I am as Un-PC a person as you will ever find. But I cannot subscribe to what I call "The Glass Parking Lot" course of action. I am sick at heart anytime I hear about our troops being injured or killed by IED's or some kind of terrorist sponsored activity. But to say we should just load up about 100 B-52's with a full internal load of 50 Mark 82's and lay waste to Ramadi or anywhere else (as I have heard many people in the Freeper community advocate) is just not a logical option. Believe me, there are times when I think that would be a good idea, such as when those savages hung the charred corpses from the bridge outside Fallujah or on 9/11, but think for a minute.
If you ask yourself the question of why we have fought the way we have in Iraq and Afghanistan, the logical (in my opinion) reason is because we want to try to find a way to make ourselves safer. In the view of those forming policy in our country, that means (from a Mulsim perspective) making your education, family, job, friends, community and future MORE important and valuable than strapping explosives on your chest and walking into a pizza joint full of unbelievers and detonating yourself.
This is not World War II...we are not desperate enough to roll over civilians with tanks, carpet bomb or drop a nuclear weapon. In WWII, things WERE different. There was no pre-determined outcome (although many people today look at the allied victory as a forgone conclusion) and we were engaged in a life or death struggle. It was clearly going to be all of us or all of them, and we knew in advance what life under their heel was going to be like.
Now, if some Islamic terrorists set off a nuclear weapon in one of our cities (or perpetrate some other thing resulting in mass casualties on a scale or frequency dwarfing 9/11, I will be the first one to support a glass parking lot or some other equivalent response in certain localities.
But we cannot do that now. I understand many disagree with me on this, but I assure you, my reluctance does not stem from any kind of guilt. It stems from proportionality.
I often find it useful, when trying to formulate my personal stand on a given issue, to delineate the spectrum by "driving a stake in the ground" at either end of the spectrum which can be agreed upon by the majority of people, or at least most people know.
For example, in this case, most of us (but I guarantee not all of us) could agree that Islamofacist terrorists killing one person would not be just cause for dropping a nuclear weapon on a capitol city in the Middle East. So that would be one end. On the other hand, Islamofacists setting off a nuclear weapon in a large American city and killing millions of people would be just cause for choosing an appropriate target or targets to drop a thermonuclear device on. Perhaps Tehran, perhaps Damascus. But it would not be unreasonable to think that some measure of evidence pointing in a direction might be adequate to choose a target and act on it. So that might be the other end.
The issue is, where is the point, contained in that defined spectrum I just outlined, that would serve as a threshold?
A hundred dead? A thousand? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?
A million?
I readily admit that the threshold will be different for many people. Mine is just higher than some, less than others. There are people who would push the button even if nobody had been killed, and there are others who would rather die and see all we know obliterated before THEY would push the button, which means 'Never".
I personally just do not think we are at the point where we can drop 5000 500lb bombs in a single raid on an undefended city with unevacuated civilians.
Or a nuclear weapon.
Again, this is MY opinion, I understand others feel differently.What we are trying to do in Iraq is magnificent. We are shedding blood and spending money to try to break the cycle over in that part of the world. Sure, it is in our best interests. We all stand to gain a lot if it works. We could just grab the oil while we are there, but we aren't.
We had 3000 of our citizens killed in just a couple of hours.
We would have been justified in carpet bombing and taking the damned countries over there by force, but we didn't.
It's not what we do. In WWII we could have taken and held as our own nearly any territory we occupied, but we didn't. We gave it back to the people who attacked us, and whose butts we kicked. It is the American way.
Now, we are giving those people a chance at choosing their own government, even if it (as seems likely) is a hostile one towards us. So be it. The process we embarked on in April 2003 may succeed, or it may ultimately fail. If we end up in a full scale conflagration in the Middle East, it cannot be said we did not try the humane approach to stamp out this festering, stinking thing called Islamofacism. And before we try the other approaches, it is the right way, and the American way to attempt it as we have.
So, you're a reactionist. OR you doubt the terrorist would actually use a nuke on us if they could.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
And to be quite honest, I don't understand why we don't "colonize" what we conquer, if attacked first. Seems like a good way to avoid another attack on our soil!
Spot on!