the author was wrong, but alas.... Just think, if someone rolled into your neighborhood in an armored vehicle after several hours or days of suppressive fire and bombs - how much would you be swayed to their way of thinking?

I don't think the Taliban or the militants or the Islamic fundamentalists are right. Any group that is totally intolerant of others and their views (Christian fundamentalists included) are wrong. They aren't tolerant and they should not be allowed to dictate how people other than themselves live, but continuing to "influence" people to our point of view from the end of a gun might help their cause more than ours.

So What Happened?

"A party can live only by growing. Intolerance of ideas brings its death."

These words were spoken by Republican Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana in 1910.

"If a majority can exclude the whole or a part of the minority because it deems the political views entertained by them hurtful, then free government is at an end."

These words were spoken by Charles Evans Hughes in 1920. Mr. Hughes was a prominent attorney, Governor of New York, US Supreme Court Justice, Secretary of State and a Presidential nominee - all under the Republican party banner.

These words of wisdom were spoken by leaders who knew that inclusiveness is much more representative of the needs of the people than a rigid doctrine of ideas that alienates a high percentage of the American citizenry.

So what happened? Values and principles are important - regardless of your political views, however it is counterproductive when any group, organization or party dictates how you should live - from the right or from the left.

Though the right should look at their history which recently they have limited to Lincoln and Reagan - the left could heed these words as well.