The Words Still Ring True Today

Its funny how, when I read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, I can't help but think of the debate raging today regarding what we should do in Iraq and the entire fight against Islamist extremists who would see us dead and our great nation destroyed. The American Civil War must have been terrible: 51,000 casualties in the Battle of Gettysburg alone; 620,000 Americans dead in total. The pressure on Lincoln to just let the South secede must have been very strong from some corners -- the war was sometimes referred to as "Lincoln's War," sound familiar? And yet, he resisted the easy road and chose to fight on for unity and liberty.

The freedoms we, and many in the world, enjoy today have only existed in practice for the last 200 or so years. The great cost we bear as the birthplace of liberty and justice for all is to ensure that it "shall not perish from the earth." Here are Lincoln's words at Gettysburg. Do they not still apply today? We should honor those who have sacrificed everything by insisting on victory.


Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.


I do truly believe in the notion of American Exceptionalism. This nation of ours is not here by accident. Listen to the Battle Hymn of the Republic sung by the U.S. Army Chorus for Pope Benedict XVI on April 16, 2008, and tell me that what we are doing is wrong and that we should abandon our mission in Iraq.