Will bombing Isis, like the Iraq war, prove to be the wrong "war" against the wrong enemy?

vanity ^ | Nathan Bedford

[xzins]

I agree with you about war. A declared war or a Congressional Letter of Reprisal would make this clearly an action with the entire full faith and credit of the USA behind it.

About our SpecOps forces, I guarantee you from personal knowledge, that they are accustomed to fighting in quaint and unusual places at quaint and unusual times at the behest of their government.

So, if I were president, and I wanted to kick ISIS in the head could I do it with the Kurds and the SpecOps Community? I could put a serious hurt on them. I just read this morning that the CIA is saying their numbers have swelled to about 31,000. That’s a division plus, number wise.

So, I would call the 18th Airborne Corps and look for a “Napoleonic Decisive Moment” when a bulk of that 31,000 were in a generally defined area, and then I’d drop the 82nd and the 101st on them. I would destroy them in a matter of weeks, and then I’d pull out and let the Kurds and SpecOps with CAS do the mop up.

It would be a reprisal. It would not be a war. I would not nation build. I would not slap backs and glad hand. Shock. Awe. Depart.

[Jedidah]

I wish there were some way to remove your dissertation from my ping page. If you are intent upon lecturing people, could you not just write a blog and do it with links rather than cluttering up FR with your vanities?

I repent for commenting.

[Zhang Fei]

We can't be seen helping Christians because that would be racist or intolerant or whatever.

Not exactly. It doesn't make sense to help Christians in the region (short of exterminating the Muslims for them) because ME Christians are a bunch of women who won't lift a finger to protect themselves from Islam. In fact, back in the day, many of them joined Muhammad's armies and converted to Islam. Arab/Semitic fellow feeling over Christianity was pretty much cast in stone from the start of the jihads. We jumped into Lebanon, gave the Christians some breathing room. The result? They are now allied with Hezbollah.

ME Christians are not Israelis. They prefer running to fighting. And after they run, the majority remain anti-American and anti-Israeli (which most in the region are today). Being Arab trumps being Christian.

[Lurker]

“So the goal of saving the soul of Islam has been made more elusive.”

The goal is a fools errand. There is no soul in islam to save. There may be “moderate” muslims. But there is no moderate islam.

[nathanbedford]

Perhaps you ought to remove your ping page to Twitter where your fastidious obsession with feng shui will be disturbed by at most 140 characters but where you can persist in your snarky remarks as your last 20 or so posts on FreeRepublic so plainly demonstrate.

[Jedidah]

Now that’s much better. You made your point in one coherent sentence.

I’m genuinely gratified that you scrolled past your diatribe, read my history, and perhaps learned a bit.

[nathanbedford]

Jedidah: "Too many notes"

Mozart: "I don't understand, majesty, there are just as many notes as I required, no more no less."

Jedidah: "There are in fact only so many notes one can hear in the course of an evening. I… I think I'm right in saying that am I not court composer?

Salieri: "Yes, yes on the whole. Yes, Majesty"

[Jedidah]

Doest thou have an inflated sense of your artistry, general? You place yourself in company much above yourself.

May you live up to your bloated self-image.

[nathanbedford]

You are the one whose inflated sense of importance prompts him to presume to censor others for length rather than content. When you engage at the level of ideas rather than on a personal level you will have grown up a bit and you might actually make a real contribution to FreeRepublic.

[Talisker]

Your scenario requires a level of ineptitude that is impossible to accept. The complete collapse of our intelligence systems at every possible level, so this mysterious enemy can pop off nukes with abandon and leave absolutely no tracks? America surrendering to a mysterious enemy which never reveals itself - presumably even after the surrender, and who then control America remotely? How, from a Facebook account with their privacy settings set to “don’t tell”?

In the event we really were up against it somehow as badly as you portray, all that would happen if we “surrendered” is that our military nuke, space, scalar and other assets would go black and wait. And once enough information was gathered, the eventual military response would be absolute, and this mysterious enemy would cease to exist once and for all.

Thing is though, there is no mysterious enemy anywhere. All is known, all is exposed to those involved. The players are all under the lights. Not on television or the Net, no. But very well known, and tracked, and watched, by all involved, every moment of every day. That’s reality.

[nathanbedford]

"The complete collapse of our intelligence systems at every possible level"

As a partial list I submit the following as examples of the "collapse of our intelligence system":

Pearl Harbor Attack

The Korean invasion

The Entire Vietnam War

The Bay of Pigs Invasion

The Tet Offensive

The Yom Kippur War

The Iranian Revolution

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

The Indian Nuclear Test

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait

Bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993

The 9/11 Attacks

WMD in Iraq

Boston Marathon Bombing

("All is known, all is exposed to those involved." –?)

"so this mysterious enemy can pop off nukes with abandon and leave absolutely no tracks?"

I submit that it is self-evident that the blast itself will "leave absolutely no tracks." Certainly not tracks that can be investigated, analyzed, and effectively reacted to in time.

"… a mysterious enemy which never reveals itself "

The Internet demands come to multiple establishment networks "over the transom." Al Jazeera, for example, has little interest in tracking down the source. Who would be doing the tracking down? The Muslim brotherhood which has already penetrated the inner sanctum of the White House? We cannot dismiss the treachery possible from a fifth column.

"the eventual military response would be absolute,"

Any subsequent military response would be at the cost of another American city.

"That’s reality."

That "reality" has failed so many times that my back of the envelope list demonstrates that it is hardly reassuring and certainly not dispositive of what the collective inventive minds of a army of devious jihadist can contrive. If I am wrong life is sweet, but if you are wrong…

Please remember, this scenario is simply to illustrate the absolute necessity of preventing Iran from getting the bomb. This is only one of the baleful consequences which flow from that calamitous event. Others have been discussed such as the destruction of the present balance of power in the Persian Gulf and the ignition of the nuclear arms race in the Arab world. The point of the vanity is that we should not permit ourselves to be distracted from Iran to Isis.

[caww]

.....”leaving Christians to perish in the Middle east”.....

I think you’re mistaken that Christians in the ME are left to perish. If you’re referring to specifically muslims who have converted.

It’s not any nations responsibility to go into another soverighn nation and rescue any particular ‘religious branch’ who are and have been ‘citizens of that country’. It is however up to that country on how they handle the situation.

Muslims who convert in muslim countries know fully well they are never really safe there....and in fact know that many non-Christian muslims would take their life if given the opportunity without repercussions.

Also..it’s not a fair judgement to compare them with Kurds or any other group fighting there....those are political and international issues.

Our government is not in the business of “supporting” religions...Christian or otherwise. The Islamic conflicts and wars we’re in aren’t against a religion...it’s against a political ideology.

[Talisker]

Please remember, this scenario is simply to illustrate the absolute necessity of preventing Iran from getting the bomb.

And if you are correct about the absolute, utter inability of our intelligence assets to find their @sses with both hands, how do you propose we do that? Or where are we going to find the will, since, according to you this country is mainly just waiting for the excuse to surrender anyway?

[nathanbedford]

The obvious response is to point to Ronald Reagan and his impact on history, the history of his day which in so many ways parallels our present experience. A charismatic leader with the right message can carry the country out of its "malaise" and onto the "sunny uplands" dreamed of by Churchill in the darkest days of World War II. Reagan did it. Churchill did it.

[Jim Noble]

You don’t become strong because you beg people to join you.

People beg to join you because you are strong.

Bush wasted almost a year (once he decided to leave the main enemy alone) screwing around with the UN and with our “allies”, while failing to arrange passage through Turkey for the Fourth Armored division.

Bush’s “coalition” was a fraud from the beginning - the “40 nations” were of no military help (except of course the UK) while the whole political side of the enterprise reeked of weakness.

The day after those towers fell the United States had every right to form an expeditionary force to conquer Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to root out Wahabism/Deobandism once and for all. If the American flag flew over Islamabad and Riyadh by the Fall of 2004, there would be no “Obama” and there would be no ISIS.

Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate, as long as they fear.

It worked in 1941, for the SS and for Japan, every bit as much as it worked in 1941 BC. It’s working right now for ISIS.

And the reason the Red Army beat Germany, and we beat Japan, is because we brought them catastrophic damage and filled them with fear.

It makes me laugh when people talk about ISIS’s methods as “the worst in history”, or some such nonsense. They don’t hold a candle to the Japs at Nanking, Hong Kong, or Singapore, and they certainly don’t stack up against the Einsatzgruppen filling every ditch in the Ukraine with slaughtered women and babies.

And when what went around, came around? How many German farmers were slaughtered in 1944-45? How many women were raped and mutilated? How many children died as the Red Army rolled West?

And although our technology spared most of our ground forces from inflicting similar atrocities on Japanese civilians, we sure made up for it with two buckets of sunshine from 40 000 feet.

THE BAD GUYS ARE WINNING THIS WAR. They’re winning because they unleash hell as they roll forward. That’s what war IS.

We’re losing because we don’t. We don’t, even with a “coalition of 40 nations”.

[nathanbedford]

I have long argued that, like government, people get the wars they deserve.

If the Germans installed a racist maniac in power over themselves it cannot be said that it was immoral that they suffered devastating consequences for their misjudgment. If the Japanese submitted to a fascist militarism which sought to conquer much of the world with unbelievable brutality, why do we agonize over their forfeit by atomic weapons?

The Arab world, and to a lesser degree much of the Muslim world, operates in a parallel universe which simply does not comprehend our fastidiousness. It's propagandists say that they react to our heavy handedness and big footedness, but I am inclined to believe that they are reared to respect the alpha dog and to despise all others.

Applying this, for example, to the eruption of Isis barbarity, we should bomb with little regard for "collateral damage" and simply take the attitude, as I suspect the Arabs themselves accept, that they are getting the war they deserve. Perhaps next time they will be less inclined to harbor cutthroats.

[Talisker]

I can’t fault the idea of a genuine leader and protector of freedom. Though our discussion has ranged beyond those limits.

This country was created upon an, as Lincoln put it, “great experiment.” It was an idea I believe, from my reading, many of the founders themselves believed to be naive, that of “the people” using their God- given rights to properly lead themselves without just such a “point man.”

I used to think such an idea was obvious, but I came to realize that I’d conflated innate rights with the idea of the innate ability for self-governance. As such I’ve come to understand the “doubting founders” better. Although even the “true believer founders” worked hard to create a system of checks and balances predicated upon mistrust of people’s good will (which was genius, I might add).

So, pragmatically, I believe that it will probably take true leadership for freedom to lift everyone up. But spiritually, I do not believe everyone required such leadership. In fact, if everyone did, I don’t believe the true leadership could defeat evil. There must be a backbone of people who have made their peace with God without the need of leaders, otherwise freedom will fall. Those people still exist. Maybe not as many as in the past, but nevertheless. And as they rely on God, what they can accomplish is unlimited, because it is not their doing. And ultimately they even keep the “good” leaders in line.

/soapbox

[nathanbedford]

Another way to say that: culture trumps politics.

And one might add that religion shapes culture, a reality alas only all too well recognized by the Frankfurt School and the likes of Saul Alinsky who set out to secularize America, actually destroy its religious foundation, and, of course, shape the culture and steal elections.

I think it was John Adams who said that ours is a government for men of virtue. That was his conviction even though he was aware better than most that it was equally a government designed to frustrate men who lacked virtue, as you point out.

All the best.

[Talisker]

All the best.

Likewise.