Posted on 11/11/2007 6:34:14 AM PST by ABN 505
NORWICH - It's quiet outside, but Terry Rathbun walks to the window of his condo again. He scans the street in front of the building. He's not sure why he keeps doing it, what he's looking for.
There's nothing there now, no threat. He finishes his scan and sits back down, all of it as automatic as breathing.
He feels he has a special sense of when things aren't right - not that things have been genuinely right for a long time, or can be counted on to be right again. Staff Sgt. Rathbun has been away from Iraq for more than a year. But Rathbun is still at war.
Related links
* Terry Rathbun Terry Rathbun Photo
He thought getting shot in the face was the hard part. But he's home now, and his mind fights him. His body fights, too, still building scars through the wreckage of his jaw and sending wincing pain to the shredded muscles of his right shoulder.
(Excerpt) Read more at courant.com ...
the writing is heavy enough in melodramma to do a disservice to the facts.
linky no worky
An army at war, but a nation not. That was George Bush’s great failure. He refused to take the nation to war. In 2005, instead of pushing the war to a conclusion, he spent his capital taking on social security reform. At NO time did he connect the two. He never said, we must fix this fiscal mess, or at sometime down the road, we cannot no longer conduct ths “ long war.” This is the same guns AND butter approach taken by Lyndon Johnson. And in 1968, it was a much a matter of liquidity that drove Johnson to capitulate as it was the backlash from Tet.
We all know where the Courant is coming from, but the facts are that our vets are not being taken care of properly and that is a crime.
There really are some things long overdue.
I agree with this. If "the fate of Western civilization is at stake!", as I'm reminded by various messages here on FR, then gear up like it, while also showing the appropriate abhorrence of war that helps make it short and overwhelmingly decisive. Otherwise it comes off as hyperbole - the sort of "go team!" sentiment that fades quickly when things turn sour, or the "phone me at the mall and tell me how the game went" non-chalance that does not put steel in the spine of folks who will need to carry water for the battle.
Honest question. Not baiting at all. Do you believe it to be the fact?
Ping
I agree with most of that, except the part that asserts that wars must be short and “decisive.” It doesn’t necessarily work that way. I defer to no one in my appreciation of Grant’s generalship, but he well knew before Appomattox that if Lee’s army escaped him and, worse, scattered into the hills, as it well might have, then it would have turned into years of guerilla warfare, conducted by men willing to continue the fight. Lee’s great prestige allowed him to surrender his army intact and to disarm it. Grant’s decision to parole it, kept it disarmed.
May God’s hand of healing be on Sgt. Rathbun.
As I see the issue the answer is yes. Obviously, there are shades of gray between the following options but our enemy will not stop until we convert or die.
We can choose a low intensity military and socioeconomic war that we are essentially in now that is a long term commitment. This type of war will not disturb the American civilian population in any significant way. The problem with this approach is sustainability from a political standpoint and the risk that the allies of our enemies both foreign and domestic will sabotage the effort over the long haul, as is being done now.
We can choose a high intensity short term warfare that will destroy our enemies will and ability to fight ANY type of war against us OR our allies. Something like what was done against Germany and Japan in WWII. When the mission is over our troops come home. The down side is the loss of many innocent lives. The upside is this type of action is it will be very effective at stopping further attacks upon us or our allies or interests. Additionally, our enemies foreign and domestic would not be able to mobilize effectively against us in the likely short time the activity would take. Further, this type of approach would reinforce the knowledge that peaceful dealings with the west are beneficial while warring actions are not. Because of our experience with the left and the democrats during Viet Nam, this is the approach I would have taken. IMHO this approach will ultimately save the most lives world wide.
We can choose a policy of "containment", and this is the direction I think we are heading because of the subversion of the first option which is in play. Our enemy has stated many times that they will convert us or destroy us. Thus they will continue to attack us and our allies while developing WMDs. They will use these weapons when they believe a chance for Islamic victory exists. While no one can predict the future, this enemy's political & religious nature and history indicates they will do exactly as they say. If the west doesn't surrender then a world wide chemical, biological, and nuclear war is the likely outcome of this strategy.
I think the fate of Western civilization is at stake, but from moral decay. Islam would simply be a force to take advantage of that decay, like the Visigoths.
I think the USA is experiencing the typical perils of empire, but in an age of instant destruction and devastation. I think our global presence arouses the dissent of people who profit locally from dissent by gaining local power - some have global ambitions, but they also fight among themselves very effectively, something the USA should recognize but not foment.
I think we have seldom achieved loyalty through foreign aid or military support payola. I think that such loyalty evaporates as soon as the last dollar or bullet is spent, if not before, and that the assurance that our arms and training won’t be turned against us is a pipe dream (oil pipe).
I think we should pursue energy independence as aggressively as we went to the moon, or as aggressively as we throw ourselves into the hornet’s next of disloyalty known as the Middle East.
I think we should base our strongest alliances on shared convictions of the nature and liberties of man, not on the expedience of trade. We should strengthen an economic and cultural alliance among South and Central American neighbors, with whom we share a great deal of European/Western cultural heritage. We should not make China a most favored trading nation while we cut off Cuba. Both are communist. We should kill Cuba with kindness - its people, not its government.
As for militant Islam, the best thing to do is make Muslims themselves face the hard realities of the nihilism they tolerate so long as it directs itself to an enemy “out there” - Israel or the USA. If the Saudis, Jordanians, et al had to really deal with the viper their ambivalence nurtures, they might finally have the discourse Islam needs to mind its own house. If they didn’t deal with, they would die.
The West needs to stop hating life or thinking of the world only as consumers or producers. We need to export optimism in human nature when it is unfettered from tyrannical governments. It is a shame to think that every problem can be solved by big government, or that an individual can never find the solution to human happiness, so he had just better keep his nose to the grindstone and let the experts and politicians sort the important stuff out.
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