Posted on 05/20/2005 12:41:18 PM PDT by HairOfTheDog
What’s worse than crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage?
NOT crawling under your beloved house and seeing the foundations rotten with decades of termite damage.
I’ve been away for a while, doing a little thinking. Usually, my thoughts for these past few years have started at home and then taken me to Iraq, and the war. Lately, though, I have been thinking about Iraq, and my thoughts turn more and more to home.
I started thinking along these lines six months ago, after a young Marine shot and killed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah
The ideas behind this little adventure we are about to embark upon have changed enormously since then. I have, quite frankly, been at a loss to know how to put so many wide-ranging snapshots together into this montage, this image, this idea of Sanctuary that I think holds the key to many of the problems we face today.
Stay with me -- our first stop is not our destination, but it is a necessary one. So let me first take you on that original journey, and show you how events in Iraq can show us how to fight and win a much wider and deeper conflict, right here at home.
(Excerpt) Read more at ejectejecteject.com ...
I think the lack of uniform is just the first visible clue. It's not the first time, certainly the concept of guerrila warriors hiding in villages is not new...
These guys have just taken it a step further. They learned about us from our outrage over burned innocents in Vietnamese villages and they will use our own ethics against us. Those villages also had non-uniformed combatants in them. And those stories played on our news and in our movies and horrified us. Those images shake our confidence because we are moral. It's our morality that makes us rip and tear (and roll the live camera) at each other for mere mistakes in judgment in war.
They riot over the suggestion that a book was ruined... not because they give a damn about it, I don't think, but because they know that their riot will make us fall all over ourselves with guilt that we might have offended their sensibilities.
These guys know us. They know our news, and we don't know them well enough to know they are using us against ourselves.
Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, but not this time. We have to look Islam in the eye and name it for what it is. As long as we pander to Muslims' cult/religion, we're weak and ineffective, and it's Vietnam all over again. They don't follow the rules because the Koran says they don't have to. Simple as that. Meanwhile, Arab tyrants, Democrat Libs, and Euroweenies are only too happy to beat us over the head with whatever scurrilous lie bin Laden and his pals are yelling. If Kerry were President, things would be different. Worse. We'd be on our knees to the UN, and blaming republicans left and right for everything. Now and then dems might spare a thought about DC being blown up by Muslim crackpots sprung from jail by the ACLU and the likes of Ramsey Clark, but we'd be busy with multiculturalism/Muslim sharia, etc., rammed down our throats morning, noon, and night, a la Germany, France, Canada, and Spain.
Libs don't realize America's existence is what annoys Islamofascists. We'd have to vanish from the face of the earth before they'd be satisfied. If we get hit hard again, another 9/11, perhaps Boston or another attack on NY, and this after months or years of appeasing the fiends, even the dumbest lib might acknowledge that something was wrong with our foreign policy. Don't count on it, though.
I shudder to think.
I would sell my left arm to have this caliber of wit
must read
I read about the first third and will finish when I get a hour or so. Good reading. The liberals will hate him because guy makes entirely too much sense and threatens their worldview.
All you say about how Washington fought is true, and he was brilliant in the manner in which he did so, and the soldiers were valient in their holding out against all odds and many times in the most horrible of circumstances.
The point was, that it is not the uniform or lack thereof that really typifies terrorist behavior, it is how they fight, whom they target and how, and what they fight for. That was my whole point.
As to butchering or cowing entire enemy populations...unfortunately, horrifically, when those populations are a willing part of the war effort, it is sometimes necessary. Never desirable, never glorifying, but sometimes tragically necessary just the same to bring the war to a quicker and sure end. We did did so to many, many enemy cities in World War II to break the will of the populations fighting us. Sherman did it in large measure for the same reasons as he cut acrioss the south from Atlanta. There are many other examples, including in our own history...notice I did not say they were unjustified. Depending on how it is done, and why it is done, albeit horrific and a teerrible part of the "war is hell" equation, it is sometimes justified and very necessary.
Just my opinion on the matter.
good-stuff/moral-clarity ping
War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.
Thanx. Bookmarking ping for later....
Bill Whittle is one of the greatest essayists of the 21st century... no... dare I say, THE greatest essayist of the 21st century.
Let me defend my assertion:
No author has put forward such a clear, well referenced, literary type of social, ethical, political and anthropologigical case as Bill Whittle.
No author of essays, save Bill Whittle, has given such a clear tone to every issue that he has addressed.
By choosing "values" instead of "issues" on which to construct essays, Bill Whittle has surpassed every known pubdit to date in his ability to bring cogent thought to the "reason" behind this issues.
Bill's essays stand as a sort of "Federalist Papers" for the postmodern world. He is a voice as shrill and intellectually clear today as was Jefferson in the days of the Revolution.
I have never met Bill, and only know him by proxy, through friends who have chided me for missing his speaking engagements, but I feel as though I know him.
I would readily ride into eternal ideological battle behind General Bill, as his ideas are not silly-blogger-quips. They are not lame partisan attacks. They are based in solid values that are REAL, true and worth defending.
Thank you for your voice, Bill. You are above the rest.
If they are hiding amongst the civilian population to fight, if they are not a part of any identifiable/organized military unit...then they are spies and sabotuers and should be treated accordingly and with dispatch IMHO.
To not do so, only invites more of the esame terror from these modern tyrants and barbarians.
save
Agreed. Thanks for the ping.
BTTT
Long but worth it.
I pulled this gem out: "There are millions of photos of people protesting President Bush. There is not a single photo of people in the street protesting Hitler."
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