Posted on 07/26/2010 8:04:25 PM PDT by Pontiac
William Tecumseh Sherman is either a hated war criminal or a honored war hero in the United States in this article I do not debate this point but only draw upon his wisdom as it applies to war. In what follows I will apply this wisdom to our present long and destined to be longer war against the World Islamic Terrorist Organizations.
The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan have been the subject of a great deal of controversy in the last decade. The words “Bush’s war” and the questions of the Iraq war’s legality have been the subject of many a written word in our national press. This is however not the subject of this piece. Today I will expound upon the wisdom of these wars and wars yet to begin.
The war in Afghanistan is the result of an act of war perpetrated by Islamic extremist terrorist on our nation. This is an indisputable fact. The active participants in this act were from various Middle Eastern Muslim nations primarily Saudi Arabia but also Yemini and Egyptian. The stated grievances of these men were the United States support of Israel and the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia.
There are other unstated but strong motives that these men had. These motives have been expressed by like minded supporters of these terrorist actions. These motives are the spread of Western culture to the Muslim countries. In the minds of the fundamentalist Muslim the worst of the West influences is on women. That a woman can show bare skin let alone her face in public is to the Arab Muslim unacceptable and an affront to Allah. To the Taliban (the ruling power in Afghanistan at the time of the September 11, 2001 attack on this country) television, music, make up, dancing, soccer, kite flying and much more were forbidden as un-Islamic Western practices. To these people everything Western was evil. Another fundamental tenet of Islam is that all the world must be brought under the control of Islam, by sword if necessary.
For these reasons the Islamic terrorist brought war to our country. Our support of Israel may have been the precipitating act in their minds for the attack but their desire to humble the preeminent non-Islamic country in the world was large in their minds.
I will not discuss the legality of the Iraq war more than to state that congress voted on and passed a resolution authorizing the war and had available to them all of the intelligence documents concerning weapons of mass destruction that was available to the Bush administration.
The need for the war is however in my opinion undeniable. Saddam Hussein was a financial supporter of world wide Islamic terror. He had used chemical weapons on his own citizens he at the very least was gathering material to produce a nuclear weapon. Although we did not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq there is evidence that he moved the weapons and the factories to Syria during the period before the war when the Bush administration was trying to negotiate Saddam’s peaceful surrender.
The point I wish to make about the Iraq war is that although direct ties between Al Qaida and Iraq are few Saddam had numerous ties with other terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the IRA. After the Iraq war a terrorist training camp was found there that had a Boeing 727 fuselage used for training terrorist hi-jackers.
Political correctness and multiculturalism has been much used in the arguments against these wars; either explicitly or in couched phrases; the failure of the government or the press to use the word terrorist or to openly name the people we are fighting as Muslim or Islamist is simply foolish political correctness. The first rule in war is to know your enemy. If you can not name your enemy, if you can not allow yourself to express anger and hatred at your enemy you will not defeat that enemy.
The press has spent a great deal of ink saying how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has harmed the reputation of the US and made us a pariah in international affairs. William Tecumseh Sherman arguably the most effective Union General of the Civil War had this to say about war and popularity:
“If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war and not popularity seeking.”
The United States is at war with people who choose to be at war with us and drew first blood. We do not have a choice of whether to go to war or not. This war is also not only a war of Islam against the United State. Islam is at war around the world. It is at war in Indonesia, the Philippines Islands, several African Countries, Europe, and even the Middle East itself. These Islamist are not simply trying to convert the world to Islam by the sword they also seek to purify Islam were it already exist. This is literally a world war. We are at war and we do not have the luxury of being kind and gentile with those who wish to kill us. I again turn to the wisdom of William Tecumseh Sherman:
“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.”
The United States has made more effort than any nation at war ever has to limit the number of civilian casualties and yet the international press continues to excoriate the US for the incredibly few civilian dead in these wars. William Tecumseh Sherman had this to say:
“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.”
We now have the technology to minimize civilian casualties but they can not be eliminated and we can not allow fear of civilian casualties to prevent us from pursuing the enemy where ever he may hide. Our enemy knows of our reluctance to harm civilians and uses this against us. He has used civilian villages a refuge and taken up human shields as a tactic of defense. This is a war crime and we must not permit it to deter us. To do so will encourage its continued use and lead to further civilian deaths or our ultimate defeat because we become unwilling to kill the enemy. We must adopt William Tecumseh Sherman’s stated goal:
“My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
We can not fight a war with half measures. It will only prolong the war and multiply the casualties. This should be the lesson of the Viet Nam war. A limited war is an endless war and can not be won.
I will end by again quoting the wisdom of William Tecumseh Sherman:
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
Actually, he did. They went with the land and were considered part of the real estate. Sell the land and the serfs went with it to the ownership of the new lord.
He couldn't, in England anyway, sell the serfs away from the land or their families, which is a major difference from American slavery. In other European countries such as Russia and Poland serfdom was much closer in practice to real slavery.
A good many of those posting here seem to have no objections to Sherman’s tactics, as such, merely in who he used them on.
If you support nuking of our enemies or massive aerial bombardment of his cities, which kills exponentially more civilians than Sherman did, you have no moral ground for criticising what he did.
You just object to being on the receiving rather than the administering end of his methods. A perfectly understandable position, but hardly an example of the correct application of timeless moral truths to human affairs.
Thanks, good advise.
I hope if there is another Civil War, we southerners won’t be as cruel as your namesake when we kick Yankee but all the way to Canada. You’ll have plenty of time to suffer under reconstruction II.
Oh yeah, reconstruction was handled soooo well, it was all unicorns and butterflies in Dixie. Dancing in the streets...
Where did you learn history in some Yankee public school? BWHAHAHAHAHAHA
Your statement was, and I quote, " Then do as Truman did, nuke em." So how do you nuke Afghanistan and kill only terrorists, leaving the innocent, the helpless, women and children unharmed?
I have never here or anywhere advocated the arial bombardment of civilian populations Nor do I see any advantage to the use of nuclear weapons in this conflict. Our enemy is a defuse association of terrorist cells and tribal groups. Nuclear weapons are only useful in the attack of hardened targets, which our enemy does not possess.
If you wish to attack me, attack me for what I said. If you wish to attack the ideas you attack in your post, attack those who expressed them.
You just object to being on the receiving rather than the administering end of his methods. A perfectly understandable position, but hardly an example of the correct application of timeless moral truths to human affairs.
Many on this thread have read a great deal in to my post that I neither expressed nor implied. I do not advocate the murder, rape or torture of innocents. The entire purpose of the article is to express the folly of placing unnecessary politically correct restrictions on the actions of our generals and soldiers.
Compared to what happened to the losing side of the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the various rebellions in Britain and Italy and Spain and China it was all unicorns and butterflies for the rebels.
Is that what the socialists teach the little Yankee eggheads up there? Oh, brother...
If one chooses dogsh!t as his subject, it isn’t surprising then that the result stinks to high heaven....
That was not my premise, which you well know.
And come to think of it, our enemy makes exactly that premise. Namely that they are fighting for the freedom of the Palestinians from the oppressive Zionist state and the Great Satan.
The same way we nuked Hiroshima, and left the helpless, women and children unharmed.
Why don’t you compare the behaviors of the Army of Northern Virgina’s 1863 invasion of PA to the Army of the Tennessee invasion of GA in 1864. No, I won’t do your f-ing research for you.
I do not know anything about Sherman’s religious beliefs, but I would be interested to know his ethics of warfare. I do know that Sherman was a racists that despised Negroes, so he was not fighting to liberate the slaves. Sherman could not defeat the Confederate Army, so he decided to declare war on the civilians. It is an effective strategy if you do not mind killing civilians through war, disease, and starvation. On the other hand, Lee refused to harm civilians. It probably cost him the war. Which man, Sherman or Lee, is the more ethical? That is not an easy question. The USA decided to drop two atomic bombs on two cities, which were not of military importance, killing thousands of civilians. We could cite the fire bombings of Dresden and Hamburg which were intended to kill civilians. These are not easy choices. Is ethics in warfare simply a matter of personal taste or good manners, or are there firm ethical principles? I suppose it depends upon whether you are the victor or the loser.
There wasn't any confederate army for Sherman to fight. Once Atlanta fell, Hood took his army north, hoping to threaten Sherman from Tennessee. Sherman sent George Thomas to deal with him, which he did without any help needed from Sherman.
Hate to pee on this WTS lovefest, but the WOT wasn’t slaughtering innocent AMERICAN women and children.
Well put my friend. While Lee paid for shoes he took from Gettysburg, Sherman.... well everyone knows the drill.
Guess these northerners wonder why we are called Southern Gentlemen. I would contend that they convey the lack of.
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