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2005-11-21

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Posted by Fred 2005-11-21 14:23|| || Front Page|| [11129 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Not to gild the lilly -- great post-- but the other frightening thing to me is that the US surrender party seems to take as an article of faith that in purely military terms the coalition effort in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. Compared to what? I'm reading a book now on the North African campaign, which is for the most part a litany of real disasters -- half trained US troops being badly led into one costly defeat after another. You just have to imagine how the defeatists would react if, God forbid, one platoon of soldiers or Marines were trapped and wiped out by AlQ.

Posted by Matt 2005-11-21 16:26|| 2005-11-21 16:26|| Front Page Top

#2 A little math extrapolation for that event in July 1876 when 212 of Custer's command were dropped by the locals. America had around 38 million back then. Today we have around 290 million and in those terms it would have been loses of over 1600. OMG, its a quagmire! The defeatist today would have abandoned the Dakota and certainly the New Mexico territory to the Apaches as well.

However, it's encouraging to understand that if these same twerps ever do something stupid and ignite a second civil war, they're going to fold faster than a house of cards.

Posted by Uleans Angineck8967 2005-11-21 16:41|| 2005-11-21 16:41|| Front Page Top

#3 I hear 'ya Matt. What book.... Army at Dawn?

Posted by Shipman 2005-11-21 16:42|| 2005-11-21 16:42|| Front Page Top

#4 Well stated Fred. Thanks, you are right on target.

Posted by John Q. Citizen 2005-11-21 16:49|| 2005-11-21 16:49|| Front Page Top

#5 It's interesting that Chris Matthews goes to Toronto to say this crap. Perhaps he believes it enough to repeat it on his NBC Sunday morning show? Otherwise, he's just a whore prostituting himself before a foreign audience. A Madonna with a pot belly.

Posted by ed 2005-11-21 16:52|| 2005-11-21 16:52|| Front Page Top

#6 Yes, Ship, Army at Dawn. I had resisted picking that up because I didn't think too much of the guy's book on Iraq (In the Company of Soldiers) but Army at Dawn is really strong.

Posted by Matt 2005-11-21 17:04|| 2005-11-21 17:04|| Front Page Top

#7 I was impressed/educated by Army at Dawn... waiting for the rest of his WWII histories. Haven't read his Iraq thing, probably won't. It's that journalism/history divide. You're a fool to try both.

Posted by Shipman 2005-11-21 19:17|| 2005-11-21 19:17|| Front Page Top

#8 Very well said.

Posted by 2b 2005-11-21 19:40|| 2005-11-21 19:40|| Front Page Top

#9 "Is anyone paying attention?"

Best I can figure, somewhere between 20% and 30% of Americans are paying close attention to the war-- and nearly half of them absolutely hate the war and hate America for waging it. The rest of America is either watching TV, or boxing the One-Eyed Mullah, or gobbling up the latest gossip about their favorite Hollywood stars, or fretting about really important things like gender equity, diversity and global warming.

"Is our national attention span so short that we can't hold a single idea for more than four years?"

Where in God's name did you get "four years" from???? Most of the Epsilon-Minus Submorons in this country got distracted by bright shiny objects several years ago, and nearly all of the rest went off the rails during last year's elections. The attention span of the average American is shorter than that of most month-old puppies.

"Is our national resolve so non-existent that we will cave in to savagery because it's easier to watch teevee?"

Of course. We had an inkling of that a year ago, when fifty million Americans actually voted for John Fuckface Kerry for president.

Here's an unsettling thought for you: right now, all around the world in countries ranging from our most stalwart allies to our bitterest enemies, there are clear-eyed, no-nonsense men and women dedicated to making, in the service of their governments, the most accurate assessments possible of America's capabilities, intentions, political constraints, strengths and weaknesses.

They are watching. They are observing. And they are drawing conclusions from what they see happening right now in America.

And when I contemplate what they are probably thinking right now, my heart fills with dread.

Posted by Dave D. 2005-11-21 19:47|| 2005-11-21 19:47|| Front Page Top

#10 Word.

Posted by Slomotch Ebbager8829 2005-11-21 20:04|| 2005-11-21 20:04|| Front Page Top

#11 It's become trendy to "have harsh words" for Bush and his administration. In a sense, it's justified. He's responsible for the political climate precisely because he has not pushed the knowledge of the depravity of the enemy from Day One.

I'm hoping a lot more people around here will carefully reconsider this notion. While there can be no doubt that America has the collective attention span of a fruit fly, I also maintain that Bush's fundamentalist bent and his administration's general overemphasis upon religiosity has manifested in a reluctance to isolate and hold responsible Islam as a whole.

Instead of going out and attempting to set Islam's house in order for them, a much stronger priority should have been placed on setting the bar for all Muslims worldwide to renounce terrorism and take substantive measures towards eliminating it.

Too much airtime has been given to absolving the Saudis and their Islamist ilk of direct responsibility for the 9-11 atrocity. How often has this administration even called the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania an "atrocity"?

In an attempt to divert attention from the dangers of all fundamentalist doctrines, there has been some sipping at the Kool-Aid of moral relativism that has ill-served America.

There wasn't a "robust discussion of what we were doing" because Bush and his advisors made the assumption that the nation understood what we were doing: that 3000 dead were not only an atrocity perpetrated upon us, but a symptom of a plan for world domination right out of comic books and really bad novels, only executed by real, live fanatical minions.

We call our politicians "leaders" because they are supposed to do just that. Leadership is supposed to utilize the tools provided by offices of state to expose and highlight those threats that should be of concern to our nation. Far too little was done to ensure that America understood the threat it was confronted with.

Yes, our nation has a near-fatal case of "monkey-mind." Was this obvious fact unknown to our leaders? Absolutely not. How then to explain why they did not act more resolutely to limn the perils confronting us?

No doubt a significant portion of the dangers described to us were just as quickly shrugged off by multi-culturalists and their kumbyah crooning brethern. Still, nowhere near enough has been done to place the ball in Islam's court.

To say that such actions would serve to polarize Muslims is pretty well irrelevent. By now, it should be sufficiently clear that the bulk of Islam has little or no good will for America. That the administration pretends (or acts as if) this were so is simply unacceptable.

In seeking to cloak his own fundamentalist religiosity with a mantle of respectability, Bush has displayed a reprehensible reluctance to call attention to similar (and admittedly far more exaggerated) efforts by Islamists to do exactly the same with theirs.

While the difference in intent regarding Islam is obvious to the discerning eye, those who are not so educated or informed will draw less distinctive conclusions and often find themselves unable to descry exactly why the jihadist threat is so dire. It is this lack of clear deliniation that has made it so difficult for America to clearly identify its very real and rather dangerous enemies.

Posted by Zenster 2005-11-21 21:26|| 2005-11-21 21:26|| Front Page Top

#12 Hang in there Fred. A lot of us haven't given up yet.

I agree that the Bush administration has completely hosed the information war. I also think that they've fallen into the trap of "guns and butter" like LBJ. The sad thing is that people really do want a cause, something to fight for. Part of the reason for us being so damn complacent is that most of us don't have anything to fight for anymore. Our basic instincts are being denied, and as many in the blogosphere have pointed out, many of us are atrophying into Eloi. The Euros are even worse shape than we are in this regard since there is no moral hazard in their societies at all.

At least, as Ralph Peters said in this morning's NY Post, Bush is willing to fight. He has my support as long as that holds true.

Posted by 11A5S 2005-11-21 22:36|| 2005-11-21 22:36|| Front Page Top

#13 Umm, Zenster, it's actually more the case that Bush was/is HOLDING BACK "Jacksonian" America, something the vomit-brained fascist-lovers fail to understand. They "holler" like scalded shit-rats about Bush being a "Nazi," secure in the historical ignorance of America for the fact that he's been the most restrained President in terms of respecting civil rights in war of any American leader in a major conflict.

Just look at Lincoln, Wilson or FDR's record, and you can see how much he's held back.

Posted by Ernest Brown 2005-11-21 22:50|| saturninretrograde.blogspot.com]">[saturninretrograde.blogspot.com] 2005-11-21 22:50|| Front Page Top

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