Posted on 08/26/2006 11:12:41 AM PDT by Steel and Fire and Stone
There is a simple reason for this. We have a more critical war on the home front - the war against suicidal liberals. It's really come down to that. Vietnam was not lost to the North Vietnamese, but to American liberalism. The Iraq war is the same. And the Israelis were done in by American and European liberalweenies.
Our job is to marginalize those idiots enough to where sufficient malice can be brought to bear against those banking on liberals from preventing such being done. Then and only then can this war be won.
Germany and Japan are peaceful nations today because we broke their will to be warlike. We face the same problem with Hiz today. But unlike he pre-WWII isolationists, the anti-war types refuse to learn from a direct attack on America. Why? It's simple. The America firsters were still Americans first. Today's anti-war types loathe America even though they live here and enjoy her protection. We must discredit them before we can adequately deal with the external enemy.
We and Israel will continually "lose" to Muslim fighters so long as we continue to employ WWII-and-since technology, meaning air power, tanks, and troops. It it obsolete, and as ineffective as British Red Coats. We should utilize drones to saturate target areas with disabling gas, employ robot "sort kill" battledrones, and only conduct human troops attacks with advancing ultrasonic transducers to induce vomiting and disorientation of the target enemy. All of these technologies exist. In most cases we know where the enemy is and there is no rush to send humans into harm's way to defeat them under set timeframes. We need to use disabling gas/sound precursors and robot/drone weaponry to disable, sort and sterilize selected target regions.
"If/When the west decides it REALLY wants to destroy their backass foes, it WILL be done, quickly and EASILY. It will be horrific, and the west will spend decades hating itself for it, but it can be done. What the west lacks isn't the proper tools of war, its the stomach to completely vanquish its enemies, and all her people."
As I and a number of other people have been pointing out, the United States has a $12 trillion economy, if we want to fight a war against a bunch of goatherders we all know who will win. We already produce an incredible amount of weaponry, and we aren't even in war mode. If Ahmanutjob and Bin Laden et. al. aren't careful, they are going to get their Armageddon, and no it won't be pretty. And I think I will sleep without guilt.
Is it really surprising that Pat Buchanan - isolationist and anti-Semite - proclaims our defeat and rejoices in a set-back for Israel? I'm waiting for his pronouncement of our defeat in the war against international terrorism -- I'm sure it's coming soon in his paleo-propaganda publication.
You'll know it's war when Mecca is firebombed, mosques are closed, Muslims are interned, multiple Muslim countries are invaded and Islam is outlawed. Sure hasn't happened yet.
"Rubbish. Enemy civilians are valid targets in warfare, just like the trigger-pullers for whom they provide aid and comfort.
I'll take my lessons from Patton, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Von Clausewitz, thank you. Not today's crop of wilting-dhimmis."
so if you had relatives in Lebanon, you'd be perfectly happy to lose them? heck, lets go one step further, let's say you lived in Lebanon. Let's say you hated Hezbollah with a passion. Let's say a Israeli bomb destroys a member of your family right in front of your eyes, so their organs, limbs and blood are dispersed in a ghastly mess over the ground in front of you, which remains your everlasting memory of your loved one for your entire life....you'd just shrug it off as "oh well....it's for a good cause."? i also find it pretty despicable you immediately dismiss a concern for human life that so happens to be Muslim down to dhimmitude (far from everyone who lives in Lebanon is Muslim anyway!).
What people with this kind of attitude towards Isr/Pal need to realize is that until some kind of change is made regarding Palestinian statehood or the status of Israel this will NOT STOP (and yes, I'm well aware the Palestinian authorities, both Abbas & co and certainly Arafat & Hamas, have done anything but help in this area). It is impossible to simply match this problem with overwhelming military might. And this is not dhimmitude, this is not appeasement, this is simply common sense. Massacring a lot of Arabs is going to do nothing but make the problem drastically worse, it's just going to make Hezbollah et al's currently ludicrous claims of genocide actually true hence boosting their recruitment. Basically, if over-the-top civilian-targeting measures are taken, for every harmless civilian you kill you get one more harmless civilian radicalizing and joining Hezbollah. You push Syria closer to getting involved, you push Saudi Arabia, you push Iran, you even might push Iraq. Then you pretty much get something resembling WW3; and although from a lot of rhetoric on this site it seems many readers would practically rejoice at some sort of apocalyptic holy war, I personally think it's best to avoid the apocalypse if it all possible. I would certainly prefer a couple dozen Israeli civilian deaths a year to a full-blown world war three. Such extreme measures are like pouring petrol on a fire to put it out. Its not like Germany or Japan where there's an oppressive regime in charge where if it falls the mat is pulled out from underneath the enemy: anti-Israel terrorism is far more grassroots. Destroy Hezbollah and something other organization just the same, or worse, will arise in its place. If the vast majority of civilians are given a situation in which they are appeased, grassroots support vanishes and terrorist groups disintegrate: look at Northern Ireland (and if you think the entrenched ethnic hatred was any less intense there you don't know enough about Northern Ireland).
Quite the contrary. It is the only thing that they'll understand.
"Basically, if over-the-top civilian-targeting measures are taken, for every harmless civilian you kill you get one more harmless civilian radicalizing and joining Hezbollah."
So why aren't we still at war with Imperial Japan? Because we incinerated Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and threatened them with racial extinction unless they surrendered unconditionally.
"I would certainly prefer a couple dozen Israeli civilian deaths a year to a full-blown world war three."
How magnanimous of you. My children will grow up free from the threat of Islam. If it takes the complete extermination of their death cult, so be it.
you said: I would certainly prefer a couple dozen Israeli civilian deaths a year to a full-blown world war three.
on behalf of a couple dozen israeli citizens: up yours!
seriously, if it's to be civilization vs. barbarism, I pick civilization to win, by a vast, terrible, devastating margin. Apparently you're willing to live with barbarism (since they're only killing jews)
...pathetic...
"The Islamic Way of War"
No more than utter cowardice. Use brainwashed kids with strap on bombs to blow themselves up and other innocent people with them, in the belief that they will be greeted by 70 virgins in the hereafter. They take over planes by cutting the throats of flight crews and crash the planes into buildings to kill thousands of innocents. They place their rocket launchers in the heart of civilian neighborhoods knowing full well that the response will cause the deaths of more innocents. The Islamist terrorists are the scum of the earth and must and will be destroyed.
It took awhile, but I am there, who's with me?
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I want to win the war. I'm willing to kill a lot of Muslims to convince them to stop warring against us. I'm willing to tolerate military casualties, including myself (though they'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel to recall me) and my son if necessary, to win the war. I'm even willing to "nation build" as long as it doesn't get in the way of the war.
However, I'm not willing to "nation build", spend $billions for years, and tolerate casualties, while the natives use our kids for target practice. I'm not willing to "nation build" at the expense of winning the war against Iran, Syria, and the other Islamic state sponsors of terror and war. I'm not willing to support a halfhearted war effort, killing off our soldiers and allowing our civilians to live in mortal peril from a potential nuclear, bio, or chem attack.
That is exactly where we are now. The problem is not that "The Islamic way of war" has beaten us. The problem is the feckless pursuit of the war by the GOP, and the outright treasonous activities by the Democrat left. We cannot beat the enemy if our priority at home is beating each other; indeed, if half the American people don't even believe the enemy is real.
Both the GOP and Demorats love to see the country divided by the war. The Demorats nurture it, because they believe their path to power is via an approach of "the enemy is us...we're all so guilty", and "we can negotiate peace; the other guys love war". The GOP loves the division because they know the Demorats will eventually hang themselves; American's care more about their own security than about Demorat "social" priorities. Both political sides perceive benefits from the anti-war political left, and since their kids are probably not in the fight, why not profit politically from the war? In a different age, we'd be tarring and feathering the treasonous left, and putting them on boats to go live with the terrorists that they don't believe in. Then we could go about kicking the incompetent GOP incumbants out of office, without worrying about a anti-USA Dem taking over.
I'm not bloodthirsty. I don't want Muslim women and children dead. I don't want to "bomb them all". However, I do want to win. If depriving Iran of nuclear weapons, or just as significantly, their ability to threaten the world with oil or nucs means going nuclear on Iran's facilities, or destroying their oil production facilities, then by God, that's what we should be doing. We are at WAR, damnit. If the war is important enough to send our kids to fight it for five long years, it's important enough to make Iranian and Syrian civilians pay the price for their country's support of the war.
That's how it's done. We prosecute "criminals" when they operate independent of national goals. We prosecute WARS against nation-states when those states commission teams of fighters to kill our civilians and war against our economic interests. The terrorists are not "criminals", and there is NO SUCH THING as stateless terrorism. We are fighting irregular armies, authorized, inspired, equipped, and directed by foreign states.
I'm not bloodthirsty; just the opposite. I want my country to end this on OUR TERMS. If we commit ourselves to that effort, then the blood our citizen-soldiers have shed will not be in vain, and we will become safe at home again. If we prosecute war, the "Islamic Way of War" is irrelevant. The Muslim combatants, and the countries that spawned them, will be dead and beaten. Perhaps then Islam will be a "religion of peace". Today, it's a religion of hatred and murder.
SFS
BS. It had nothing to do with "armed resistance" but with the cowardly habits of hiding behind women and children, and parading dead babies for the media.
Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.
After 9/11 we gave those who wanted to live in a civilized ME a chance when we could have done much worse to them.
If they refuse to take it, or after enough time cannot take it, then so be it.
The next President should give no quarter to our enemies, he should be ruthless, bloodthirsty and cunning.
How to win against them? To paraphrase their Quran; "Smite the jihadist wherever you might find them." They look at any forebearance as weakness.
--Bacevich seems to me to be someone who wanted to arrive at a conclusion -- that America should retreat from the world -- then set about twisting an argument to reach the desired conclusion.
Intellectually, his argument is obtuse.
If George Washington had been listening to somebody like Bacevich, we'd still be remitting our taxes to London--
Nonsense! In his farewell address Washington exhorted his countrymen to "avoid foreign entanglements", i.e. just what Bacevich and his editors at AmConMag would love us to do, despite the exhortations of the "cosmpolitans' (i.e Wilsonians) on these boards. In fact, up until 1898 (when the USA kicked itself out of an Eden of sorts by succumbing to empire-building) we existed quite happily as Washington, Bacevich and AmConMag would have wanted us to.
BTW--The USA won its independence by NOT fighting the dominant European power in the traditional European way. Oh, the irony!
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