A personal email...

It's midnight in Ohio, and such a slow news period that a personal thread gets posted to invite late-night Freepers to critique a thread between brothers.

These latest points you've made are the best yet, and are going to take some doing to refute. Several of your points I can't refute at all. Let's take them one by one.

Number one: The idea that any leader who does not act, having prior information that enemies of the U.S. plan to cause loss of life to American citizens should be tried for treason...

Number two: we do disagree strongly that the invasion of Iraq made the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorism; that our actions have caused us to be more vulnerable to terrorism (now a favorite mantra of the left), but let's press the examination of that assumption.

The Middle East has been a bubbling cauldron of discontent since the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. The problem originates in the decision made by the Ottomans to support the Austro-Hungary-Germanic alliance in World War One. They sided with the Kaiser, and as such bought their ticket. Folks like Murtha, Kerry Sheehan and their ilk need understand- sure, everyone has the right to decide which side of the battle line they stand on. What they also need to understand is that there are consequences to one's actions, both individually and as a people.

When the armistice was signed, it was the Axis powers who had to accept humiliating terms. President Wilson warned that too harsh of terms would stir a cauldron of discontent and he was right. Be that as it may... their side lost. The Ottoman Empire was broken up, not along natural tribal and cultural lines, but in spite of the secret assurance given to the Arabs by the Sykes-Picot agreement, they were instead fractured into geographically neat mandates, one of which, greater Transsyria was handed to the French as a spoils of war, and Transjordan was handed to the British.

Turkey had so badly beaten the British at Gallipoli, that the Tommies had no wish for a fight again with them, and so Mustafa Kemal Attaturk was left alone to consolidate Turkey as an independent country. Through brutally effective means, he crushed the forces of zealotry in his country, and firmly established Turkey as a secular democracy.
If CNN had existed back then when these cleansings were taking place, they would still be reporting on it today. But the children of those killed grew up and told their children what had happened.

The Americans didn't want, and so did not accept any such colonial spoils, and so became friends with the House of Saud, and later helped Reza Pahlavi establish a secular, modern country in Iran. Iran is composed primarily of Persians, not Arabs, though a significant number of Arabs live in Iran. (Along with Kurds, and a few Christian sects.)

But the Arabs understood that the Caliphate was forever broken, never to be restored, by the power of a technology which they didn't understand and couldn't fight against. The twentieth century had butted heads against the fourteenth century, and the outcome was inevitable.

At about that time, in Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud had the same thing on his mind. If he let the Wahhabis press their mad idea about slaying all of the infidels in the kingdom, he knew that the power recently turned loose on the fields of Flanders.. could just as easily be turned loose in the Holy Cities. Saudi Arabia would drown in Arab blood, as badly at the hands of the infidels, as the Syrians and the Jordanians were being suppressed by the Europeans.

He made up his mind and sent his loyal followers out to slaughter every last Wahhabi, (the precursurs of today's religious madmen), in the entire kingdom. Many years later, he pressed his heirs as he died to defend the house of Saud at all costs, and so they did until the 1970's. But they lost heart then, in a world no longer secure for Kings and empires, and figured that if they just bought off the re-emerging islamic madmen- gave them parole to do whatever they wished outside of the kingdom-, that they would leave the kingdom alone.

After the end of world war one, the British and the French brutally suppressed the various uprisings in their mandates. Rage arose which would someday infect the world. But no U.S. forces participated in these 'police actions'.

World War two again saw the Axis powers re-emerge, and many of the Arabs, notably those in the British and French mandates, once again worked overtly and covertly for the Nazis, and after Germany fell, suffered even more egregiously. Stupid seems never to learn sometimes.

AT the end of WW2, the newly formed U.N. orchestrated the French and British abandonment of their mandates, and established a much smaller Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and so forth. The Middle East got the structure it now enjoys/suffers from.

The Arabs watched as, once again, instead of Arab scimitars slicing through infidel flesh to liberate the caliphate, they were now handed their small countries by a benificient United States. It was hard to say who was more enraged to be handed their freedom-, the French or the Arabs. Especially once the Arabs found that it didn't matter who the master was... to the subjects. Serfs are serfs.

For 60 years, some say 90 years, the Arabs of the various countries have tried one means after another to re-establish the Ottoman Empire.

In the late 1950's Gamal Abdel Nasser seized power in Eqypt and nationalized the Suez Canal. The British and French both tried to liberate it... until the United States decided that it would not happen, and with several telephone calls turned around two European armies by it's will alone.

Now, even the Europeans were pissed. But surprisingly the Arabs seethed even more. Egypt, which had joined briefly with Syria to form the, (i think it was), the United Arab Emirates, began an attempt to rejoin by force all of the Arabs. Nasser decided to establish his credentials in the late 1950's by threatening to burn Israel to the ground with chemical weapons. When the U.S. assured him that he could be killed by the CIA at a whim, that fell apart. When the Egyptians and the Syrians disagreed about just who was going to be the maximum leader, (as is natural for coalitions of psychotic zealots), the countries separated again.

The Arabs for 60 years have found themselves crushed under by dictators, raped by their own governments, isolated in a world under rapid expansion of wealth, and have raged at their impotence. They have never known freedom or democracy, and were and are always subjects of the King/Strongman/etc. They are property and they know it.

Therein lies the paradox of Islam. They cannot gather themselves to realize, admit and cast aside that which will forever keep them in poverty. It is their religion, and their acceptance of the 14th century dictates of a different world.

Bush knows, because Condalezza Rice has surely explained to him, as evidenced by his decision making, that four options exist for the United States, and they are stark ones.

1... Kill them all. No hyperbole. No exaggeration. Like Attaturk, Saud, and the powers of the past... kill all of the new Wahhabis, to the last child. Nuclear weapons will be of most efficency in this respect, since no possible way exists to rout them out of the "non-combatants" which merely dance on the rooftops as the missiles fly. Then, we learn to live with it, and spend the rest of the century as a nation of burned out drunks, reviled and shunned by a horrified world for the genocide we perpetrated.

2... Make the same deal as the French, feed money power and increasing control of the world to the Imams, until the time is right for the sabers to flash in the night and all the infidels to die. Vichy dies as Vichy lives. Ask the French.

3... Pull a Clinton redux, and simply fire a few missiles into a different abandoned camp in the Middle East each time we lost a few thousand, then a few tens of thousands, then hundreds of thosuands of American lives. After all, what else could be done? There is no state to retaliate against. Where do you fire the nuclear missiles when every state proclaims how their sympathies lie with the Americans? The terrorists establish a kill ratio of a dozen suiciders against the loss of 20,000 Americans. How long do you think our freedom,(enabling some to badmouth the accomplishments of our troops), would last?

If Kerry had won the election he would have declared peace with honor and immediately sank to his knees in a mosque every night asking for instructions from the mullahs, just like the Iranian President now does.
If Bush didn't immediately reject this Vichy surrender, the end was inescapable, until he was overthrown in a military coup, joined in by every man left in the U.S.... after which we would implememnt solution 1 immediately...

4... Take a chance, and fight an immediate war, drawing in the trained terrorists, into a country weak enough to be taken down, and unignorable in their complicity.

When Afghanistan announced in the last week of September, 2001, that Osama Bin Laden had been appointed the head of their armed forces, and the story broke on the Drudge Report, a few of us felt the same as the original China Marines must have felt, as the Japanese rolled through China. "It's inevitable now.... but where, and when?"

Yet from our national media- not a peep. They were still busy cheering on the Democrats as they blocked efforts of the newly elected George Bush to form his cabinet... after, of course, they lost the two dozen recounts, and all of the other efforts to overturn the election. They declared themselves fine fellows for obstructing the President from forming his Executive staff. Sneering, they broke two centuries of the peaceful and dignified transfer of power, throughout the entire spring and summer. Arguably, it contributed to 3,000 deaths, and untold deaths to follow. I hope they enjoyed themselves.

When I warned Shirley several times that summer to stay away from large targets, large gatherings of people, she thought I had surely lost my marbles. But when you care about family, you endure ridicule if it means a chance of averting tragedy. Sad how less preposterous it sounds now, after you explain it all to the previously sleeping.

George Bush consulted the best military minds in the country, and after all of the advice had been rendered, he sent the forces into Afghanistan. The entire media establishment gnashed their teeth, admittedly at the best camera angle for them to do so, and wailed about the quagmire which would follow. "A billion Soviets died there and we will all die miserably..." Our military professionals shocked the world, which had been waiting in glee to see the U.S. bleed away all of it's wealth, prominence and power.

We then turned to the next incubator of despair and human slavery, Iraq, where the remainder of the output of suiciders needed to be lured into the one place we had military assembled ready to deal with them. To argue that we are only creating more terrorists, is to accept that the Marines on Gaudalcanal only created more Japanese, when they seized the island and trapped japan into a face-saving deathtrap which pulled Jap troops away from all the other places which we couldn't possibly defend. The argument that "if only we mailed taffy to these nice terrorists, then, they would like us, and join us on our candlelight marches..." is the refrain of children. The preparation for this showdown has gone on for decades and more.

I won't argue with you, either, about weapons of mass destruction, since this is an idiot's argument. The amount of wealth, in the hands of a person like Hussein, himself desparate to survive against terrorists as set against him, as they were against the Saudis, forced/enabled (take your pick) the Iraqis to help bankroll a growing operation against the infidels that would culminate in chemical/biological/nuclear material being channeled to the terrorists, as surely as he openly channeled money to the relatives of Palestinian suicide bombers.

But the bankrolling wasn't so much money- they had piles of money coming in from all over the world- but rather what they needed most... the research and development into perfecting WMD. Making the first nerve gas weapon would cost hundreds of millions... the second warhead would be a few dollars, and so with the third.

As anyone who has ever paid any attention to munitions can tell you, the majority of cost of any weapons system is spent up front in research and development. Once all of the bugs are worked out, the design tested, (on Kurds), and finalized, production can then be done in a French apartment bathroom, for no more than a few franks/dollars/shekels, amidst an unconcerned group of frog idiots. For pennies. The same applies to biological weapons.

But-, you have your supporting research into your opinions, and I have mine. We will not agree on this one. And whoever is wrong stands to doom us. And that is not hyperbole, either.

Those persons who worked, and continue to work, though citizens of this country, to hamstring the United States in this it's fight to the death against the final totalitarianism... had better hope that there is no hell.

For it is not like the stupidity of urging young people to vote, in spite of their being totally unprepared to have any clue as to what they are voting for. Liberals figure that just the act of voting is sacramental, since they haven't a clue what a real sacrament is.

The Germans voted in 1932. The Japanese cheered in 1933 when their troops overran Manchuria.

Stupid people get nations smashed, and we are fast losing the last of the luxury of being utterly wrong with no permanent consequence.

Football games recur every year, and if you lose this year, you can have fun rooting next year, with your beer and brats in hand.

The Cartheginians don't attend football games anymore. Neither do the Aztecs. Nor do the remnants of the Armenians. Mistakes leave ruins for archaeologists, not thriving civilizations.

In this world, being wrong, cheering for the wrong guy to get into power and lead your country into oblivion is something you only get to do once. He may have spoke much more fluently, smiled much more Eastern-Seaboard-ish, been much more able to fabricate lies effortlessly and charm the pants off of a barely literate national press...

But once he loses for all of us the accumulated security of twenty generations, wealth and freedom allowing us to direct our own destinies... all of his clever banter will turn to acid in our ears, as we finally realize what was bought for us at the cost of so much blood....

... and which we cast into the dirt, charmed as we were by the charisma of a truly sophisticated man about town.

I can hear the words now of the ghost of Winston Churchill, as he intones that, "-... Across the whole of the free world, a muslim curtain has now descended..."

Those who think it unnecessary to study history, aren't just doomed to repeat it. They are doomed to watch their children be enslaved by it.

Bush did Number 4, because it is our only chance of not having to wipe out 300 million people with nuclear weapons. A lot of young Marines are betting with their blood that they may be able to forstall or even stop the most horrendous religious war ever known.

Vietnam involved a single country, of no real consequence to us. People who thought that the war was wrong need to sort out for themselves the honorability of their personal actions. It is too much to explore it here.

It bothered me so much that I finagled my way into the Air Force, and overseas to the Pacific so that I might find out. It forced me to study war for thirty years, so that I might understand. I was a dumb kid. But I understood then that a person's actions follow him... unlike the last football game, or, in the eyes of the Oprah-lites, the last election "...where that cute guy ran against that...uh...other one and.. er...they all made speeches and then we voted. And the cute one didn't win, just this guy that the news says is real dumb, so I guess he is...."

A comittment to understand, to take seriously our responsibilities to choose wisely, is not just a right, it is a solemn duty owed to those who came before.

I am not denigrating your right to an opinion or to choose... I am simply saying that you need to be as serious about what you accept as fact from a liberal media twisted and biased beyond recognition... as you would be about career choices which affect the rest of your life.

Be good to note that troop re-enlistment is at record highs. Even 1 out of every 5 amputees in Iraq has re-enlisted (I heard that on FoxNews when I was home at Christmas).

You write very well....as good an explanation of what we are involved in as any I have read in the last four years. The liberals crazed desire for power will end this country as we know it, should they are handed the reins of power by the electorate. I do not think the American people are that gullible to let that happen.

I do not think the American people are that gullible to let that happen.

Personally, I don't believe the American People are knowledgeable enough to prevent it from happening. We have allowed the socialists free reign; the Allies won the battles against the Axis Powers, but it is becoming readily apparent that they have become firmly entrenched in all sectors of our society and are winning the war. Make no mistake -- President Bush is doing a lot of things correctly -- he's just not doing enough of the right things in a timely fashion.

Well written article; thank you.

Well done, sir! I have read your intelligent post, have bookmarked it, and will be re-reading it and sharing it with others....especially those "others" that just don't "get it".

BTTT and kudos to "pickrell"!!

This is an excellent piece. I only have one correction and put it forth because liberals will sieze on one mistake to justify ignoring all of your excellent reasoning and history.

Tha alliance between Egypt and Syria was the U.A.R., the United Arab Republic...NOT the U.A.E.

Thank you for posting this. It is very well-written.

The Cartheginians don't attend football games anymore. Neither do the Aztecs. Nor do the remnants of the Armenians. Mistakes leave ruins for archaeologists, not thriving civilizations.

Well put!

This, also, but "have spoken" instead of " have spoke"..

Thanks brityank for calling this excellent historical review and critical analysis of the resulting present situation to my attention. And thank you pickrell for taking the time to write and post your review and analysis.

I concur with almost all of it and for a very long time have said that the threat posed to the United States by socialists, Democrats, and liberals is far greater than the one posed by the radical Islamic terrorists. I have always added that it is far more likely that the middle east will turn into radioactive glass long before terrorism brings down the US.

The islamic terroists that are already in the US can cause much grief, but they have no chance at all to bring down the US. Make no mistake, the United States is within two decades of coming apart at the hands of the socialists, but it is the Democratic Party that is destroying America. And it is the Democratic Party and their ideation of socialism that must be defeated if the US is survive and prosper.

Ron, this is superb! Thank you for sharing it!

Those who think it unnecessary to study history, aren't just doomed to repeat it. They are doomed to watch their children be enslaved by it.

Amen!

That's an Honorary Tagline for Taglinus!

Excellent, excellent post. Am saving it for future reference, and bumping for others to enjoy. Please repost again later as well since this one truly deserves it and others should read it!

"..The alliance between Egypt and Syria was the U.A.R., the United Arab Republic...NOT the U.A.E..."

You are absolutely right! I knew as I was writing it that something was amiss in my memory, I just couldn't picture the name clearly enough in my mind. I only needed to see you write it to remember. Excellent eyes, Marple!!

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