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With the public in many European countries strongly opposed or simply sceptical about their troops' involvement in what has been evolving from a peacekeeping mission to a combat operation, many governments have been wary of unpopular new deployments, especially of sending their forces to the volatile south.
"We must not -- we cannot -- become a two-tiered alliance of those willing to fight and those who are not," said Gates.
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That may have been stating the obvious. The mission should be to avoid sending the message to the violent Islamic fundamentalists in the area that if they wish to succeed, all they have to do is to sustain their violent acts against the rest of civilization until we all get tired or until they can convince the civilian population that it is too costly to keep opposing them. They seem to believe no matter what the real military situation is, no matter what the civilian population suffers, no matter how many innocent die, all they have to do is to keep blowing people up and they will emerge victorious and the world will thus become an Islamic kingdom with them in charge, of course. If any country is naive enough not to realize this, then I'm afraid it will only add fuel to their fire and continuation of the violence and death that we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan to this point. Europe, the U.S., and all of our allies need to present a solid front that is not afraid to oppose those that would destroy us. That, of course is just my opinion.