Posted on 02/09/2005 5:37:33 PM PST by wagglebee
General George S. Patton once said, "Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack."
Those on the left seem to be cynical about everything to do with the war on terrorism. I think if Patton were alive today, he would say liberals lack the courage to fight the enemy, and he would slap a few of them around.
Liberals are also cynical about the way the military handles terrorist prisoners. I am sure Patton would tell liberals they lack the basic understanding of warfare and prisoner handling, and he would challenge them to spend a few days on the front line to see how things are really done. Then he would slap a few of them around once again.
A soldier's job is to kill the enemy, or, as Patton also said, "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." The sooner liberals understand the true meaning of war, the sooner we can make the "other bastard" die for his country.
To prove how out of touch with reality liberals are these days, look at the uproar that occurred because of comments made by Lieutenant General James Mattis. General Mattis, who has commanded troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, was recently speaking at a forum in San Diego about strategies for the war on terror.
Mattis said: "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling."
General Mattis is the kind of general I want leading our troops into battle. Marines are there to kill the enemy, not coddle them. They need a leader like General Mattis.
But of course there was an uproar by liberals. Jeff McCausland, director of the Leadership in Conflict Initiative at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., countered, "Clearly, for an officer from any service to say that publicly is unprofessional and inappropriate and sends a terrible message to subordinates."
I disagree. I think the general's troops loved the message sent and probably feel the same way.
What do liberals think Marines are doing in Iraq, handing out condoms to AIDS patients? Would liberals rather General Mattis had said: "I hate to fight. I think war is much too bloody. I think we should stay home and polish our nails and listen to show tunes."
Somehow, I think liberals would.
Liberals, especially young liberals, seem to forget that war is a very nasty thing. It is not a panty raid on a women's dormitory at a local college or a beer-chugging contest at an off-campus bar. In battle, the enemy has one thing in mind: He wants to kill. War is a contest of kill or be killed, and it is not nice.
The closest most leftists have come to battle is fighting police at various protests in the United States and around the world. Their idea of warfare is yelling obscenities at local police and hurling the occasional rock or bottle. A liberal's badge of honor is spending a few hours in jail after being arrested at a protest in Seattle or Washington, D.C., and getting his or her mug shots taken.
Yet even with their lack of experience in real warfare, liberals seem to think they have all the answers about how the military should treat captured terrorists and how best to fight the war on terrorism. Some liberals even claim that the U.S. Constitution protects terrorists.
I think they have a lot to learn.
First, prisoners captured in Iraq are not leftist protesters staging a sit-in on the steps of a federal building, singing "Give Peace a Chance." Prisoners in Iraq have not studied "Activism 101" and have never heard of Martin Sheen, Janeane Garofalo or Al Franken.
They are terrorist thugs who behead captured men and women, showing no remorse over the act. They are murderers trained by al-Qaida or other terrorist organizations. They want to kill American men, women and children. They have no rights.
Prisoners captured in Iraq are not handled with kid gloves and gently placed in a paddy wagon the way liberal protesters arrested in Seattle are. They are trying to kill Americans when captured and would love nothing better than to kill their captors and escape to fight another day. Captured terrorists should be treated like a rabid dog waiting to bite its handler and thrown in a cage.
I really do not care how inhumanely we treat the captured terrorists being held at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib Prison. They are murderers and thugs. I think terrorists should lose all human rights once they take the path of terrorism. A tough approach is the only deterrent these killers will understand.
If making a terrorist wear a pair of women's panties on his head will help save one innocent life by gaining information on future terrorist acts, it is worth the effort. Victoria's Secret and Fredrick's of Hollywood should contribute panties to the war effort. Maybe we would get a few more confessions.
I think General Mattis would agree. I know General Patton would.
You're right, y'know. Force of arms alone won't do the trick. It will, however, get their attention. But it won't win the war, all by itself.
Instead, it is an idea that will win the war. It will take a better idea than the bad idea -- radical Islamism -- that started it.
That overarching idea is democratic self-rule. Bush was way ahead of the curve on this. See U.S. Grand Strategy and Iraq, from the Hindustani Times, December 31, 2002 -- three months before we entered Iraq.
I have observed this myself and in Church history where they previous revival after it dries up become the persecutor of the next revival.
When Jesus spoke of the Pharisees he spoke of something else. "They say and they do not." This is not the same. I'm thinking as I write . . . I'm going to say that by the way Christ talked that they wanted only to sound Holy and appear Holy when they were not. It was done for effect but there was no inner cause.
Here is something else I have observed over my last 30-35 years of going to Churches. In some Pentecostal(Latter-rain) circles the Preacher's would say that they believed that they could Literally preach the perfect church into existance.
This was a very heady concept but as you can see it did not work.
Word of Faith preachers believe they can by words preach and confess health and prosperity into existance -- we have discussed on FR that this is very -- ify. The say my will not thy will be done. My wants = Faith.
Others Church Fundamentalists preach fruits and rightousness that they themselves do not possess.
The commonality here is that none of these preacher's possessed what they preach and that none either had the will nor strength to enter in, but they hoped that their hearers would have the faith and enter in and by so doing that the hearers would pull the preacher and other members in with them. (We sometimes call that revival)
A good example of this was in 1906 when Brother Seymour Preached that the baptism of the Holy Spirit was to come to a believer with the evidence of speaking in tongues -- He did not have either. And it came to one person then another and within a few weeks hundreds along with brother seymour had come into the experience.
But had he known his church history Brother Seymour would have known that Baptists Methodists Presbyterians and others had been speaking in other tongues for almost two centuries in the US (I digress) And Before the methodists began in 1703 the fundamentalists in their many flavors have on and off spken in tonuges and prophesied back to the anabaptist revival in 1530 Luther and Calvin were both dead set against these manifestations but not Menno Simons. (I really digressed)
A verse comes to mind.
Matthew 13:11-13 He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
The hath not is the lack Patton spoke of. the lack of the Pharisees.
Here Christ says the same thing in a different setting. Matthew 25:28-30 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
If you have more to say brother say on.
-- then on another page he talks about Children TV movies and Viseo games making children into killers. I was surprised by that in light of the main page
I guess I would have to look over his material to make a better judgment.
We know that something has change in society since the 1980's when we started having all this serious youth crime.
The problem is that Video games were in their infancy then and I think I can say that in the 1970's blowem away movies and TV shows ran for for a decade or so without these fatal results.
Death wish, Dirty harry We couldn't talk about that enough when I was a kid. The only caveat is what effect this would have had on real small children ages 2-5 (This may be where the breakdown occurs when the Child's mind is forming good and evil -- because these would have been the 12 - 14 year olds in the 80's (Just a thought)
On a different note one of my observations of the western Church is that none are willing to suffer much less die for their beleifs in Christ, none it appears are willing to sell all that they have give it to the poor and follow chirst, and none are willing to share of his cup.
But all are willing to rule and reign in this life and to pile up riches in this world.
Not things, terrorists, commies, and perps.
One point about the phenomenon worth mentioning was made by Ann Coulter. I really liked it, and it has 'stuck'....(to paraphrase) it is that one notices the liberals will always loudly proclaim conservative's hypocrisy....through their propaganda organs; the MSM, etc. (buncha' bloviators, so old).
Not only is this caterwauling due to the 'lack' we've discussed, (and which is painfully transparent to most people....which is why the majority of 'political movement', or maturation usually goes from liberal to conservative).... but cynically (evilly?) enough, the libs have latched on to everything of 'no value'....no morals; hedonism, homosexuality, abortion, etc., in order to avoid the charge of hypocrisy! (can't accuse someone of hypocrisy when they stand for nothing!). The one thing they do 'stand for' - the environment....they can never be 'called on', since their doom & gloom scenarios always will happen, in some future (if we don't save the baby dung beetle).
That's why "HYPOCRISY" is always their favorite charge!
Sorry! Ms. Coulter is far pithier than I!
This paragraph is the root of your error.
We are not fighting a people, or a nation or even an ethnicity. We are fighting an ideology.
We defeated Germany and Japan by destroying their ideology. When the populations of Germany and Japan saw that nazism and militarism did not work they surrendered, abandoned those ideologies and started living as peaceful, prosperous nations (although Germany is backsliding again)
The answer to the war on terrorism is not to flood those countries with bribes. The answer is to kill all the terrorists. And since the terrorists are a logical and inevitable outgrowth of islam (in fact mohammed (piss be upon him) commands his followers to be terrorists) our war is really against the ideology of islam.
The war ends when islam no longer exists as anything more than an isolated cult belief of a few hundred or less isolated and contained people. As long as islam is allowed to exist the war will never end.
So, killing them not only works now, but is the only method that will solve the problem. The only unknown is how many of them we have to kill before the others wise up and desert their ideology. I'm open to eradicating every last man, woman, child, dog, cattle, camel etc that adheres to islam if that's what it takes.
War is only over when there is a winner. And there is only a winner when the loser is utterly defeated.
Does this mean we can cut more foreign aid and get more tax cuts? (Please say yes, please say yes)
if you still think I'm pacifist, you're a fool, try being more inventive. ..... I hope that clarified some of your criticism. If it didn't, most of us here possess brains, so let's be creative, not inefficient and crude.
My, my. Aren't we high on ourselves? You consider being called naive, the pacifist comment was an analogy, not a label, to be an insult though it isn't, yet you truly hurl insults at me while complimenting yourself.
The last thing we want to do to our troops is demoralize them further by having them losing men at an even higher rate.
If you think our forces are demoralized, you are truly ill-informed (another word meaning naive). They are very happy and proud to be doing what they are doing, which is saving the innocent from the savages. They, as do we, mourn when one of their own goes down but they don't become demoralized over it, they consider it just an unpleasant part of the job they are proud of doing. They also mourn the brutal murder of Innocent women and children by the savages, yet this doesn't demoralize the. It only makes them believe in our cause even more and they become more determine to accomplish it.
Further, since we don't have much capital left to fund such a force, nor much population willing to man it, the overwhelming force option becomes difficult to manage. Any other countries that pose a threat will have to be weakened by alternative means. This is because we need time to re-arm, re-man and perhaps work out alternate doctrine.
We have as much capital as we need to fund such a force. Defending this country is the number one priority of government. We may have to eliminate some gingerbread programs that we never should have had to begin with but the money will be found to defend this country.
We are in this position for several reasons: First is the massive reduction, cutting our forces almost in half, by the Clinton/Gore administrations and second, the difficult but necessary transformation of our forces from the massive force option to a lighter, faster, more agile military with the latest state-of-the-art weapons. So, much of what you say needs to be done is being done. Third, the reason recruiting is slightly down, for the first time, is that we are winning. The sense of urgency is gone. If we embark upon another grand adventure that will change. Some well-trained and experienced SF, etc., are leaving for bigger bucks doing the same thing for the CIA or other mercenary operations.
It is probable that we have active covert operations going on around the world doing many things to lessen the threat to us and to convert oppressed populations. They are much more sophisticated than the options you propose.
Well, we could try the "America's Bounty" option. This time, lets not fund the strongman just because we says he likes us (ie Saddam, bin Laden, the House of Saud, etc)
When did Saddam or bin Laden say they like us? They each declared war on us and worked together to destroy us.
... we send in teachers, goods, food and a guard force which may or may not include the UN.
How are we going to do that? Do you think North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or many others will allow us to do that? Do you just wrinkle your nose and say a magic phrase to make it happen? Saudi asked us to leave, the savages in Iraq bombed the UN building housing aid workers and ran them out, and I doubt that any of them would welcome "teachers, goods, food and a guard force" under the banner of the USA. So, before we change the subject, how are you going to do that?
I'll discuss the UN option later, for now, let's just assume that France and Germany doesn't f*ck with us because the entire operation smacks of humanitarianism. Any politician that votes against it could be made to look as if he hates whatever country we're going into, in so doing he risks political suicide.
Now this I won't call uninformed, that is just plain naive. Why would France, Germany, Russia, and many others not obstruct us? What was more humane than removing a brutal despot like Saddam? They obstructed us at every turn for selfish, monetary reasons, public opinion be damned. Besides, they have the mainstream media all over the world shilling for them. All the while the UN was covering for them as they all happily lapped up billions intended for the "starving children" of Iraq. Were they worried about public opinion? Not until they got caught and not very much then. They still think they can skate because of the MSM.
The same is true in this country. The Democrats obstructed us at every turn, and still are. So is the MSM. Political suicide? Probably, but they are too blind to see it so they continue to obstruct.
Now, that gets us access, now how to use it?
Wrong!! That didn't get us access for the reasons stated.
Let's learn from that lesson and eliminate, or at least reduce the middle man. UN participation would increase acceptance and credibility, so the target population might be more receptive to deeper integration.
Where have you been? The UN is the middleman, guilty of all the sins you describe. In addition, the have committed other sins, making them unacceptable to the locals in many areas.
If this doesn't pan out, go to the "people's" favored representatives, or at least the less virulent ones. Let natural selection take over, the guys who are nice do better, we don't create any martyrs so the bad guys just wither and become bitter has-beens. Since the people we went to first were relatively honest, enforce that honesty by letting in non-military personnel.
Since the first DIDN'T pan out, how are you going to do the rest? You seem to be under the naive assumption that all borders are open and that we can just walk in and do as we please. Where do you learn this pap?
The rest of your screed is just as naive, especially your suggestion as to how to handle North Korea. Do you think those wackos are just going to sit there and take it? They are suicidal anyway. However, I feel certain that we have some covert operations in progress there but not of the kind you describe.
I suspect you get all your information from the MSM and teachers in our public schools and the universities. That leads to being ill-informed. Stick around Free Republic and learn something.
They are commanded to fight against the unbeliever that is near to them. That is, they are to fight until there are no more unbelievers. The mohammadans have been practicing genocide since the 7th century. When it comes down to islam dying or us dying, islam is going to die.
In fact, what you just said is pretty similar to the Nazism and militarism embraced by Germany and Japan before and during WWII.
You've never read the koran have you? A little history lesson, the nazis and the japs were killing people who never attacked them or caused them harm (like the islamics do today). We attack out of self defense. They attacked us and we are trying our best to kill as few of their civilians while still getting the terrorists. Now as their civilians become terrorists (which if they follow koranic islam they must do) we'll have to kill them too. Unfortunately their religion binds them into this fate.
As for Mohamed commanding his followers to be terrorists, that's patently untrue. Militant Islam is mostly based on a passage which describes a single campaign.
read the koran. There's lots of suras commanding them to fight us. Do a little research and learn. several threads here have discussed these passgaes in depth. seek and you will find.
Just like some militant versions of Christianity (every religion in fact) people who want power can use the loose language of religious texts to declare holy war on others.
The difference is when a Christian calls a crusade (for example) he is violating his scriptures. When a moslem calls a jihad he is following his scriptures exactly
(Sura 109)
I never saw that one on the list of terrorist suras. Look for the others
What's encouraging however, is that there has been a recent stirring in the Muslim intellectual community that seems similar to the early parts of the Enlightenment.
Like the taliban, al queda, wahhabism etc? The moslem reformation is moving more to radical militant islam than to maturity. It has to if they are going to follow their scriptures
We beat the Germans and the Japs in WW2 by pounding the hell our of them with our military until they were totally and completely at our mercy. Hell, we nuked Japan, TWICE! Yes, afterwards we did the proper thing by providing major help for them to rebuild their countries, but we couldn't have done the second without doing the first, it just wouldn't work.
Under your premise, we should have been fighting off German and Japanese terrorist til this day. Again, we NUKED Japan - TWICE! Shouldn't that have caused every friend and relative of the Hiroshima dead and injured to become terrorist against the US when we occupied Japan? But, that really didn't happen, now did it?
Why is this so hard for your ilk to understand. It's the basic psychology of confronting and reforming the school yard bully taken to a larger and much more serious extreme. You can't reform him until the bully is made to realize he is totally impotent against a superior force.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill
English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)
John Stuart Mill is widely considered to be one of the dozen or so most intelligent people ever to have lived. Many try to say that he is something of a "founder" of liberalism; actually, he was somewhere to the right of what today's conservatives, but he was what Bush would call compassionate.
I'll commnet a little more later i got to take my son to work.
bttt
are you really THAT stupid?
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