I completely disagree. Once again you put our country in a box where we must do one thing or another. Life is not that simple, Kevin. We win this war by outthinking our enemy, who right now, is doing a much better job of outthinking us because we are too busy being barbarians.
The "wimps", as you call them, are the ones that could come up with a way to win with a combined use of strategic force AND intelligence gathering. That's they key and we will be doomed to failure if use strategies that are 2000 years old.
Your post here reminds me of when I went and saw the movie 300 with a very conservative friend of mine. He says to me in the middle of the movie, "See? That's what we have to do. Be like the Spartans. They are takin' it to the Muslims."
I turned to him and said, "This movie takes place in the 6th century BC. There were no Muslims for another 1200 years."
"Oh," he says.
Thinking wins wars and especially in this case when we aren't actually fighting a country.
Certainly, outthinking your enemy is important, but war is not policing. We're "being barbarians"? Good. In case you hadn't noticed, war requires killing. There's no "civilized way" to kill people in combat. As one Usenet wag put it, "To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be unable to commit mayhem is not the mark of civilization, but domestication."
We didn't just "outthink" our enemies in WWI, we outfought them. We didn't just outthink our enemies in WWII, we outthought them, outproduced them, AND outfought them. It seems, however, that when we put the emphasis on "outthinking" our enemy rather than outfighting them, we LOSE - see Korea and Vietnam.
The thing you don't seem to grasp is that our opponents embrace barbarism, and count on our civilization to restrain us. Osama bin Laden has stated this explicitly. He believed that we don't have the stomach to fight the only kind of war he could bring to us, and we don't have the will to bring our kind of war to them long enough to be effective. Heads, he wins. Tails, we lose.
And I've seen nothing, nothing from your side of the aisle that suggest you've got any kind of plan other than "run away and ignore it, and it will go away" - validating his strategy.
Kevin, the WWII analogy is completely out of place here. What country are we fighting? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Iraq? We are not fighting a country with a standing army like Germany in WWII. We are fighting an idealogy that exists in all of these countries.
We didn't do enough thinking in Korea or Vietnam and that is why we lost. People in our government actually had the bizarre notion that China would not get involved so everything would be fine. How many enemies did we kill in Korea? 1,190,000-1,577,000+
Vietnam? We killed how many? Somewhere between 4-5 million? We bombed the living hell out of that place with everything but nukes? Did we win? No. And the reason has nothing to do with us not being barbaric enough.
Our current enemies count on us being barbaric and not restraining ourselves. You have it backwards. The new NIA states plainly and clearly that the War in Iraq is an effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, we haven't done shit in Pakistan and now Al Qaeda is operational again and fully capable of attacking us on our soil.
So, no, Kevin, no one on "my side" (whatever that means) has suggested that running away and ignoring it will solve the problem. In fact, everything I hear from the Dems is that we should have finished the job in Afghanistan and never gone into Iraq, which made the situation worse. Several generals have also said this, who I have quoted on here several times but strangely never seem to get the airing or validity that their knowledge deserves.
Instead, we hear the same old "do it my way or we are all dead" baloney that is basically resigning us to defeat. I wonder what it will take for you to admit that President Bush's policies in the Middle East have made us less safe, not more secure, and have been a complete and utter failure. Another attack, perhaps, from bin Laden/Zawahari, still going strong after how many years?
Oh, and one more little tidbit of perspective. You analogy of WWII and recent posts about the space program have something in common. In both of those eras in our country's history, government worked.
We had people that were working in the system that were extremely intelligent and highly capable. We stopped the greatest standing army in the history of the world in WWII in three and half years. In four years of the Iraq War, we haven't been able to secure the road from airport to Bagdhad. The reason for this is we have buffoons working in our leadership.
Note:
All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost;
references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>
JS-Kit/Echo comments for article at http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2007/07/that-reminds-me.html (4 comments)
Tentative mapping of comments to original article, corrections solicited.
I completely disagree. Once again you put our country in a box where we must do one thing or another. Life is not that simple, Kevin. We win this war by outthinking our enemy, who right now, is doing a much better job of outthinking us because we are too busy being barbarians.
The "wimps", as you call them, are the ones that could come up with a way to win with a combined use of strategic force AND intelligence gathering. That's they key and we will be doomed to failure if use strategies that are 2000 years old.
Your post here reminds me of when I went and saw the movie 300 with a very conservative friend of mine. He says to me in the middle of the movie, "See? That's what we have to do. Be like the Spartans. They are takin' it to the Muslims."
I turned to him and said, "This movie takes place in the 6th century BC. There were no Muslims for another 1200 years."
"Oh," he says.
Thinking wins wars and especially in this case when we aren't actually fighting a country.
I am not at all surprised you disagree, Mark.
Certainly, outthinking your enemy is important, but war is not policing. We're "being barbarians"? Good. In case you hadn't noticed, war requires killing. There's no "civilized way" to kill people in combat. As one Usenet wag put it, "To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be unable to commit mayhem is not the mark of civilization, but domestication."
We didn't just "outthink" our enemies in WWI, we outfought them. We didn't just outthink our enemies in WWII, we outthought them, outproduced them, AND outfought them. It seems, however, that when we put the emphasis on "outthinking" our enemy rather than outfighting them, we LOSE - see Korea and Vietnam.
The thing you don't seem to grasp is that our opponents embrace barbarism, and count on our civilization to restrain us. Osama bin Laden has stated this explicitly. He believed that we don't have the stomach to fight the only kind of war he could bring to us, and we don't have the will to bring our kind of war to them long enough to be effective. Heads, he wins. Tails, we lose.
And I've seen nothing, nothing from your side of the aisle that suggest you've got any kind of plan other than "run away and ignore it, and it will go away" - validating his strategy.
Kevin, the WWII analogy is completely out of place here. What country are we fighting? Saudi Arabia? Pakistan? Iraq? We are not fighting a country with a standing army like Germany in WWII. We are fighting an idealogy that exists in all of these countries.
We didn't do enough thinking in Korea or Vietnam and that is why we lost. People in our government actually had the bizarre notion that China would not get involved so everything would be fine. How many enemies did we kill in Korea? 1,190,000-1,577,000+
Vietnam? We killed how many? Somewhere between 4-5 million? We bombed the living hell out of that place with everything but nukes? Did we win? No. And the reason has nothing to do with us not being barbaric enough.
Our current enemies count on us being barbaric and not restraining ourselves. You have it backwards. The new NIA states plainly and clearly that the War in Iraq is an effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, we haven't done shit in Pakistan and now Al Qaeda is operational again and fully capable of attacking us on our soil.
So, no, Kevin, no one on "my side" (whatever that means) has suggested that running away and ignoring it will solve the problem. In fact, everything I hear from the Dems is that we should have finished the job in Afghanistan and never gone into Iraq, which made the situation worse. Several generals have also said this, who I have quoted on here several times but strangely never seem to get the airing or validity that their knowledge deserves.
Instead, we hear the same old "do it my way or we are all dead" baloney that is basically resigning us to defeat. I wonder what it will take for you to admit that President Bush's policies in the Middle East have made us less safe, not more secure, and have been a complete and utter failure. Another attack, perhaps, from bin Laden/Zawahari, still going strong after how many years?
Oh, and one more little tidbit of perspective. You analogy of WWII and recent posts about the space program have something in common. In both of those eras in our country's history, government worked.
We had people that were working in the system that were extremely intelligent and highly capable. We stopped the greatest standing army in the history of the world in WWII in three and half years. In four years of the Iraq War, we haven't been able to secure the road from airport to Bagdhad. The reason for this is we have buffoons working in our leadership.
Note: All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost; references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>