“First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt

I need to stop hearing the following phrase. “_________ will embolden the terrorists.” This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. First of all let’s examine embolden.

em·bold·en (m-bldn)
tr.v. em·bold·ened, em·bold·en·ing, em·bold·ens
To foster boldness or courage in; encourage.

To imply that we will embolden them says that they are not already bold. I’m very sure that terrorists are not cowering in their boots at the threat of the U.S. military. First of all these people brought it to us. No one has done that since The Japanese and they had Germany and Italy backing them up. Besides, do you know they took over China in the past? You ever seen China and Japan on the map? Anyway these cats went even more hardcore than the Japanese and hit us in our midst. Second, we’re not even concentrating our efforts on the guy who said “I did it!” We’re in another country. There are some troops in Afghanistan, but no discussion has come up about removing them. Third, when someones favorite tactic is suicide bombing…there isn’t much you can do to make them even more bold. I mean our troops will do alot, but they like to go home afterwards and deal with their issues either in therapy or in front of the T.V. with a cold brew. These cats will take themselves out and not even on some “I can die and end the fighting” tip. They will take themselves out to kill 20 people. If you believe that your God will reward you for killing yourself in the name of your cause…there isn’t anything after that to “embolden” you. Hell people here have firebombed abortion clinics cause of their belief in God, though they were not bold enough to die in the process. There are two other things that disturb me about this. FDR had a good point. The only thing we should fear is fear. We should be afraid that we will allow our fear to back us into a corner. We should be scared to make the wrong choice. The City Paper had an article that mentioned how we will back out of any bad choice, save for war. When you play poker, if you have a bad hand you don’t throw good money after bad. You fold and wait for the next hand. Here were tossing lives into the pot. That’s what we should fear. That fear will cause us to sacrifice more young people so we can “Stay the Course”. Terrorists are afraid!!! If we leave they’ll…what? Keeping bombing and sniping our troops? Keep blowing our helicopters out of the sky? Keeping fighting? We wouldn’t want them to get the impression that we have any intelligence at all would we? If we just keep plugging away…what? We’re talking about a group of people who have been fighting for a long time. When they couldn’t fight at home…they went to where other muslims were fighting to help out. These guys are like the little quiet, dirty kid that can fight. Leaving him alone doesn’t make him act out. He goes off when people mess with him. Right now he has us in a headlock and is bashing our face in. It may be a good idea to push out and stop and think.