There is a lot to admire in Captain Secher. I feel deeply sad for his family and honor his commitment to family and country. Clearly, he was a deep thinking man (and a devotee of history, which I think a necessity for anyone who would expound on international policy). I agreed with a great deal of what he said. For instance:

If you really want to win a war you have to be brutal. You have to be Sherman and raze Georgia as you march to the sea.

This is the whole tragedy of war. People are so quick to only criticize the Marines and to demonize these young men. I pity them. Their lives are ruined, ruined by their actions which are judged by men who have never been in those situations.

I have said similar things in previous posts. I am not a fan of staying the course. I have always thought we needed to fight a harder, harsher war. We are trying too hard to “nice” it up. War is an ugly business. You can’t fight nice and win.

Captain Secher never said the war was not worth it. He said that the way we were fighting was not going to work.

He was no pacifist. His parents describe him as an unswerving Republican, and his own dispatches consistently defend the invasion of Iraq even as he anguishes over its dwindling prospects of success.

I hope his death is not used by the Cindy Sheehan types. I think he would hate that.

"Don't mistake us for Cindy Sheehan," Pierre Secher told NEWSWEEK at his Memphis home (a reference to the California woman who became an iconic opponent of the war after her son's death in Iraq). "To me, pacifism could have led to Hitler's victory. We might have all been speaking German and Japanese right now."