Posted on 07/28/2006 5:37:41 PM PDT by AFPhys
Enjoy.
Article was excerpted on FR here and had a few comments:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1668888/posts
Thanks for the post.
We used to understand war. Look at Dresden.
Destroying the enemy outright, with as much firepower as available.
gotribe posted on the earlier thread:
"Back in the days of real wars, a civilized people could justify offing the bad guys, because they knew the world would be safer from evil and the bad guys would burn in hell. Nowadays, no one believes in either evil or hell, so it's pretty hard to fight an effective war."
of course.
and in war, you have to be NASTY, more NASTY than the enemy is.
Please excuse a little musing on war, from bother personal experieince and a lot of historical study.
Some musings look like this. If Condi can't make a cease fire soon maybe we'll turn this into an Op Ed or something so please give me some feedback. If this is of no value to you my feelings will survive!....
Just a week or so ago, we wrote for a paper what we were realy thinking: We are living in a new strategic environment that we do not yet fully understand. ... Some of our adversaries, once viewed as of no or lesser importance, are undeniably at work developing ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. This ushers in an entirely new age of threat, terrorism, intelligence and defense.
In the Cold War, everyone understood the rules. The United States and the Soviet Union were at odds. Smaller nations chose sides: and they understood whose side they were on. The little guys had little weapons. Only the big guys had missiles and such.
If smaller, regional wars flared, the big superpowers let them play out or they encouraged conduct that would not irreparably alter the strategic balance.
Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) kept the two superpowers at odds yet cautious; ever wary of overstepping bounds with the other. The concept that either superpower could unleash hell on earth upon the other; but only with the full and complete knowledge that it would reap the same hell after a short, almost imperceptible delay; supposedly kept the world “safe.”
Deterrence; the notion that the fear of MAD could guide men toward right decisions guided our lives for decades.
That the very existence of MAD meant the world was a few seconds or minutes away from total immolation at all times made for some sleepless nights, especially during a crisis like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I grew up in the military during the Cold War, and, although not assigned to strategic forces, served as caretaker for tactical nuclear weapons more than once. It was a heavy burden.
And we knew plenty of men (they were all men then) that served in strategic submarines or missile silos or B-52 wings. These were the men on watch at all times. The men that made sure that MAD was valid, reliable and “safe.”
Many, most of us, are delighted, I expect, that MAD no longer exists. It seemed a terribly immoral policy; a total abrogation of the idea that peace could be assured through diplomacy and dialogue. Peace was maintained, some said, by the nuclear power of the two superpowers. The fear of nuclear weapons in fact.
And then this system melted away with the end of the Soviet Union.
The situation we have today, and we see the ugly evolution of the former strategic balance in the situation between Hezbollah and Israel, is something like this. A democracy, relying upon the superpower for arms, assistance and sometimes advice, is engaged with an enemy. That enemy, not a state at all but something greater than an armed militia and smaller than a duchy, is governed by religious zealots who are not elected. But the enemy leaders also rely upon third parties for arms, training and the like. The enemy and the third parties are all sworn enemies of the democracy, and perhaps every democracy; or every Christian democracy. They want to wipe the regional democracy off the map. They want to rule “from Spain to Iraq.”
The democracy and its mentor have nuclear weapons. The third parties, at least one of them in support of the enemy, may have nuclear weapons. Certainly they could get nuclear weapons if left to shop freely.
The enemy, even in the face of a democracy and its mentor armed with nuclear weapons seems undeterred. In fact, some learned sages practically guarantee that the enemy is not deterred. We spoke to Israel's Dr. Boaz Ganor, the deputy dean of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy and the founder of the Institute for Counter Terrorism in Israel who said, "The Hizbullah has succeeded in creating a situation in which it deters Israel more than Israel deters it. It is unprecedented for a terrorist organization to deter a state and not vice versa."
Hmmmm.
Without elections to keep its leaders in check with some accountability; and with a weak, some might say powerless government (Lebanon) overseeing (loosely) its territory; for the enemy the normal strictures of treaties, good conduct, diplomacy and proper international behavior may have gone away. Add the fact that no international organization has stepped forward to demonstrate impartiality or the ability, desire and requisite influence or power to enforce proper conduct, much less a peace. So what do we have?
We have a very dangerous situation. “A new strategic environment that we do not yet fully understand.” It includes, undeniably, the existence of ballistic missiles with even longer ranges than those used thus far in the conflict; and perhaps weapons of mass destruction.
Israel and the United States and their allies, need to exert some control and establish some bounds by which a way forward without war may be found now. A cease fire is needed to stop the loss of innocent lives and to establish an environment for the discussion leading to a more lasting agreement. We agree, for a change, with Warren Christopher, who wrote last Friday, “Especially disappointing is the fact that she [Secretary of State Rice] resisted all suggestions that the first order of business should be negotiation of an immediate cease-fire between the warring parties.”
It seems that the enemy, in this case, and its vocal and seemingly irresponsible mentor nations, left to map the direction forward without proper dialogue from the democracies, could lead the world into an even more perilous situation.
And no rational man can want that.
We cannot leave the outcome and the timing of this thing in Hezbollah's hands. When Israel says they've reached a point they can live with we have to call a cease fire and start the dialogue if we can.
Mission of the Hospital Corp, US Navy: "To keep as many men at as many guns for as many days as possible."
Bah! We knew what to do with a Gordian knot of the Japanese persuasion in 1945. Surely we can come up with something similar in 2006.
AFPhys: I like your idea...Thanks!
Folks, there is a mad dog in the neighborhood now, and we want to teach it tricks. It will have none of this. It wants to kill you and your children. Failure to see this before they strike us will be a heavy burdon for us to carry. We can stop it now if we will. But, sadly, we do not have the will.
Hi Tex. Good post, brother.
The part where you win by killing the other guy.
Have you noticed, as the Israeli bombs drop western television media and islamic television media photograph the leadership of Hezebolla inciting its constituency to lift up arms to fight us. Our media destructively debates the inhumanity and dysproportionate, assymmetrical warfare being waged. We place a high premium of loosing our soldiers (Israeli soldiers) while the facists have spent the past 40 years inculcating their constituents to wage a war against he west and die. The dedicated facists want to die for their cause. We want to discuss it. (Collectively). The will to victory will not be measured by numbers of dead but by prevailing ideology of the living. The west has a reproductive rate of less than 2 per household. The muslims have a reproductive rate of 9 per household. We are afraid to look back for fear they are gaining on us. The United States has adopted a world view that all views are valid to vet. The islamists provide that only one view is valid to pronounce. Wrong though they may be, they have clarity of purpose and it is extant and ubiquitous among moslems. Western citizens want to explore all possible avenues of synthesis. The islamists have one, and that is, in its purity, does not confound. The west needs to move to a singular view that survival is what should bind all of us who want to have this option of multicultural discussion in the future. We must propagate the Will to Win, or we will fail.
We need to nuke Iran and Syria now, not to deter them, but to stop them from doing what they are doing. With Iran and Syria out of the picture, Hez'b'Allah folds up and blows away (or is blown away) within months. The same for Hamas.
State support for obvious and avowed Jihadists must be punished by the death of that state.
This may have the added benefit of deterring other Islamic states from similar action in the future. Perhaps, if enough parts of Iran are still glowing, and enough of their mullahocracy is vaporized, Pakistan will be willing to relinquish it's nukes ... and they will have to be forced to do so, since it's clear that the West simply can't afford to have weapons of mass destruction in Islamic hands.
This is not really a complicated problem ... it is just a problem that has festered due to 30+ years of inaction. The fix is now much more painful than it would have been had it been dealt with back then.
At the end of the day...the war will not be over by the end of the day...
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