Lando 
Posted on 05/12/2004 6:00:49 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
These are troubling times, but they are assuredly the most comfortable troubling times in history.
The television commentators look like movie stars, the talking heads look like movie stars. Little girls on the street, revealing far too much flesh, look like mini-movie stars as do their older brothers, revealing far too much in the baggy shorts chumpy attitude department.
Mom wears Dior, dad…Armani.
It’s so easy, far too easy.
Even the journalists, who toil in relative obscurity, look more like movie stars than many movie stars of yesteryear, sitting behind multi-thousand dollar banks of computers and video monitors. We have access to the Internet at T-3 speeds. We are wired in like never before.
We watch a battle half a world away in real time and mistakenly allow ourselves to think that we are actually there, choking on the dust and acrid smoke, ears ringing long after the action ends.
We delude ourselves constantly, offering simplistic battlefield advice wholly inappropriate to the situation.
Yet because we are exempt from the actual consequences of these malformed suggestions, we continue to gladly trod the road of undeserved certitude.
Kill them all…pull them out…do this…do that…
At times it seems pointless to carry on in the face of such confusion.
But carry on we must, there is really no alternative.
And that is where President Bush finds himself.
Not necessarily beleaguered, but certainly under attack from all sides. The left pushing for his ouster, driven by the same mindset that brought about the Soviet Union. Some on the right, operating on the assumption that actions do not have consequences, auguring for the tactical nuclear option in Iraq.
Two sides, both mistaken, both increasingly driven by rage.
While we understand the animus of the left, that of the right is less easily explained.
We have noted from the very inception of the Bush administration that many on the right have been expecting to “get sold down the river" in one form or another. These people interpret the world through the peculiar lens of that expectation and of course it taints everything that falls upon their gaze.
Their glass is smudged with greasy fingerprints and always half empty.
The president’s actions in Iraq being only the most recent reason for their imagined abandonment and consequent knee-jerk fatalism.
Today, and nearly every day that we battle the philosophy that lead to 911, we are presented with examples of terrorists doing what terrorists do, brutally conducting themselves in such a manner as to intimidate those of a less warlike countenance.
It seems that for some, the previous night’s sleep has miraculously removed the assorted bogeymen and bad characters from the world, a world only to be shattered again by the next opportunistic attack.
Such is the unfortunate case of Nick Berg, Westchester, PA.
Nick was in the wrong place at the wrong time and for his efforts to help the Iraqi people, had his head hacked off by Islamic sub-humans.
That this happened was no revelation to me, it should have been no revelation to you, gentle readers, either.
In this war you must, WE must, keep a bit of that outrage - of 911, of reporter Danny Pearl, of the 700 plus servicemen who have so far died in this war, and now of just plain folks Nick Berg - always resident in our hearts.
We must never forget what the enemy is like, how little they differ from Mohammed’s hordes as they swept across Europe in the last part of the first millennium AD. We must constantly remember that what was done to Nick is the fate that the enemy wants to visit upon your wife, your husband and your children, preferably in front of you.
These people deserve no mercy; they do not deserve a dignified soldier’s death.
What they deserve is too horrific to even speculate upon in this space.
But we must not let this rage contaminate our thinking; we must not turn inwards on ourselves, picking at each other like animals pick at their wounded.
We must keep our criticism in check and realize that all of us are operating on imperfect knowledge that we do not and never will - until this is over once and for all - have the depth of information necessary to make a reasonable judgment regarding what policy is best followed as the war is being prosecuted.
We have a further impediment.
Americans - European Americans primarily - are a direct lot. It’s probably still a remnant of the scientific revolution that percolates throughout our genes. This leads us to analyze, quantify and take prescriptive action.
“Bad guys over there, apply force X in sufficient amount. Repeat as necessary, screw the collateral damage."
Easy in the laboratory, not so easy in real life where the United States is already feared and envied, perceived, pejoratively, as the new Rome.
You may say, beget the world, we can make them soil themselves and tremble under their beds in ways they can’t even imagine, we can turn their world into fiery hell at the press of a button and not even break a sweat.
That is true, but then that is what Rome would have done, and Rome is but a memory…as well as a warning.
We Americans are supremely competitive and confident. If it’s important to us, we will win.
Period.
And win this war we must, just not in the manner in which World War II was won.
That was a different time, never to return.
No, this war calls for a different mindset, one that I have no doubt will finally become operative.
We must be brutal, when brutality is indicated, but not brutal just to satiate the blood lust which now boils in most of us just below the surface.
We must be duplicitous, when duplicity suits our endgame, not just for the sake of confounding our enemies.
We must be magnanimous in victory, though our adversaries do not deserve it, because maybe their children or their children’s children just might.
Above all we must be patient, we must be deliberate and we must rely upon the wisdom provided by faith in God that our cause is just and we will pursue it justly.
For justice, true justice is our goal.
This is both an historic challenge and an historic opportunity.
There is so much to gain and there is a world to lose.
I trust that we will have the wisdom to see that for what it is.
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Another Day, Another Muslim Atrocity, Part II – Lessons Unlearned
May 13, 2004
Over the weekend I had the occasion to stumble across an article entitled “If General Patton Were President".
Until the murder of Nick Berg I had no framework within which to place the piece, but that is no longer the case.
Let’s play.
The article in question was offered, I am sure, in a good natured way to illuminate just how easy it would be to run US foreign policy if only a regular, meat and potatoes, no-nonsense warrior type guy were calling the shots.
Of course it should go without saying that General Patton’s boss, General Dwight David Eisenhower actually was president - for two terms [1952-1960] mind you - and did none of the things suggested in the essay, but that is probably an unfair use of the truth, so let’s put it in abeyance, at least for right now.
So let’s see what the populist type attitude represented by this essay would have had General Patton doing.
Well for starters the General would turn tail and run, not walk from Iraq, claiming that America’s feeling had been hurt by the non-support of the effort by most of the world’s governments.
“This morning I gave the order for a complete removal of all American forces from Iraq. This action will be complete within 30 days."
Given Patton’s dogged determination displayed throughout World War II and especially during the Battle of the Bulge it’s hard to fathom him authorizing this, but I guess anything is possible these days.
Next our make believe Patton character calls for an end to foreign aid, both to punish those who did not stand with us in Iraq [a conflict we just abandoned and lost, thus proving those who refused to stand with us, correct in the first place] and to pay for our effort there during that, now aborted, war.
“Let me start by saying that effective immediately, foreign aid to those nations on List #2 ceases immediately and indefinitely. The money saved during the first year alone will pretty much pay for the costs of the Iraqi war."
Best estimates are that total authorized US foreign aid for 2004 is $28 billion [which includes aid to the UN]. So far $87 billion has been appropriated for the Iraq effort and another $25 billion will be needed shortly. This gives us a total of $112 billion, subtracting “Patton’s" evil foreign aid leaves us with a shortfall of merely $84 billion.
That is billion with a “B", folks.
Now it is true that Patton was a military leader, and as such not a bean counter by trade; but a commander so obtuse as to think the above equation is in balance might just not be the kind of guy to be making such decisions in the first place.
You think?
Ok, after dispatching those two thorny problems our beloved General becomes bellicose again, this time threatening the terrorists who have just defeated us in Iraq.
“On that note, a word to terrorist organizations. Screw with us and we will hunt you down and eliminate you and all your friends from the face of the earth."
But, but, but…we just ran away from Iraq Mr. Patton, do you think our white flagged threats and brown stained underwear will scare them? Especially since we also just abandoned the only democracy in the Mid East also – Israel - to Hamas, Al-Qaeda and the terrorist states?
“To Israel and the Palestinian Authority. You, boys. Work out a peace deal now. Just note that Camp David is closed. Maybe all of you can go to Russia for negotiations"
Bottom line?
After this simple, edifying and wildly popular five minute speech we have lost all credibility with every nation in the world, given radical Islam its biggest victory in 1,300 years, given up whatever leverage we ever had with foreign governments and thrown our friends the Israelis back to the Nazis, this time in Kaffiyehs.
We have also most likely sealed our own fate proving once and for all throughout the land where radical Islam holds sway, that the West is weak, decadent and without moral fiber.
Scenario:
Saudi Arabia falls within a year to a Wahabi revolution.
Israel is defeated by a Palestinian led Arab military coalition in 6 months, failing to use its few nuclear weapons because France and Germany having promised nuclear retaliation due to the fear of being taken over by their own indigenous Islamic populations. President Arafat dissolves the State of Israel - an action which is sanctioned by the United Nations - whose diplomat’s cars had just been impounded on orders by Patton.
“I have instructed the Mayor of New York City to begin towing the many UN diplomatic vehicles located in Manhattan with more than two unpaid tickets to sites where those vehicles will be stripped, shredded and crushed."
Arafat orders the execution of all Israeli men over the age of 18.
Oil hits $150 a barrel, the US economy crashes, causing a global depression.
A clique of Soviet generals sell 25 suitcase nuclear devices to Chechen Islamic terrorists to raise much needed cash and to buy time for the Moscow government.
Within 90 days 15 major US cities [we intercepted 10 of the suitcase nukes] are destroyed by low yield nuclear weapons, courtesy of Al-Qaeda.
US civil disorder causes martial law to be invoked with shoot to kill the order of the day.
The international situation spins further out of control and downward from there.
Conclusion: Get real citizens, quit your bitching, get with the program and read the goddamn writing on the wall before it’s too late.
Lando
The chilling truth.
The problem is convincing the majority of Americans that this is true.
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