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”.
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.
