Thursday, November 09, 2006

The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth

Marc Cooper tells the truth about "redeployment":

"I don't think this sort of Democratic obfuscation will wash. War is like sex. You're either in or you're out. Anything in between doesn't count for much. ... What's missing now is the political courage to state a simple truth which, I believe, a vast majority of Americans would understand and agree with: George W. Bush got us into a war we shouldn't have fought and which we cannot conclude. It's time to admit our mistake, give Iraqis notice, provide some funding and security support for the Iraqi government, and commence to orderly withdraw. Not redeploy."

Commentary

Whether you agree with Marc Cooper or not, this is the kind of honesty that should have characterized the debate leading up to the election. I often wondered why the Democratic Party never articulated a warfighting policy on Iraq. What they would have done differently. Oil spot. More troops. Less troops. Unconventional warfare. Expand the war to Syria, Iran. Withdraw to enclaves. More training. Whatever. You know the stuff a more competent SecDef would have done. Now I understand that all that was irrelevant. Deep down though they never said it was the deep conviction that there was no good way to fight Iraq; that the original sin was to fight in Iraq at all. And Marc Cooper is not only entitled to that opinion, but welcome to express it. After all, he may have been right. The pity is that few others were as forthright as he is.

Remember all those articles from Generals who were going to do it right? No one was going to take their advice. The contrary views were printed just because they were contrary, not because anyone was thinking of switching to any strategy other leaving town. All that stuff about reporting for duty. Bring back the adults into the Defense Department. Lessons from past counterinsurgencies. British approach. Responsible redeployment. Thank God for Mark Cooper. He's right. That's just a dishonest word for the process of just giving the Iraqis notice, providing some funding and security support and getting the hell out of Dodge. Like we did in Vietnam. That lasted nearly three whole years after responsible redeployment. In many ways its more honest to leave some money on the night table, slip on your pants and push the car down the road before starting it so she doesn't wake up. Let her dream a little longer.

Well maybe you can't undo all the mistakes in your life and maybe it's better never to stop at bars along the road. Anyway, there's that deal in Phoenix and a plane to catch to the coast.

157 Comments:

Blogger Bret said...

My heavens, Wretchard is really, really getting gloomy now.

I'm apparently confused. Isn't Bush still commander in chief? Does Congress really have direct control over military strategy and tactics? Can't Bush veto defense budgets that don't have adequate funding?

Are things really this dire?

11/09/2006 04:14:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

bret,

It's not what I want to do but what I think they are a-fixing to do. Whether they will succeed is another matter, but I think its only realistic to reocgnize that the real agenda is.

11/09/2006 04:27:00 PM  
Blogger Marcus Aurelius said...

Bret,

President Bush can veto budgets that do not include adequate funding but the problem is getting a budget with adequate funding on the agenda.

After the new congress is seated it is Nanc-eye Pelos-eye who sets the agenda in the house. If a Republican wants to propose adequante funding he can but it is up to Nancy and her minions when and if to vote on it.

Congress can not order the President to withdraw the troops or the particulars of conducting the war (however much Congress and leftists think they can) but they certainly have the power to raise and disburse funds as they see fit.

As we all know, clever congressmen and Presidents can bargain things they want done, but it remains to be seen how much the left is willing to bargain "redployment".

One thing is for sure. If we "redeploy" prematurely we will be back in Iraq someday and then the cost will make what we see now to be money for a gumball machine (not to mention the butcher's bill).

11/09/2006 04:31:00 PM  
Blogger Jeff Gill said...

Not to make to much of it, but the use of metaphors says more about the user's viewpoint than reality . . . if Cooper really thinks sex is about whether you're in or out, his experience of sex is remarkably limited -- and i suspect his understanding of other intimate realities, like warfare, is similarly limited.

11/09/2006 04:40:00 PM  
Blogger Annoy Mouse said...

The Iraqi's have served us a Shiite sandwich. Let them eat cake while we pull back. We have no business there until a war is declared and an enemy identified. The Iraqi's voted for their Iran backed thugs and a host of religious extremists. Let us return only to return the favor of factory-made explosive devices (FED's) and deposit them on every intersection of that bastion of bastards. Let them learn French.

11/09/2006 05:05:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Nice brave keep-up-your-chin posts, all. But, what is is, and you just saw 1974 all over again. We can go hard, or we can go easy--but America has just rejected the project.

Consequences? We don't need no steenkin consequences. "Oblivious" R us.

I'm sorry, I'm really, really sorry.

11/09/2006 05:09:00 PM  
Blogger enscout said...

Dubya's unlikely ally in this GWOT has been Sunni KSA. With a Shia dominated, democratically elected gov't in Iraq & and the ever emboldened Iran they will press to keep US troops in the ME over objections by Dems, who will press ever more for a speedy retreat by our troops.

And as we all know, money talks and BS walks.

Maybe the closest analogy we can make to sex is that war makes for strange bedfellows.

11/09/2006 05:29:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

I watched from inside the CIA as the Democratic Congress ceased funding the South Vietnamese.
I watched from inside the CIA the troops withdrawn.
I watched from Saigon the NVA approaching daily and watched the panic develope. I watched in Saigon as the USA left 6-10 thousand loyal South Vietnamese we had promised to get out. They had worked in our Embassy and in the field with our intel, and we abandon them..abandon them..
Thank God we don't have that kind of commitment from the Iraqi's. But we also have no need to stay and watch our men and women get fucked up because the ME is one big cluster fuck.
Hit Syria and Iran by sea and air but no more wasted lives in a war the Democrats are not going to see through..we don't need another black wall in DC ... been through that horror...admit we're a weak horse now jockeyed by a socialist party and get out.

11/09/2006 05:29:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Amen, habu. Sea & air. The puss-out is a feature of American foreign policy, now. What does it take to prove it? OBL had us pegged. Sea & air or turbans, we still have a few choices.

11/09/2006 05:37:00 PM  
Blogger Harrywr2 said...

The first rule of being a civil servant or politician or a somewhat successful corporate animal is always make sure everything is always someone elses fault.

The senior leadership on the hill wants everything to be someone elses fault.

They only thing they really want to run from is "responsibility" for their actions.

They are all more than aware what will happen in the cut-n-run scenario, it'll be a hard road getting elected in 2008 with gas prices at $20 a gallon.

Everyone has got their political cover now, Rumsfeld made a mess, the price of not fixing it will exceed the price of fixing it. That blah-blah Rumsfeld should be hung from the highest flagpole.

If things look better in Iraq by 2008, the Dem's will claim it was because of their insistance that Bush dump that no good Rumsfeld. If it isn't any better, it will be because Bush kept that no good Rumsfeld around for too long.

Either way, the backsides of the Dem's are covered in 2008.

If they insist on cut'n run now, and it all goes horribly wrong, they will pay in 2008.

If Bush had nominated Gates prior to the election, then a Senate that was running for election would have had to vote for him. Now the lame ducks can vote for him, they have nothing left to lose.

The first job of every elected leader, is to insure re-election!!

Bush held off on firing Rumsfeld for as long as he could. The roar from the Senate and House is certainly deafening, they need someone to blame other then themselves.

11/09/2006 05:40:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

I think if we get busy, we can hang onto a rump America--defend the south bank of the Ohio, east bank of the Mississippi, the crest of the Alleghanies, and the gulf.

11/09/2006 05:42:00 PM  
Blogger enscout said...

Habu:

It's not all bad.

I took the logshot & switched my big pharma investments to a bi-lingual, walk-in abortion clinic franchise on Nov 6!!!

Good thing all those voter fraud stories ware all just a nasty rumor.

11/09/2006 05:46:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

When I was a kid my dad showed me a pack of pack of Lucky Strikes, four cigarettes to the pack, marked "I Shall Return". My Dad is 86 and he still has it. All my mothers male uncles fought in Bataan and survived the Death March and the Capas concentration camp. And upon their release they listened to a San Francisco radio station each night. Through the long years they believed. "I Shall Return."

One day in early 1945 after the Lingayen landings a rumor swept out to where my mother lived. They were vague at first. The First Cavalry was headed south. They were 50, 40 and now 30 miles out. A Japanese Catholic chaplain who had befriended my grandmother -- a young man -- came by and gave her a bolt of striped silk cloth. "I was going to give it to my mother, but now I give it to you," he said. And later in the gloom nothing could be heard but the peculiar hobnailed tramp of Japanese Army boots as they headed south of the river. Then dark. And from across the fields my mother heard the sound of heavy motors. The clang of a steel gate being pushed down by a Sherman. A short burst of machinegun fire. And then the cheer of thousands of human skeletons who were the prisoners of war at the Santo Tomas internment camp. And what struck that little girl was that they did not forget; that those smelly emaciated men were not really expendable. And then she knew it was no longer "I shall return". It was "I have returned."

11/09/2006 05:48:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

Grimmy,

When life gets hard, you get harder or you get dead.

In a nation of 300,000,000 at least 60,000,000 will not nad up...

I now think more than 60 million...

Many cultures didn't nad up when times got rough. And, they are dead cultures.

I am not saying the game is over - I am saying the times are rougher than millions think they are. And, we are fighting ourselves - and losing...

11/09/2006 05:56:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

pauldanish,

I think there's a chance. But it will all depend on two things. Whether the Democratic Party can get internal consensus and whether there can be bipartisan consensus following that. Marc Cooper's remarks illustrate the debate within the Democratic Party right now.

Ironically, if the Democrats are logjammed internally, a bipartisan consensus may actually be easier. If the Republicans are solid and the Democrats divided, then advantage Republicans.

However, the Left wing of the Democratic party is on the warpath and they believe they have a mandate to leave Iraq, even though the Party studiously avoided taking a definite position for withdrawal. But that's the perception: that America has given them back "their country".

So any successful strategy to avoid rout depends on mounting a successful internal advocacy within the Dems for fighting to victory and on finding a leader in the Republican ranks who will stand fast. Right now, I don't see any centers of resistance to stand against the Leftist tide. Some may soon arise, but right now flags are scattering in all directions.

11/09/2006 06:00:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

Grimmy,
I 've read enough history and been part of that history in the 1970's to know when to sound retreat.
I do not know you,haven't read much of your postings but cowardice isn't in the mix here. We played this one wrong as has become our forte in protracted military engagements.
In previous posts I've written both here and at the Elephant Bar I have recommended genocide of the Islams. I have recommended killing millions of them. We could do it militarily, but our society would not tolerate it AT THIS POINT. There will come a time when Islam will dirty bomb us or pull off another mass killing. Then we will kill the millions who have earned it.
Right now we're too soft and too comfortable in our Alice in Wonderland security mindset. Hold steady it's com'in.

11/09/2006 06:00:00 PM  
Blogger desert rat said...

pauldanish,
Now that Mr Gates is at the helm of Dept Def the reccomendations of Baker/Hamilton report will become the holy grail. To be pursued 'til achieved.

Mr Baker has his marching orders, as does Jr 43. The adults of 41's Administration have been returned to power, or at least they so believe.

The authorization for occupation of Iraq has to be renewed by 31Dec06. The pullout schedule will be formulated and ratified by then.

11/09/2006 06:06:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

Ironically, if the Democrats are logjammed internally, a bipartisan consensus may actually be easier. If the Republicans are solid and the Democrats divided, then advantage Republicans.

The Donks got their Vietnam flashback, so all that's left to do is to get their Watergate flashback. One more ride on the merry-go-round, with maybe one 40 year anniversary trip to Woodstock, and then the boomers exit stage left forever (and good riddance!)

11/09/2006 06:09:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

The Rumsfeld speech at the Kansas State University Landon Lecture. "As we look back on those critical years during the Cold War, so too our grandchildren will one day look back on this time as a defining moment in America’s history. History will judge whether we did all we could to defeat a vicious extremist enemy that threatened our security, our freedom, our very way of life. Or, if we left it to the next generations to try to fight an enemy strengthened by our weakness, and emboldened by our lack of resolve." (Defense Link)

11/09/2006 06:10:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

habu1 said:

I have recommended genocide of the Islams. I have recommended killing millions of them.

The scary part is how many Belmont Clubbers and Elephant Barflies see nothing disturbing at all about that remark.

11/09/2006 06:12:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

woman Catholic,

I for one am disturbed by it. And for that reason it was important to win this one early with a surplus of power. With a comfortable margin. Because it things went on down to the wire, then tragedy either way would be near. Back in 1973 there were rumors that Moshe Dayan readied Israel's nuclear weapons when it appeared that the IDF and the nation would be destroyed.

Necessity knows no law. Therefore the important thing is to keep from getting to that point. I am disappointed in those who would evaporate the margin of safety -- the margin of mercy -- by laying aside the defenses one by one until ... Well, we don't want the until.

11/09/2006 06:21:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

The Democrats who will be the committee chairmen are old vitriolic partisan people. They want to get the tag on the trophy of failure with Republican written on it. And they will. They do not care a thing about national security. They have in past conflicts consorted with the enemy to undermine US policy. They are treacherous. They will invoke that treachery again, and soon.

11/09/2006 06:24:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

I find far more disturbing the situation that gives rise to such a remark.

Wretchard, that's quite a story. I have an old 1944 Filipino coin, I swear it has a near-copy of the USMC insignia on the obverse.

11/09/2006 06:25:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

wretchard,
I never read a word of support for genocide of the Islams, either here or at the Elephant Club.
It is at this point in time uniquely my position. Why advocate it when the very word is so aberrant to enlightened thought?
It should be noted that it's advocacy is due to the very fact that we are dealing with a civilization that has not enbraced nor even entered the enlightenment of mankind. There societies are barbaric and their religion is a bastardization of the word. It is a philosophy of dominance and death to all non believers.
You cannot reason with a madman,but you can subdue him. There are 1.5 billion Islamists on earth. Killing millions will give them pause, as Charles Martel did at Tours. They have no intention of stopping there attacks. It is a moral obligation to free men to kill them first.

11/09/2006 06:38:00 PM  
Blogger Heather said...

redeploying: that assumes that it will be possible for the USA to 'redeploy.' I would guess that 99.99% of the American public - and the West - believes that that is possible.

Just like the question: are you for or against the war?

What war???

11/09/2006 06:39:00 PM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

Like we did in Vietnam.

I don't see what will happen in Iraq to be like what happened in Vietnam. Mainly because I think a big part of the judgement on Iraq is that the American taxpayer has decided that Arabs can't be civilized and we're unwilling to spend any more dollars and blood to try to do it.

We fled Vietnam in a panic, as Habu points out. We won't pull out of Iraq in a panic. It will be done very slowly with lots and lots of explanations, drawn out in long excrutiating detail about how the project we wanted to bring to them simply is not moving along fast enough because we haven't had enough cooperation from the Iraqi people, or perhaps since American soldiers seem to be the problem if we remove them then the Iraq that will remain will be a pure and undiluted Iraq that they will have made all by themselves.

I don't think it's sunk in yet in Iraq what's going to happen to them. We told them we would leave when they told us to get out, and we meant that. The terrorists will spin it that we're leaving in defeat and because we're afraid, but we're not. We're leaving because we've decided that individual Iraqi's - none of them - have the Right Stuff and they're not worth fighting for.

As for committing genocide on all Arabs, I remember something Steven den Beste wrote three years ago where he said we *must* go into Iraq to try to prevent the coming genocide we would be forced to inflict. Because if we didn't at least try before committing the mass murder that it being thrust upon us, we would never forgive ourselves. And that it *would* be seen as murder rather than self-defense. After the next (and coming) Muslim attack on a major American city, we can honestly call the resulting genocide of all Arabs in the Middle East self-defense, and no that we *tried* to save them from themselves, even if we couldn't give it our very best shot.

11/09/2006 06:40:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

I don't think the cut & run charge will scare the new Dem leadership.

They have all they need to blame anything and everything that ever happens from now on, on GWB.

The road is clear for them, and as rat says, the plan is a-writing as we speak.

All you have to do is look at those incoming Capitol Hill leaders, and remember who all is behind them. Whom they owe.

11/09/2006 06:42:00 PM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

Habu - read this, written in November 2003. He uses the word "genocide":

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/11/TotalWar.shtml

11/09/2006 06:47:00 PM  
Blogger Heather said...

and I agree with Habu. We are dealing with tribal people.

Personally, I believe that we will have to become like them if we hope to save anything of our civilization. Actually, it is quite possible for Christians to be uncivilizaed, and remain Christian. Have you thought of that?

Also, when the Israelis were in the middle of the Intifada, I suggested a mode of action that met with dead silence and a turning away. When a suicide bomber kills, then catch every one of the male members of that family, down to the infants, and castrate them. Let them go, and live, wrapped in shame, in the eyes of their neighbours.

The Israelis went so far as tearing down their houses. But doing what I suggested would have saved thousands of lives. There would have been no more 'suicide bombers.' And no more 'martyrs.' Not in THAT culture, anyway.

As to Iran, WHEN it drops the Big One, I truly hope there is no pussy footing around: forget about the nuclear installations. Take out their entire oil production infrastructure. Let the Persians go back to making rugs.

11/09/2006 06:48:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

Habu1,

As I always used to say to Desert Rat - the Third Conjecture Solution is always avaialable!!! Our adversary has no defense against it.

I do not think we are at the 'until' right now.

My biggest concern - and I think the biggest concern of Wretchard - is that we are marching smartly to the single solution. Our generation of Americans could end up making decisions that dwarf the confliction behind Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

I hope that if we must fight a 'Total War' that our decendents find our tough decision just and wise. Personally, ignorance and cowardice and stupidity are not good reasons to march to WWIII. We played our part in that game in the lead up to WWII.

11/09/2006 06:51:00 PM  
Blogger Marcus Aurelius said...

C4,

I don't recall there being radical rabble in Haiti or in any of the other locales you mention intent on keeping the war against the West going.

One criticism of Rumsfeld is he tried to make war on the cheap. I wonder if it would have been cheaper if we had finished the job in '91 when we had that huge army in Iraq? We could have destroyed the Iraqi Army much more thouroughly than we did in '03. Furthermore, it was pretty clear to Saddam he had to make some serious preparations.

Will it be cheaper to have to return 3-4 years after "redeployment"? I doubt it.

11/09/2006 07:01:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

Tranzi,

I think your comment was sarcasm...

But, something else should be clear. I will not back foreign intervention till the 'until'. I do not have 50% of my nation at my back.

I don't care about a month of mourning.

Send in the Media - not the Marines!

11/09/2006 07:03:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

NahnCee,
Thank you for the link. The article was well written and corresponded with many of my thoughts. His history was well researched.
We are now three years hence from the article with bombings and jihad more active than ever.
His points on genocide are well taken.

11/09/2006 07:04:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

I'm with you, TZ. Luxury Emissions Out of Africa!

here, I'll sing it,

Pat Buchanan here I come,
doodah, doodah,

Go screwyourself,
the rest of the world,

Doo diddly doo dah day, oh!

11/09/2006 07:08:00 PM  
Blogger Deuce ☂ said...

In 1982, Reagan had a loaded Congress against him. He could not get a budget passed and had to rely on continuing resolutions. That was not enough for the Democrats. One scumbag Congressman attached the Boland amendment. Wikipedia misrepresents it at having been passed 411-0. They do not mention, that if the Amendment and continuing resolution was not passed the government would be closed down. Congressman Edward Boland, D, Mass., attached the amendment with no thought about the irregular troops in the field fighting the Sandinistas and the consequences to them with the cut-off of funds. In short they would have been slaughtered. Reagan should have told the Democrat controlled Congress to go fuck themselves and see you in Court or hell. Reagan folded and did some gymnastics getting the Japanese and Saudis to fund the Contras through the CIA. I helped unload planes of wounded with injuries that smelled like yesterday's dead dog, while on a farm In Costa Rica, owned be an American hero, John Hull. Hull was maligned by another Democratic piece of shit, John Kerry. Do a Google on John Hull, CIA drugs and you will read lie after lie after lie. If John Hull was a drug dealer, he was the worst on record. He never had any money. He still owes me $500, he borrowed to buy fuel for his plane to get more wounded from Nicaragua. Expect nothing noble from Republicans and worse from Democrat Politicians. I hate all of them.

11/09/2006 07:09:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

Even the Civil War ended with us absolutely rejecting the idea of a prolonged Army of Occupation in the South.

And by "us" you must include Robert Lee, who in reply to Alexander's suggestion (Woman Catholic digs out Shelby Foote vol. IX) that the Army of Northern Virginia become "like rabbits or partridges in the bushes" and keep fighting, said, "We must consider its effect on the country as a whole. Already it is demoralized by the four years of war. If I took your advice, the men would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. The would become mere bands of marauderse, and the enemy's cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections they man never have occasion to visit. We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from." And this is but one reason General Lee is beloved by both sides above all other American generals.

11/09/2006 07:11:00 PM  
Blogger showhank said...

Wretchard,

What is your definition of victory in Iraq? I know you have had some concerns in prior posts about this issue.

I always thought we really went there to have troops on both the KSA and Iranian borders.

Thanks in advance

Showhank

11/09/2006 07:23:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

2164 is right--Kerry and Tom Harkin did absolutely everything they could, to destroy the anti-communists in central America.

Just like the commies outwaited us in VN, and the jihadis in ME, that wing of the Dems will try to outwait the nationalists right here in the good ole USA.

"Try", hell--they're *doing* it.

11/09/2006 07:23:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Skook, just claim you like grits, and you is in like flynn!

11/09/2006 07:26:00 PM  
Blogger Tim said...

Bush knows enough history to realize he doesn't want to repeat the errors of either Johnson or Nixon, or to go down in history as the president who initiated a war only to lose it (and he knows the enemy and the liberal politicians, journalists and historians well enough to know all four would characterize early withdrawal from Iraq as a defeat).

Look for something different from what you expect. I don't think "cut and run," no matter how well managed or spun, is in the cards.

Bush doesn't have re-election to worry about; Bush doesn't have Congressional Republican seats to worry about; Bush does have the ongoing defense of the nation against militant Islamic fascism to worry about; Bush does have the long-term morale of the ground forces, who have no desire to return to the post-Vietnam/Carter entropy, to worry about.

Look for the hard right turn rather than the slow left turn. Dems in Congress will squeal like stuck pigs, but in the end the votes are there for "not abandoning our troops in their fight against terrorists."

11/09/2006 07:33:00 PM  
Blogger vnjagvet said...

I have always believed the Iraq campaign was a necessary battle in the WOT; but I might have been wrong.

I thought Hussein had to be taken out after Afghanistan because he was running Iraq the way he was running it, and because Iraq is situated where it is situated.

Iraq is strategically situated -- right in the middle of the Arabic/Islamic cultural territory where those who attacked us were indoctrinated, trained and motivated to begin their jihad by specifically attacking this country.

Having attacked Iraq and won the battle of Baghdad, we established a beachhead in the middle of enemy territory. The major impediment to complete success has not been (as occurred in Vietnam) significant casualties on our troops inflicted by our "enemy". It has rather been the casualties among Iraq's civilian population being inflicted not by us but by the cruel minions of factional warlords within the country struggling for its control.

If it is correct that Iraq is a necessary battle in the WOT and we abandon it, it is highly likely there will be another attack on our country. Those who push abandonment will be proven wrong with the attendant political fallout.

If we abandon Iraq and no further attacks occur, I will have been proven wrong in my initial premise. The way things are going now, all in all, I hope I am the one who will be proven wrong.

11/09/2006 07:36:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

Nancee,

Thanks for your comment and the powerful post by Steven den Beste on Total War'

The conclusion is heart rending - especially considering it was written over three years ago.

We are engaged in a massive effort to destroy the ideology which threatens us by persuasion and coercion. We mean to eliminate the ideological threat by convincing the bulk of its supporters to abandon it. This is unprecedented and it is risky; we're on uncharted ground. To a great extent we're making this up as we go along, and that means we're making mistakes and learning-while-doing. We might not succeed.

If the experiment in Iraq fails, if we cut and run, and Iraq reverts to savagery, if reform efforts elsewhere in the mid-East falter and succumb to an extremist backlash, and if the governments in that region become more radical and unite against us, then all hope of reform in the region in the short run (20 years) would be gone. As time went on, those nations would certainly acquire (covertly or overtly, developed or purchased) more and better industrial age military capabilities, with range and striking power able to threaten us with catastrophic losses.

If our attempts to eliminate the threat through reform fail, then we face the decision to either kill them or let them kill us. It's worse than that: we would inevitably have to kill them. Once our cities begin to get nuked, we would respond massively, causing unprecedented devastation, resulting in a tragedy that it might take centuries for the world to recover from. Such attacks against us are inevitable based on the ideology that opposes us unless we surrender to it. If we refuse to surrender (and we aren't going to surrender), then the only decision we'd have would be whether we should kill huge numbers of them before or after they'd started killing huge numbers of us.


Nice touch to use 'Cut and Run' before the term was birthed and spanked.

den Beste's conclusion is very similar to one written by Wretchard:

Conjecture 2:

The so-called strengths of Islamic terrorism: fanatical intent; lack of a centralized leadership; absence of a final authority and cellular structure guarantee uncontrollable escalation once the nuclear threshold is crossed. Therefore the 'rational' American response to the initiation of terrorist WMD attack would be all out retaliation from the outset.

Iteration Non-Islamic Losses Islamic Losses
1 - 5 x 10^5 -1 x 10^9
Total - 5 x 10^5 -1 x 10^9

James Lileks and the Pew respondents would not lose America; but like the boogeyman in Seven, Islam would take it's soul. The most startling result of this analysis is that a catastrophic outcome for Islam is guaranteed whether America retaliates or not. Even if the President decided to let all Americans die to expiate their historical guilt, why would Islamic terrorists stop after that? They would move on to Europe and Asia until finally China, Russia, Japan, India or Israel, none of them squeamish, wrote -1 x 10^9 in the final right hand column. They too would be prisoners of the same dynamic, and they too have weapons of mass destruction.


That is why den Beste and Wretchard are where they are at - the top.

60%+ of Americans now think the war is lost, the war is won, or there is no war.

I hope we have won it!
Is this what victory looks like?

11/09/2006 07:39:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

I'm cut'n and runn'n for bed..nite all ...rest peacefully

11/09/2006 07:46:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

On the first line den Beste writes:

The term total war doesn't mean what Steve [Green of VodkaPundit] thinks it does. It doesn't refer to a maximal effort.

Folks, we don't need a maximal effort. We can't even use a maximal effort. There are not enough targets of opportunity.

11/09/2006 07:48:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

marcus aurelius said:

I wonder if it would have been cheaper if we had finished the job in '91 when we had that huge army in Iraq? We could have destroyed the Iraqi Army much more thouroughly than we did in '03.

All of our allies would have felt used and abused by America to provide diplomatic cover and military preparation for an invasion of Iraq which they did not sign on to. The result would have been nearly total isolation, and when 9-11 came along no one would have lifted a finger.

11/09/2006 07:50:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

showhank,

Last night I had a Korean visitor at home and remembered thinking that from '45 to '50, the US supported a counterinsurgency against Kim Il Sung and propped up a guy called Syngman Rhee, who graduated from Princeton. When the Korean War broke out, Truman was vacationing in Missouri. The Navy's carriers had been weakened in favor of the useless (for Korea) B-36. McArthur sent occupation troops in from Japan and they were slaughtered. The Allies recovered, but the Chinese intervened. The First Marines were nearly encircled at Chosin. You know the story. It was a fiasco. I remember a movie called Pork Chop Hill, with Gregory Peck and vaguely remember the references to the cowardly ROKs. They were worthless. Anyhow when Truman left office in 1953, he was one of the most unpopular Presidents the US had ever had.

Then I remembered the childhood stories of how Ed Landsdale beat the Huks. What most people forget is how close a former US colony came to being the original Vietnam. Two Philippine Presidents were routed by the Huks over 8 years. It took the third President, Ramon Magsaysay to beat the Huks. I had the habit of walking old battlefields and visited what is now a Manila suburb that the Huks took in raid in 1949 or thereabouts.

I asked myself: when did we know we had won in Korea? And when were the Huks beaten? It's impossible to justify an open-ended commitment but I think we just held on in Korea, even though we seemed beaten, simply because it was important. And the US held on in the Philippines just because nobody noticed in those days that such things happened. And at some indeterminate point we won. You know, we didn't quite know we had the Soviets beat. The very biggest names in media were surprised and shocked when they realized it had already happened. They're still debating when and how it happened.

Withal, many Koreans feel no gratitude towards America. And I can assure you that many leftist Filipinos scoff at America who would have been sent to year zero concentration camps by the Huks.

The answer to your question is probably we would recognize victory when we saw it. Now post-Saddam Iraq is about a year and half old, which is short by the standards of comparison I've invoked. Would things have worked out given enough time? I don't know. A lot of people now think Harry Truman was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But we know that now. No one would have guessed it then.

11/09/2006 07:59:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

Woman Catholic,

Our 'Allies' are fighting this conflict through appeasement - the only military weapon they have left!

We are now setting up to use that self-same tactic. It has worked so well in the recent past, eh.

Half measures are going to result in the full measure.

Will we be able to look our grandchildren in the eye and state that we did all we could? When there are hundreds of millions dead. Hundreds of millions of cilivilians.

11/09/2006 08:00:00 PM  
Blogger showhank said...

Wretchard,

Thanks for you thoughts. It is a tough subject. Sometimes I think of our current predicament and hope that somehow all the leaders of the west got together and planned this all out and are executing the following Strategy from the famous 36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Six_Strategies
****************************
Strategy 27 -"假痴不癲"- Play dumb.
* Hide behind the mask of a fool, a drunk, or a madman to create confusion about your intentions and motivations. Lure your opponent into underestimating your ability until, overconfident, he drops his guard. Then you may attack.
****************************


But I sometimes feel it is a fools daydream and then go back planning my move to New Zealand.

11/09/2006 08:22:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

Yet, the other day, Catholic Woman, you were adamant that we should have taken Saddam out in the first Gulf War. It's so hard to keep up...

Catholic Woman says: "Our fathers in World War II would have never allowed Hitler to remain in power in Germany after defeating him (if he did not commit suicide)..."


That was my observation that the Allies in 1991 were pale shadows compared to the sinewy Allies of 1945.

"...We decided it was cheaper to leave Saddam in power and set up no-fly zones. The amazing thing is how people were shocked when Saddam, ruler of a sovereign nation, challenged them."

So, were we short-sighted cheapskates, or did we understand the nature of the Coalition and UN mandate we had at the time?

Both. The United States actually made a small profit (I seem to recall it was about $14 billion) from Gulf War One after all the "donations" came in from the other countries in the coalition (especially Japan and Kuwait itself). If Stormin' Norman broke off and tore up through Mesopotamia, the allies would have stood fast, and none of the checks would have cleared. But, uh, thank you for this opportunity to make myself more clear.

11/09/2006 08:23:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Don't make yourself too clear, birds will fly right into you and knock themselves silly.

11/09/2006 08:35:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

How many others simply change their name?

11/09/2006 08:39:00 PM  
Blogger 3Case said...

"Quitters and losers and other adherents to the cult of cowardice should understand one thing.

We give up on this and the only option left is eventual genocide.


Simple human nature.

When life gets hard, you get harder or you get dead."

Slaughter now or Slaughter later. The later the more will be required. As you say Grimmy, "Simple human nature." The feckless don't get it...we didn't choose this game and there is only one way we get to make it stop...and it ain't through "dialogue". Those who have called this game know our feckless are squeamish and they play to that defect.


"There will come a time when Islam will dirty bomb us or pull off another mass killing." I am afraid so, Habu1. I am afraid so.

Then we can light them up.

11/09/2006 08:46:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

The case against Robert Gates: David Corn quotes former CIA analyst Larry Johnson as saying he once called Nelson Mandela a Communist. "Gates wanted the lede to say that Mandela was a communist. The analyst kicked back hard and ultimately prevailed, but this behavior was consistent with his reputation as a political animal willing to curry favor with the political masters downtown and sacrifice sound analysis." (David Corn)

Larry Johnson does come up in a lot of contexts and I don't want to debate David Corn's specific point, but it is an indicator of what the litmus test for being a "good guy" is under the new dispensation. If Larry Johnson's agin you, then you had better talk fast.

11/09/2006 09:01:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

boghie wrote;

Will we be able to look our grandchildren in the eye and state that we did all we could? When there are hundreds of millions dead. Hundreds of millions of cilivilians.

I only need to be able to look my Creator in the eye and state that I trusted Him all that I could. I would certainly not be able to do that if I called for the pre-emptive incineration of millions of Muslims, or even if I stood by and said nothing when others called for that.

11/09/2006 09:15:00 PM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Folks, folks, folks - all this talk about the need for genocide in order to save ourselves is way premature.

There's an option that none of you are discussing that doesn't require genocide and will in all likelihood work perfectly well. In fact it worked for the last 400 years.

It's the strategy called you-stay-in-your-lands-and-we'll-stay-in-ours.

Why is Al Qaida mad? Cuz there were US soldiers in Saudi Arabia, their holy land. Because there were Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan. Because there were US soldiers in Kuwait. And, unfortunately, because there are Israelis in "Palestine".

Why are we in danger? Because we let muslims into Western nations. They can't hurt us unless we let them physically into our countries. There is no prospect of them having the military force to invade us. They have no navies to speak of. We are completely safe in the West if we make the muslims leave, go back to their homelands, and ban Islam in our countries as the death cult that it is.

We don't have to commit genocide! Just get out of their lands, get them out of ours, and let things simmer down for a couple decades. We cut off contact with Iran in the 1970s, and by 2000 most average Iranians liked us! They saw us as the good guys and many hoped we'd topple the mullahs after we toppled Saddam.

Separation is THE solution. It requires no killing, no bombs, no surrender. All this trouble started because we let them into our lands, and we pushed into theirs.

11/09/2006 09:15:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

mark said:

We don't have to commit genocide! Just get out of their lands, get them out of ours, and let things simmer down for a couple decades.

Wow, Mark, you make perfect sense, except that you are deviating from the GOP script which says that if we pull out of Iraq they will follow us home like little puppies with dynamite strapped on.

11/09/2006 09:21:00 PM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Let me add one additional argument for separation and mandatory repatriation of muslims to their ancestral muslim lands, and our withdrawal from those lands:

If we leave, and "quarantine" them in their lands, they will occupy their time fighting one another.

I read that after Charles Martel defeated the muslims at Tours in 732, a victory in large part thanks to their killing the general leading the muslim invasion, the muslims pulled back. Part of the reason for this was that the various competing factions in the muslim army could not agree on who the new leader would be.

I read an article a few years back by a journalist who went to Saudi Arabia for two years to teach journalism there. The 9/11 attacks had radically limited the number of tourist visas to the West that were available to Saudis, and his journalism students told him they were going crazy. They told him that for the rich Saudis, regular trips to the West for booze, broads, gambling, and shopping were the outlet that kept the Saudi social pressure cooker from exploding under the restrictions of the religious police. Now there were no overseas vacations easily available and the rich were getting restless.

That's what we want! Bottle those muslims all up in their lands and leave them to sort it out among themselves. THEY THEMSELVES will kill off their fundamentalists after a couple of decades of being cooped up with them!

11/09/2006 09:23:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

Woman Catholic,

We are not to the point of 'Total War'.

But appeasement will lead us to that point.

Why should I forget the lessons of history? I do not want to fight a Total War – a war that will target civilians.

11/09/2006 09:23:00 PM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Wow, Mark, you make perfect sense, except that you are deviating from the GOP script which says that if we pull out of Iraq they will follow us home like little puppies with dynamite strapped on.

I don't really understand this point...I guess it's sarcasm. But obviously they can't "follow us home" if we won't let them into the country.

And if the comment was meant as a dig at Republicans, believe me, it is the Democrats who will scream "racistm!" the loudest when we need to implement a separation. It is liberalism and the refusal to make distinctions between cultures and peoples that got us in this mess, not conservatism. Conservatives never would have let them into our countries in the first place.

11/09/2006 09:26:00 PM  
Blogger Boghie said...

By the way...

I would recommend a readjustment of your retirement funds. Have you seen the folks that are going to run commerce and banking and appropriations. Flee to safety. Do so before the big money players make their move. They will probably try to get as much out of the Christmas season as possible - but I think they will move within two weeks...

Me hopes none of you are stuck in pensions...

If I could only hold gold or whatever...

11/09/2006 09:27:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

mark,

That's a solution which the Serbs tried a while back. And it's certainly less violent than genocide. The UN didn't like it much though. Speaking of which the very process you are describing is the cited proof of why Iraq is a failure.

Logically one would conclude that separation < genocide on the scale of evil. However, things apparently work like a cliff function. No one will be allowed to criticize Islam until the day the mobs run out and start stringing them all up. Including me because I might be taken for Indonesian. Keep the Belmont archives up for me will you?

Anyway. I know it sounds crazy. But that's what we are doing. Building up a head of steam with these dinky politically correct strategies. The one day a whole bunch of nukes will go off in New York, London, Paris, Tel Aviv. And then your perfectly reasonable suggestion won't even be on the table. People will be irrational. I am tempted to call this process "pacifism", but that would be too cynical.

11/09/2006 09:28:00 PM  
Blogger MnMark said...

wretchard,

Whether the U.N. liked the Serbian separation effort is mostly irrelevant to whether the U.S. and the rest of the West undertake something like that, since the U.N. has no military enforcement power of any signficance unless the U.S. is part of it. The U.N. just doesn't figure into this issue, in my opinion.

I don't think there's a cliff function here. Maybe there is, but we don't know that yet. So meanwhile, the responsible thing to do is get SEPARATION AND QUARANTINE out there being discussed.

Every time a Mark Steyn says "we either surrender to Islam, destroy it, or change it", we need someone to call in and say "um, why not SEPARATE OURSELVES from them instead?"

Everytime a poster says "we'll have to nuke them", say "hey, why don't we try separating ourselves from them first?"

Ideas matter! Ideas change the world. If it was all going to end in genocide no matter what we said, then your blog here is a waste of time.

We will need a head of steam to implement a separation too, because that means basically throwing out the anti-discrimination ideology that has become the bedrock of Western liberal identity (and as Lawrence Auster points out, most Westerners, liberal and "conservative", are liberals). But it is still the morally superior choice to genocide.

11/09/2006 09:38:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Wretchard, that "see to my archives, wouldja?" was flat scary. talk about gallows humor--

11/09/2006 09:54:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Boghie's right--the Dems are fixin to cluster fooey the economy--their hard wing has the leadership posts.

Gold & oil--oil because it's a-fixing to go up, on the political certainty that OPEC price hawks will have the whip hand now.

My best guess, a long slow slide for the indexes.

Hope I'm wrong--but I'm already trading it. Got to, one more kid yet to put thru college.

11/09/2006 10:02:00 PM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

The answer to your question is probably we would recognize victory when we saw it. Now post-Saddam Iraq is about a year and half old, which is short by the standards of comparison I've invoked. Would things have worked out given enough time? I don't know.

Are we real sure that Iraq is a failure? I know they're busy killing each other and blowing shit up, but isn't there a chance that once we pull out they could get it together, take the tools we have given them -- a constitution, an electoral process, an elected government, and functioning oil wells -- and start to pull it together?

Since victory is so hard to recognize in the absence of someone bowing and handing over his ceremonial sword, maybe victory in Iraq has already been achieved, and we just didn't know it.

11/09/2006 10:03:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

We'll be waiting to hear, C4. Where we gonna go, anyway? Jupiter?

11/09/2006 10:37:00 PM  
Blogger Mike H. said...

I went into the Marine Corps in 1973. I had served in the Navy aboard a destroyer in 1965-67. When I went into the MC I was unprepared for the total breakdown in discipline that I saw. At Twentynine Palms we had a number of troops who had multiple court martials already finished and were awaiting separation and who couldn't be written up for any infractions. This included drugs, sleeping on watch, etc. It took a number of years to overcome that situation. What are we going to have now? The troops are not draftees, they believe in the mission, and if I was hit hard by the boat people, what will they feel like.

11/09/2006 11:25:00 PM  
Blogger runtchard said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

11/09/2006 11:28:00 PM  
Blogger runtchard said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

11/09/2006 11:33:00 PM  
Blogger runtchard said...

THE FERNANDES FILES

All around the booth, beyond the foggy glass of the diner, civilization was crumbling, and the piled plates of half eaten pies and pancakes attested to both impulses of survival and escape.

The silver haired philippino shifted in the linoleum, its sparing comfort budging barely beneath his trenchcoat.

Somewhere in Tennessee, away from the blast radiuses and intifada playgrounds of Australia, was the man that started it all - the fun
and the internet. The one who'd betray them all, with nary a hint of shame or timidity in his upwards onflection.

He'd worked it all out: because time flows in a circle through the Quantum computer of the Unviverse, if he destroyed the Instapundit, he had a nonzero chance that the professor ceased to be in the present past and the hopes for a new sphere could blossom. Those hopes had been his only companion in the dark below deck. Infact, they'd haunted him, maddeningly, as he slept between containers, deep within the obscure bowels of the superfreighter, where man sends only machines to tread.

"Sir, would you like some more coffee?"

He broke his staring at the puddling cherries and lifted his head up, as if just asked a riddle by an idiot.

"And coffee will solve what, exactly?"

She laughed nervously and offered to take away the cluttered mess of the meals that were aspired to but undevoured.

As if an exodus of his socialized brain had begun as he grew more disheveled, matted and bearded, he stared at her like an autistic street performer, and leaned back in his seat as a monarch, the creek of the linoleum shrieking through the awkward silence, insidiously trumpeting the forthcoming.

When she turned to walk away, muttering "Asshole," he leapt up from his seat, all wild eyes and silver hair, a foregone mystic in a
trenchcoat.

"Wait! I'm sorry, it's just that-"

And as she turned, surprised and unamused, with a back arched in rigid compulsive ceremony he tore apart the coat and displayed his naked self as if he were beaming evangelism out of his body.

She shrieked and tripped backwards over a chair as she pulled away, as
if put to a hungry flame or a snarling dog.

The chef turned to see what the commotion was, seeing only the aloft
coat trailing behind the nude patron as if it were a cape. By the time he thought to shout, the door bells were done ringing and the mystery
man disapeared into the 3AM shadows.

11/09/2006 11:35:00 PM  
Blogger Mike H. said...

And now, for something completely different, Poster Girl.

11/09/2006 11:35:00 PM  
Blogger Deuce ☂ said...

I wish to erase any misconceptions and clarify my intent on my previous comment. John Hull and relevance today

11/10/2006 03:39:00 AM  
Blogger lugh lampfhota said...

Mark suggests seperation of muslims and infidels. That may have worked a century ago but would be impossible in the post-modern world. Besides being illegal to discriminate against religion by our constitution, it would be foolish to make all of the Islamic world a no-go zone for Americans. Four fifths of the globe would be off limits to Americans including Europe. How would America seperate future Islamist nuclear weapons from American cities?

There is a lot of wishful thinking going on in a pitiful attempt to avoid the war that is afoot and will soon get worse thanks to the American electorate's fecklessness. Either we fight this war now, over there in Wretchard's "Golden Moment" or the world will endure future horrors.

Sometimes I wish I was blissfully ignorant like most Americans.

11/10/2006 05:02:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

"...preemption is a sin against the comity of this planet." Have you served that load of dishwater on the jihadis? How'd they respond? Or is it that they are exempt?

The "SUVs-cause-draught-and-famine" comment is TOO stupid...way TOO stupid...classic, unthought, Useful Idiot drivel. The Bible records draught and famine, but no SUVs. There was famine in Ireland, but no SUVs. The Soviet Union suffered "famines", but only got SUVs recently. Here in CT, 5+ years ago we had a draught, now we got water out the bazoo...and we've had SUVs the entire freakin' time. PURE Useful Idiocy that SUVs = draught and famine twaddle.

11/10/2006 05:20:00 AM  
Blogger Teresita said...

"Remember, for the first time in human history a major mass-murdering tyrant has been caught and brought to justice…

"And Europe wants to spare Saddam’s life."


Hangin's too good for him. Shootin's too good for him. He should be welded into a six-by-six-by-six cell with clear acrylic walls behind which are photographs of the innocent children he gassed.

11/10/2006 05:26:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

"redeploying: that assumes that it will be possible for the USA to 'redeploy.'"

One of the rank stupidities of the porcine ex-Marine Rep from PA's bilge about redeploying to Okinawa is that the Okinawans, for decades, have wanted us OFF Okinawa NOT more of us on the island (a very beautiful place, BTW).

11/10/2006 05:27:00 AM  
Blogger Clyde said...

Bitter much? I'm sure that's what some of my readers at Recycled Sip are thinking. The answer is "No, not really." I'm not upset about the rejection of the Republicans per se. But I am upset about the fact that the voters who showed up voted against the only party that is serious about how to deal with those people in this world who hate our guts and would kill us if they could, and are actively trying to do so. I remembered that we are at war, a war with Islamofascism that WE did not start; unfortunately, the majority of the voters who showed up did not. I took the lesson of 9/11 to heart, but then again, I was off that day and watched the whole damn thing on television, all day long. Apparently most of the rest of the nation wasn't, and didn't. I learned the lesson about the Islamofascists on that awful day. Most of the rest of you didn't. You'll have to learn it again when the next attack comes, and your votes on Tuesday made that attack all the more likely. Thanks a lot.

Perhaps you heard Democratic House Speaker-Elect Pelosi saying that Iraq isn't something to worry about "winning," but "a problem to be solved." When you aren't concerned with "winning," the solution to the problem is easy: Leave, ASAP. Get the hell out of Dodge. Devil take the hindmost. Don't worry about those Iraqis hanging onto the runners of the last chopper out of Baghdad. Not our problem. Right?

A lot of this is the fault of Republican leadership for failing to emphasize all along the dangers that confront us. We've become complacent because there has been no follow-up attack to 9/11 over the past five years. Be assured that it hasn't been due to a lack of trying by our enemies. We've been able to hold off the barbarians at our gates, so far, but we owe no thanks to the Democrats, who would hamstring those trying to protect us out of some misplaced sense of "fairness" for the terrorists. And now they've been elected to leadership roles in both the House and the Senate. I shudder for the fate of our nation.

So was this a "Democrat tsunami"? Hardly. Turnout nationwide was about 40%. About 52% of that 40% voted Democrat. So we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 21% of the nation's registered voters who have decided that it's a good idea to lay down before our enemies and be "humbled." Just remember, Democrats, that YOU are the ones who live in New York and Washington and Los Angeles. YOU are the ones who are most likely to be killed in the terrorist attacks that the people YOU elected are likely to enable. Don't come crying to me when it happens, because I'll only say "I told you so." If you're looking for Sympathy, you'll find it in the dictionary between Sh*t and Syphilis.

And the rest of you gutless pukes, the 60% who couldn't be bothered to show up to vote this time? What's your excuse? I'm talking to YOU, 2004 Bush voters who were nowhere to be seen on Tuesday. Do you think that bin Laden and Zawahiri and their evil henchmen have forgotten us? Do you think that if we bug out of Iraq that they'll say, "Okay, that's all over and done now, we'll let bygones be bygones, have a nice day, Americans?" If so, you're too damn stupid to still be breathing. "Oh, those nasty Republicans were corrupt! They were sending nasty messages to teenagers!" And so you were willing to put the fate of this nation in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? You idiots! Do you have any idea how badly you screwed up? You will when the bomb goes off in New York Harbor or the Port of Long Beach! And then it'll be too damn late!

11/10/2006 05:28:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

Technically, if the cell is acryllic, it would have to be glued. ;-)

Personally, I like hangin' and think it should be PPV (no charge to Iraqis).

11/10/2006 05:31:00 AM  
Blogger Teresita said...

3case wrote:

...the Okinawans, for decades, have wanted us OFF Okinawa NOT more of us on the island (a very beautiful place, BTW).

It's amazing what a nuke test and a couple practice rounds flying over your head can do to focus your priorities.

11/10/2006 05:40:00 AM  
Blogger Oscar in Kansas said...

This is the future people. To quote a Joseph Heller novel, "It was no longer a matter of morals or even of decisions. It was only a matter of time."

All that's left is to bicker over the details. Sec Def designate will be responsible for finding some plausable excuse, Pelosi & co. will provide the rhetoric and Bush will get to declare victory. And the American people will engage in a mass conspiracy of silence as we pretend this isn't retreat.

Watch as the media covers the last American to leave Iraq and then promptly forgets to cover the disasterous aftermath. Watch as the Lancet stops releasing reports as Iraqi dead, even as the dead really start to pile up as the true civil war begins.

But by then Americans will be collectively trying to forget this ever happened. After all, there's the exciting 2008 campaign to cover. Hillary and Obama are soooo much more interesting that Shia-Sunni genocidal wars.

The only big issue facing us is whether and when Pelosi & Murtha will start demanding we abandon Afghanistan. Any guesses?

11/10/2006 06:09:00 AM  
Blogger buck smith said...

I don't think the Dems will screw up the economy. When Reagan came in to office top tax rates were 75%, when he left they something like 31%. Bush the elder raised to 33%, Clinton raised to 39%, Bush the younger cut them to 35% or so.

The fringe of the democrats and the nut roots might want to wreck the economy, but think about some of the dems who won - James Webb, Reagan's secretary of the Navy! One big advantage we have in this war with Islam is that our econonmy will stay strong.

11/10/2006 06:17:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

I wish to revise and extend some of my remarks regarding genocide of the Islams.
The new word is really closer to what I have in mind anyway and it's much, much easier for people to warm to....the new word is decimate..cut by a tenth.
Now the math..1.5 billion Islams decimated = 150,000,000 dead. That would give them pause.
I do apologize to those I unintentionally mislead by using genocide instead of decimate...do we feel better now? I thought we all would.

11/10/2006 07:34:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

'tenshun
From the halls of Montezuma To the shores of Tripoli' ,

We fight our countrys battles In the air', on land, and sea.

First to fight for right and freedom , And to keep our honor clean,

We are proud to claim the title Of United States Marines

Our flags unfurl'd to every breeze From dawn to setting sun';

We have fought in every clime and place Where we could take a gun.

In the snow of far-off northern lands And in sunny tropic scenes,

You will find us always on the job - The United States Marines

Here's health to you and to our Corps Which we are proud to serve;

In many a strife we've fought for life And never lost our nerve.

If the Army and the Navy Ever gaze on Heaven's scenes,

They will find the streets are guarded By United States Marines.

Semper Fidelis

11/10/2006 07:38:00 AM  
Blogger Teresita said...

buck smith wrote:

I don't think the Dems will screw up the economy. When Reagan came in to office top tax rates were 75%, when he left they something like 31%. Bush the elder raised to 33%, Clinton raised to 39%, Bush the younger cut them to 35% or so.

No doubt under Republican presidents, those in the rarified cream of the crop who pay the top rates get a break. However, a breakdown of factors more important to working families shows that Democrats perform slightly better.

Real Disposable Personal Income Growth per year (1953-2001)

D:3.65%
R:3.08%

Unemployment (1962-2001)

D:5.1 %
R:6.75 %

GDP growth: (1962-2001)

D:3.9 %
R:2.9 %

Inflation (1962-2001)

D:4.26 %
R:4.96 %

And so on. But this sample needs more data points to rise out of statistical noise. In the meantime, keeping one's hands off the economy is still probably the best over time. I'm Woman Catholic, and I endorse this message.

11/10/2006 07:49:00 AM  
Blogger enscout said...

woman catholic:

pre-Nov 2, 2006
US unemployment rate = all time low
DJIA = all time high

Let's see what happens & how "they" spin it.

11/10/2006 08:02:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

"I don't think the Dems will screw up the economy."

I wondered about that on Wednesday so I set the following mark in my PIM for 4Nov08:

7Nov2006 - DOW: 12,156.77; NASDAQ: 2,375.88; CBOE volatility: 11.09; $1 = 1.28059 Euro; $1 = 117.44 Yen; Oil: 59.35/bbl.; Gold: 625.30; BRK.A: 107,000; Unemployment: 4.4%.

11/10/2006 08:14:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

BTW, can we leave Bosnia now?

11/10/2006 08:17:00 AM  
Blogger Hayek said...

I just began the novel "Wildfire" authored by Nelson DeMille. The premise involves a government policy of that name which is the present day version of MAD. We have told all Muslim heads of state that if a nuke goes off in one of our cities,w/o the necessity of determining its origin,we will nuke all of their capitals and Mecca and Medina. What do you think of the concept and whether such a policy is in place?

11/10/2006 08:24:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

and threaten our life-blood, oil

No, Jim, "threaten" is when you are subject to over-packing your socks on your next business trip. You need a stronger word.

11/10/2006 08:42:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Mark suggests seperation of muslims and infidels. That may have worked a century ago but would be impossible in the post-modern world.

Why? What does "post-modern" have to do with whether we allow muslims into our countries? If we pass the laws, voila, they are not allowed in. It's not like they are going to teleport in through their internet connections.

Besides being illegal to discriminate against religion by our constitution...

Then we will either need to change the Constitution, or officially recognize that Islam is not a religion in the sense meant by the Founders, which was a set of beliefs grounded in the belief in a loving God. Islam is actually a cult founded by a 7th century Bedouin warlord. It advocates slaughter of non-believers. We do not have to pretend this is a "religion" we must respect.

...it would be foolish to make all of the Islamic world a no-go zone for Americans. Four fifths of the globe would be off limits to Americans including Europe.

Muslims do not control 4/5ths of the world. They control the Middle East and South and Central Asia. We can perfectly well go to Europe - why not? I am not saying we should stay only in the USA. I am saying we should not let them in the USA, and we should not force our way into their historic lands. Otherwise we will go anywhere we please - Europe, China, Japan, South America, Africa, etc.

How would America seperate future Islamist nuclear weapons from American cities?

How would they get to our cities if we don't allow muslims into the country? A whole lot more difficult. And if they nuke us, well then we may have to nuke them. But that is even MORE of a problem if we are letting muslims in here. As the British are discovering, a native muslim population is a festering breeding ground of terrorism. How do you think letting muslims into our country improves our security over excluding them? Until a few decades ago there were virtually no muslims in the West, and muslims were no problem. Who ever even though about them then?

Separation is the only workable option. We will never change them. We don't want to surrender. We can't kill them without giving up our humanity - we are not Ghengis Khan. But we can separate ourselves from them. That's orders of magnitude easier than trying to slaughter them. Our troops would be in the position of the Nazi SS soldiers who were going insane and having nervous breakdowns from the strain of murdering people all day every day!

11/10/2006 08:44:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

3case, you should put your gold mark on the date some weeks back, when two things changed together, the polls began looking inevitable, and gold said goodbye to to the mid 500s.

11/10/2006 08:48:00 AM  
Blogger Teresita said...

mark said:

How would they get to our cities if we don't allow muslims into the country?

The same way the Chinese smuggle themselves to Seattle: By shipping container. Wal-Mart greased the skids in the 109th Congress to prevent 100% inspection.

11/10/2006 08:52:00 AM  
Blogger enscout said...

mark:

don't go there. it's a fools game.

Islam considers any land on earth as either their holy land (land Muslims dominate or once dominated) or land they intend to dominate (bring under the subjegation of their Allah). It is the pretext for jihad.

Yours is the arguement that has been in play for 14 centuries.

11/10/2006 08:55:00 AM  
Blogger Teresita said...

hayek said:

What do you think of the concept and whether such a policy is in place?

Kurdistan is not officially autonomous, but everyone winks and knows the real score. I think that is basically the case with the option of making Mecca into glass. Sometimes a dumb congressman strays off the reservation and mentions the policy out loud, but the boys take him out to the woodshed and then he comes back in unable to sit down for an hour or two, but much wiser.

11/10/2006 08:59:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

woman_catholic: We can improve security on shipping containers. And even if we can't (which is untrue) it would still be a vast improvement to not allow muslims anywhere else in the country.

enscout: please address my arguments point by point, rather than labeling them as a "fool's game", because that is just name calling and doesn't help me see how you are right and I am wrong.

Yes, that is how things have been done since the 14th century and that is how things will have to continue to be done as long as we want to survive in a world with a large death cult like Islam. We cannot change them - you have to understand that. We cannot change them. Only they can change themselves, and they will only do that when they see it is in their interest, and not because we pressure them.

11/10/2006 09:02:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

"Andaluse" my ass--what about Contantinople?

11/10/2006 09:06:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

I'll tell you what is a fool's game: thinking we can somehow induce muslims to give up their religous beliefs. Or thinking we could go and kill enough of them to make them change. (I think that it is theoretically very workable to decimate them like that and force change, but I think it is practically impossible because there would be no public will for that kind of killing.)

There are four option:
* surrender (not an option)
* destroy Islam (not an option - we are not Nazi SS soldiers)
* change Islam (not possible for outsiders to change Islam)
* separate ourselves from Islam (ideologically difficult for us to get past our liberal faith in the universal equality of all cultures, but the practical steps are simple and do not require killing people).

Can you see any other options? I can't. The only workable one is separation.

11/10/2006 09:08:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

add an "s" please, to Contantinople

11/10/2006 09:08:00 AM  
Blogger dla said...

Al Qaeda has won a strategic victory by securing the one weapon proven to work against the American military - public opion.

11/10/2006 09:09:00 AM  
Blogger Teresita said...

mark said:

There are four option:
* surrender (not an option)
* destroy Islam (not an option - we are not Nazi SS soldiers)
* change Islam (not possible for outsiders to change Islam)
* separate ourselves from Islam

Can you see any other options? I can't. The only workable one is separation.

The fifth option is going back to September 10 and putting bandaids on Islam (ie. bombing Aspirin factories in Sudan). It's not workable, but it is what we're going to do.

11/10/2006 09:19:00 AM  
Blogger Hayek said...

Mark- the idea behind the Wildfire concept is that the threat of massive retaliation gives an incentive for the muslim states to police the jahidis in their midst and to thereby reduce the potential for such a terrorist attack.Given that the major threat is not from a nation state, doesn't this concept have some validity?

11/10/2006 09:31:00 AM  
Blogger Shaun Mullen said...

Wretchard:

This is slightly off topic, but do you really have to tolerate hate speech at your blog?

All too frequently Habu1's posts are beyond vile. Might he be invited to vomit his screed at neo-Nazi and other sites where such sick thinking is celebrated?

Thank you in advance, Shaun

11/10/2006 09:46:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

For all you erudite pusillanemous bloviating contributors what part of "they attacked us, they toppled the WTC, blew up our embassies, etc., and their religion calls for total domination don't you understand?"

Or do you truly believe we can Nevelle our way out?

11/10/2006 09:48:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

well back along time ago there was this schoolyard, actually we called him school lard, sissy.

i think his name was swann mullett and he was the achetype of what later in the 90's became known as a metrosexual, least that's what heard at the reunions.
they say he faded away, went a join a san fran bath house vocal group.. i never really knew..heck i never really cared ...i do remember he had a low thresh hold for pain as he thought kickball was hurt'n his feet ..anyway people come and people go..I hope the world has been good to swann mullett.

11/10/2006 09:54:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Mark I can see a really great chance that "passing laws" excluding Muslims will work. My goodness,the history of laws like that shows that it works wonderfully well.

There are historical precedents. One real big one comes to mind: we banned Naziism in Germany after World War II. It was an ideology founded by a charismatic leader who preached the superiority of his people and their destiny to rule the world, and who engaged in genocide to that end. Such ideologies cannot be permitted to get a footing in our Western nations.

Your mistake is you are thinking of Islam as a religion like Christianity or Buddhism. But's it not...it does not preach love and forgiveness. It preaches mandatory conversion of the world, by the sword if necessary, to Islam. It is a cult. We can ban cults without giving up our highest values.

11/10/2006 09:56:00 AM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

Shaun - does the phrase "Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech" mean anything to you?

I'll bet you also call people "racist" when you're losing an argument, too, don't you?

If you're offended, you can always go back to whatever Leftist and/or Yurpy swamp you just climbed out of -- you know, the ones who don't like to say anything bad about anyone except Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and who never met a terrorist they didn't love.

I'll bet you think poor old Osama is just a little misunderstood Saudi patriot trying to protect his over-run country from Zionists and the American military, too, don't you?

Jerk.

11/10/2006 09:58:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Hayek wrote:

Mark- the idea behind the Wildfire concept is that the threat of massive retaliation gives an incentive for the muslim states to police the jahidis in their midst and to thereby reduce the potential for such a terrorist attack.Given that the major threat is not from a nation state, doesn't this concept have some validity?

It may for keeping muslims states from harming us, but it does nothing about the muslim colonies now growing in our nations. The muslims colonists must be expelled back to their homelands, their ancestral lands. Then a strategy like you describe would be workable. It would be one part of the separation strategy that I am saying is the only feasible option: separate the muslims from us, and then maintain military superiority. Then we can let things simmer down for a few decades and let the muslim moderates, who will be positively chafing under the fundamentalists, to change Islam themselves. We can't change it.

11/10/2006 10:01:00 AM  
Blogger NahnCee said...

BTW Mark, everything I've ever read about nuclear explosions says that there are DNA-like earmarks, so there will be no such thing as an "anonymous" explosion. We can track the yellowcake or the uranium or the grid-marks or something so that who-ever lets the thing off can be very certain that there'll be a soft tapping at his door within an hour or two with a little billet doux back from us.

(And if we can't do that, we'll just *say* we can, and nuke 'em back to the Stone Age any way on general principles and because they've been asking for it for a decade or two now.)

11/10/2006 10:01:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

woman catholic wrote:
The fifth option is going back to September 10 and putting bandaids on Islam (ie. bombing Aspirin factories in Sudan). It's not workable, but it is what we're going to do.

You're right, I forgot that "do nothing" is also always an option. But it doesn't attempt to actually address the problem so I ignored it. Actually, "do nothing" is jus the early phase of "surrender."

11/10/2006 10:02:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

-"let a hundred flowers bloom"

-Relaxation of censorship, allowed freedom of expression

11/10/2006 10:03:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

I'll bet the boots on the ground a sand-line over has had much to do with states policing their jihadis re 911 attempts.

Speaking of 911 and the decap comments--911 was, recall, precisely that.

It failed by a hair--and now look, it has put the passivist party back in control of Congress.

11/10/2006 10:09:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

What bothers you about habu, shaun? Does he make you look at a possible future, or something? I'd say that your attitude is a thousand times more likely to bring that future to us, than is habu's--which has the best chance of preventing it. If that is a little complex for you, my apologies. But you are, you know, quite dangerous.

11/10/2006 10:22:00 AM  
Blogger Reocon said...

There's been a lot of puzzling over the definition of "victory" on this blog of late. Here's Gen. (ret.) Tommy Franks in the current issue of the National Interest:

"When we try to decide whether or not we’ve been victorious, we have to think, for just a second, what the term “victory” means. Victory means the accomplishment of objectives and goals that we had in mind when we initially became involved in a particular conflict.

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=12988

By that standard it's certainly a bad sign it be in the middle of a quagmire and hoping to discover what are goals might be. I don't see how that tact is really going to fly in a democracy.

11/10/2006 10:30:00 AM  
Blogger enscout said...

mark: You said, "Your mistake is you are thinking of Islam as a religion like Christianity or Buddhism. But's it not..."

Exactly! It is an alternative form of government, which, if established in the US is in direct conflict with our beloved Constitution.

Need I say more?

11/10/2006 10:48:00 AM  
Blogger lugh lampfhota said...

Mark,

You are advocating retreat and constitutional amendment to forbid the practice of a religion. If Americans started pondering the ban of religion then, in fairness, they would ban all religion. Do you actually believe that any Congress would commit political suicide on such an issue?

Strategic retreat is never successful. It is defeat by another name. Nazi Germany wanted to unite with Austria, then Sudentenland, then Poland, then the Ruhr...well you get my point. Once you signal retreat, the enemy will want more until nothing is left and you are left to make a final defense of a bad position.

Seperation is defeat. We either fight this now or die later. Muslims are coming for YOU Mark. This is personal whether you want it to be or not. Get ready to fight or die.

Shuan Mullet may survive as a castrated bath eunuch but we will either defeat the Islamists or die with or without seperation.

BTW, we have already been seperated by the Islamofacists. They live in dar al-Islam while we kufirs live in dar al-Harb (house of war). They have not stopped their conquest for 1400 years and will not stop until the whole world is dar al-Islam.

Wise up son.

11/10/2006 10:51:00 AM  
Blogger lugh lampfhota said...

Also Mark,

You would have to deport American citizen and muslim Congressman Ellison of Minneapolis to pull off "your plan". Still think it would work?

11/10/2006 10:56:00 AM  
Blogger enscout said...

mark:

Even if we were to succeed in expelling the Muzzies from sovereign US lands, how do you expect we would enable that in places that are already being diputed. The Horn of Africa, the former Yugolsavia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Phillipines.....you get my drift. What type of incentive do you propose we offer them to just drop their weapons and back away?

I don't know that we have the right resources to fight them mano-e-mano in a series of bush wars.

11/10/2006 11:03:00 AM  
Blogger Andrew Zalotocky said...

You cannot retreat from a war that will follow you home.

Premature withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. The country would slide into full-scale civil war, with Iranian-backed Shia militias the most likely winners. The Sunni minority is too outnumbered to take power again and al-Qaeda would be annihilated. Its forces are small, it is widely hated, and the Iranians would want to eliminate any challenge to their leadership of international Islamism. Many government supporters would flee or switch sides once they realised that America was running away, and those who didn't would eventually be killed.

The end result would be Iranian control of Iraq, a purge of dissidents, and a flood of refugees reminiscent of the Vietnamese "boat people" of the 1970s.

Every nation and non-state actor would conclude that:

(a) America could be defeated by any power that was able to sustain a few years of guerrilla warfare
(b) The media and the left would force America to lose any war it started
(c) America was a weak and unreliable ally

Enemies of the United States would be emboldened to attack it. Terrorist attacks on American targets abroad would greatly increase, as would attempts to obtain concessions by taking American hostages. China and the Norks would suddenly become much more belligerent. Allies would look for alternative security arrangements, e.g. Japan would start building nuclear weapons and the Europeans would seek closer ties with China and Russia. American power would not collapse entirely, but it would be greatly diminished.

There would no longer be any entity with the means or will to control the spread of nuclear weapons. The Arab states would all be desperate to get them, in order to fend off Iran. Once the Iranians had nukes, they would use terrorist groups to conduct unrestricted warfare against Israel and America while using the nuclear threat to deter retaliation. Every tinpot dictator on the planet would copy their example - imagine Cuba and Venezuela armed by Iran or North Korea - and the spread of democracy would be halted or reversed. The threat of nuclear terrorism would greatly increase, as would the risk of a nuclear war between states.

We should all do everything we can to spread awareness of how bad the consequences of retreat would be, for the whole world.

But the right should also fight to reclaim the meaning of Vietnam. Instead of allowing the left to define the alleged similarities with Iraq - war crimes, immoral cause, quagmire, etc - the right should aggressively assert the real parallels. It should remind the public of how South Vietnam was betrayed, and the horrors that followed. It should put the Tet Offensive centre-stage as an example of how the media turned military victory into political defeat, and turn the left's claim that Iraq is Vietnam against it.

For if it is Vietnam then "redeployment" is surrender and the enemy will be left to pile up bodies until they blot out the sun.

11/10/2006 11:15:00 AM  
Blogger Monkeesfan said...

I'm struck by the pessimism about Iraq. It isn't a lost cause; we've come too far for that. Yes it's still messy, but then a lot of the "mess" remains panicky MSM slant. We definately, as Armed Liberal has pointed out elsewhere, need for American forces to get out of the basecamps and get to know the locals more than they apparantly are now doing.

The comparisons with Vietnam ignore what should be obvious - that we quit - or more accurately let outselves get bullied by the antiwar crowd into quitting - just as we were solving the riddle and finishing off the VC infiltration while crushing the NVA invasion. The whole "we can't win in Iraq" argument is wrong - we won't win if we let ourselves get bullied in quitting.

11/10/2006 11:28:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

here for a little comic relief, is a parallel thread, followed by this, please read the comments.

Ripley: "...And all this, this bullshit that you think is so important, you can just kiss all that goodbye!"

11/10/2006 11:29:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

I did some housekeeping on my genocide vs. decimate thesis.
Decimate is definitely the way and genocide ,as I said before was incorrect terminology.
Further clarification brings me to say that I definitely do not wish all Islams perish. But they are the ones who brought the fight to us. They are the ones with the
raison d'être of agression towards the non Islamic world. We are defending ourselves from naked aggression.
This BC group should need no homily on numbers of dead in wartime. To decimate Islam would I truly believe cause them to rethink their CURRENT aggression. History shows that they of course will never cease to attempt in conquering "infidels". But for goodness sake lets give them something to really think about. And I can practically guarantee that the decimation of their numbers will do just that.
We have the power and power is the one thing you can't fake. Let's use our power to defend ourselves.

11/10/2006 11:32:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

Enscout 11:03

"What type of incentive do you propose we offer them to just drop their weapons and back away?"


babyback ribs with coleslaw and baked beans

11/10/2006 11:38:00 AM  
Blogger Habu said...

Buddy,
Ripley.. a brainy, long legged beautiful woman who has long been a heatthrob of mine.

Ripley

11/10/2006 11:46:00 AM  
Blogger sammy small said...

Mark, so how do you plan on identifying all Muslims in the U.S.? How will you identify the ones who deny they're Muslim but really are? What about continuing converts?

Maybe we should ask the Serbs how that went.

11/10/2006 11:50:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

"heatthrob", now that's a freudian slip wot betters the origenital.

11/10/2006 11:53:00 AM  
Blogger Charles said...

lugh lampfhota said...

Mark suggests seperation of muslims and infidels. That may have worked a century ago but would be impossible in the post-modern world.
//////////////////////
I think that its inevitable that the moslems will be kicked out of europe.

Its most important for the USA to ensure that the Eurabians return to their lands of origin.

As it happens there will be great impetus for the flow back to north africa especially because right now the rate of the fall in the cost of water desalination and transport is acclerating.

In under 10 years it will be economically feasabile to turn all the world's deserts green and double the size of the habitable planet.

The sahara will look inviting.

(And Mexico will be beautiful.)

11/10/2006 11:54:00 AM  
Blogger sammy small said...

There is another option I suggest adding to the list of ways of dealing with Islam, as others elsewhere have suggested:

Change Islam from within

We can of course help this along. I suggest that the Mossad train and arm at least 100 "martyrs" to attend services of the most radical mosques across the world on a given Friday and, in unison, assassinate their fiery clerics preaching jihad.

Nothing like swating a hornet's nest to get the fun started.

11/10/2006 12:06:00 PM  
Blogger Habu said...

Buddy,

You remember.

Martha and the Vandellas,"HEATTHROB"

11/10/2006 12:09:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

subtext in Motown songs? Nahhh.
:-D

11/10/2006 12:14:00 PM  
Blogger Teresita said...

Mark, so how do you plan on identifying all Muslims in the U.S.? How will you identify the ones who deny they're Muslim but really are? What about continuing converts?

Once a year, a government agent will come over with a plate of ham and cheese sandwiches and ask everyone to take a bite. Of course, this will also sweep up Jews and Seventh-day Adventists into the net, but homeland security calls for sacrifices to be made.

11/10/2006 12:15:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Woman Catholic, hie thee to the nunnery!

11/10/2006 12:20:00 PM  
Blogger lugh lampfhota said...

abu masri declares "al qaeda in iraq is winning the war". Well American voters, how's that Tuesday victory looking now?

charles,

I suspect there's a better chance of Euro Islamists taking over Europe than being deported. After all, with only 10% of France's population they can turn the projects around Paris and Marseilles into police no-go zones by burning a hundred cars and night and pillaging in subways. In Holland the natives are fleeing Amsterdam because of muslim intimidation.

Are we next? Ask Nancy and Harry.

11/10/2006 12:44:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

why ask them? they will no idea what you are talking about, and will think you a nut.

11/10/2006 01:06:00 PM  
Blogger lugh lampfhota said...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A purported audio recording by the leader of Iraq's al Qaeda wing gloated over the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as a top U.S. general said the military was preparing to recommend strategy changes.

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, also known as Abu Ayyub al-Masri, said in the recording posted on the Internet on Friday that the group had 12,000 armed fighters and 10,000 others waiting to be equipped to fight U.S. troops in Iraq.

"I tell the lame duck (U.S. administration) do not rush to escape as did your defense minister...stay on the battle ground," he said.

He said his group would not rest until it had blown up the presidential mansion in Washington.

"I swear by God we shall not rest from jihad until we...blow up the filthiest house known as the White House," the voice on the recording said.

America....they are coming for ya.

11/10/2006 01:27:00 PM  
Blogger Shaun Mullen said...

Nahncee:

Which are worse in your educated view:

Islamofascists or Christianfascists like our friend habu1?

11/10/2006 01:30:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

shaun, please tell me you didn't read lugh's post just a few minutes before yours.

If you did, and posted yours anyway, you are making quite a case for identifying yourself as an utter sap.

11/10/2006 01:42:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Somebody should tell Abu Masri (considering how he has interpreted the recent American elections) that we do not approve of questioning the Dem's patriotism.

Sic Bill Maher on Abu Masri--that'll straighten him out.

11/10/2006 01:49:00 PM  
Blogger wretchardthecat said...

Shaun,

My whole object in life is to prevent, rather than justify or make acceptable any kind of warfare which will slaughter millions of innocents. Not just Muslims, but anyone. When I was a young man in grad school we talked about the death of hundreds of millions routinely. I had the privilege of listening to professors like Tom Schelling, who recently won a Nobel for his work, and Al Carnesale on the subject of nuclear deterrence.

This was the plan. In the event of a nuclear exchange America would do its level best to kill every man, woman and child in the Soviet Union and possibly China. Depending on the SIOP. Under lesser circumstances, nuclear weapons would merely be used in Western Europe. And while this was happening a similar process would be occuring in America, England the UK.

The SAC motto was "Peace is our Profession". And there was whole lexicon of words like "Enhanced Radiation Warhead". There were optimization programs. Did you know that 3 x 175 Kt was better than a 1 Mt "device"? There were wonderful films analyzing the shock hammer wave of a nuclear blast front. It has the instantaeous density of steel moving at five hundred miles per hour. Something like that.

You know what we were talking about? It was genocide. More than genocide. There was no word for it. And you know what else? It kept us all alive. So while I sympathize with your revulsion for what Habu1 and others have said, I have to truthfully say that stripped of its crude terminology it is almost no different from the things we were prepared to do back then. Pre-emptive strike. Launch on warning. Assured second strike. Invulnerable deterrent.

We are all of us guilty of living because our lives were bought at the cost of preparing to kill every man jack on the face of this planet. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. And today we want safety? We hear give me safety but don't speak of death. I am afraid you can live if your prepared to kill; you can forswear killing if you are ready to die. My beef with the politically correct world is this. They are unprepared to die and yet they want to live. No faith in God yet no faith in the Devil. Now comes the Muslim man to twist their nose. Good luck to them.

11/10/2006 01:49:00 PM  
Blogger Rem870 said...

Don't worry Shaun. When the time comes, folks like Habu and I will do your fighting for you. You won't have to get your hands dirty.

11/10/2006 01:51:00 PM  
Blogger Cosmo said...

Wretchard:

Pardon the its length, but I have, perhaps, another conjecture.

You write about "building up a head of steam with these dinky politically correct strategies. The one day a whole bunch of nukes will go off in New York, London, Paris, Tel Aviv."

You assume one would naturally follow the other, followed naturally, in turn, by a massive Western response. You assume we would muster, when I see very little evidence we would.

What if the collective enemies of the West need not go so far to get what they want? What if they "Finlandize" the West in increments?

What if the threat of nukes going off -- or of just plain violence -- is enough obtain concession after concession? That and the relentless gaming of our legal, educational and media institutions to further the Islamist agenda.

Hell it's working in France, worked in Spain, and just worked here. The 'kapos' of a dhimmified Western ghetto -- the tranznational statist political class -- are already in power in Europe and ascendant in America, looking to stifle speech while enabling Muslim special pleading.

Police in the West already bother more with 'Islamophobia' than with openly espoused jihad.

They'll give us enough oil at exorbitant prices to maintain our decadence, stay out of their way and concede to whatever they wish.

Observing our weakness, Korea, Japan and the other nations of Asia will make accommodation with with their largest market and superpower neighbor.

We end with a whimper, not with a bang.

As for our children and grandchildren, they're already being indoctrinated to understand that their world will be the result of the West's cumulative crimes and guilt -- and of the superiority of other forms of civilization.

We'll use sophistry to hide from our cowardice and rationalize away our defeat and submission.

And even if the scenario you describe of nuclear strikes against the West were ever to take place, our likely response would be paralyzed handwringing fueled by doubt, self-loathing and worry over what the 'international community' will think.

Sometime in the very distant future, historians might learn that while barbarians who observe none of the 'rules' of civilized behavior during war were at the gate, our leadership and intellectual classes spent civilization's final moments indicting themselves for relatively minor violations of wartime etiquette.

No, in the end, Western Civilization's neglected and abused political and cultural institutions and traditions will not finally wake up and strike.

It will, instead, involve the far more frightening prospect of each of us, one at a time, facing moments of defiance or submission -- facing financial ruin after CAIR and its media mouthpices or your own government put legal pressure on you for something you wrote on your blog, or being fined for Islamophobia after complaining to the school board about giving your child a Muslim name during Islam Study Week -- all of it without ever coming face to face with a jihadist.

Again, thanks.

11/10/2006 01:58:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

If genocides will be prevented, who shall prevent them, the habus, or the shauns?

History says, the habus have the key--a screwed-up, ugly, tarnished key it is, shaun--but you have no key at all.

You have only words that nobody but other hapless prey critters can afford to listen to.

11/10/2006 02:06:00 PM  
Blogger Cosmo said...

monkeesfan:

I concur. Unfortunately, you and I have no influence over any decision to stick it out.

11/10/2006 02:10:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Cosmo's conjecture has been rising in my own mind, for sometime now. It is more or less the same as catholic woman's "do nothing", and will be the truth, is becoming the truth, pending an active crusader-like revolution in our mass-thinking.

Don't expect it, because, as the far future attenuates, the near-future will become hypnotic--tomorrow morning's crumbs will be more and more valuable, traded easily for future fortunes ever more nebulous, and by the time the crumbs run out, we will be gone.

Probably alive, but not in current incarnation.

First sign, soon to come, news of a trend on college campuses, to "go muslim".

Fashion trends, the headgear on Hollywood stars.

Coming soon to a theater near you.

Better red than dead.

11/10/2006 02:29:00 PM  
Blogger lugh lampfhota said...

cosmo,

Sadly I think you have it about right. The West has lost it's will to exist. Our most fearsome weapon, the barristers, will pick the bones clean as we lie on our backs whimpering.

But history will be written by the ruthless peoples that inherit the earth. The memory of the West will be an evil that was deposed by glorious muslims or chinese.

11/10/2006 02:30:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

And the thing that killed us will be recorded as "freedom".

11/10/2006 02:46:00 PM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

"Freedom", a utopian dream that destroyed its own capacity to survive, was the catchword of the era between "The Enlightenment" and the "New Caliphe", will say the book.

11/10/2006 02:52:00 PM  
Blogger Cosmo said...

Right, Buddy and lugh.

The language of politics and morality has been under assault and has been thoroughly debased.

Freedom will either be blamed, as an evil necessitating its destruction, or redefined, as some EU MEP recently did, as the absence of all sorts of things bureaucrats think we should do without.

We already hear something like this with the increasingly-elastic definition of democracy -- which, we're told, can be interpreted and customized according to local taste.

We used to laugh off the obvious fraudulence of 'People's Republics.' But now we have members of the U.S. political establishment praising Iranian democracy, and Western media reporting Saddam's election results with a straight face.

Expect the Chinese to declare themselves a democracy, to the golf-clap applause of our bien pensant 'clerks.'

11/10/2006 03:55:00 PM  
Blogger Cosmo said...

One footnote:

While the West proceeds with the dubious and misguided project of feminizing its culture -- by classifying boyish rambunctiousness as a pathology to be remediated with therapy and drugs, by de-legitimizing masculinity, and portaying men as childish incompetents (when they're not aggressors) needing the guidance of wiser, morally-superior females -- rest assured our Islamist and Chinese enemies aren't buying into any such non-sense.

See, stuff like pacifism and metrosexuality work only when everyone else -- including predators -- agrees to go along.

11/10/2006 04:05:00 PM  
Blogger 3Case said...

Rocky Patel Vintage 1990...will I be able to get these under Sharia? Robusto tonight.

Time to pick up the pizza.

Happy Birthday and Semper Fi my Brothers!

11/10/2006 04:10:00 PM  
Blogger Cosmo said...

lugh:

You write: The memory of the West will be an evil that was deposed by glorious muslims or chinese.

Probably true. I was assuming that, like Greece, Rome and the Enlightenment, civilization, as we understand it -- scientific inquiry, logic, etc. -- would one day rise again.

See, I'm really an optimist after all!

11/10/2006 04:16:00 PM  
Blogger Consul-At-Arms said...

I've linked to you here: http://consul-at-arms.blogspot.com/2006/11/re-whole-truth-and-nothing-but-truth.html

11/10/2006 07:20:00 PM  
Blogger Jack said...

"David Corn quotes former CIA analyst Larry Johnson as saying he once called Nelson Mandela a Communist. "Gates wanted the lede to say that Mandela was a communist. The analyst kicked back hard and ultimately prevailed, but this behavior was consistent with his reputation as a political animal willing to curry favor with the political masters downtown and sacrifice sound analysis." (David Corn)"

2 things:

First, that Larry Johnson doesn't like him means squat to me.

Second, honest question: Was Mandela a Communist?

11/11/2006 01:24:00 AM  
Blogger Jack said...

"here for a little comic relief, is a parallel thread, followed by this, please read the comments.

Ripley: "...And all this, this bullshit that you think is so important, you can just kiss all that goodbye!"


I consider myself a small l libertarian, so believe me, I can understand why old Goldwaterites could get worried about Bush's European-type socially conservative big government deal.

But for the life of me, I don't understand what good it does for libertarians to vote for socialists. Gridlock, whatever. You're sending the message that socialism sells, and most important, you're putting them in power. Insane.

11/11/2006 02:43:00 AM  
Blogger Jack said...

Note vote for the Republicans, sure! Vote for the, admittedly foreign policy moonbat, Libertarians? Okay! At least until they have a chance at winning power...then run for the hills. Constitutional Party? Yep!

Democrats as the vessel for libertarianism (especially with the Old Guard that has seniority)? WTF?

11/11/2006 02:46:00 AM  
Blogger 3Case said...

"Was Mandela a Communist?"

Yes.

11/11/2006 05:40:00 AM  
Blogger buddy larsen said...

Thank you for that, Cutler.

I can't stop thinking about how Ross Perot voters handed us over to Clinton, who got a humongerously destructive 8 yrs out of 43% of that 1992 vote.

That year, the Librarians went against Bush I for falling short of perfection, and so got instead the Clintons for 1992 through 2016 (with a brief interregnum 2000-2008).

Librarians hate big gov, dontcha know.

11/11/2006 05:57:00 AM  
Blogger MnMark said...

Mark, so how do you plan on identifying all Muslims in the U.S.? How will you identify the ones who deny they're Muslim but really are? What about continuing converts?

Maybe we should ask the Serbs how that went.


For an example of how to do it, I'd suggest we look at how the US and allied powers banned Naziism in Germany after the war. I don't know the particulars of that. But I'd suggest we'd do something like this:

* Declare that Islam is a totalitarian cult much like Naziism, and that we will no longer allow muslims into the country, just as we did not allow Nazis into the country after WWII.

* Ban mosques, and make it a crime to prosthelatize for Islam.

Right there, we've made the environment so unfriendly that the great majority of serious muslims are going to leave the country. Keep in mind that if we get to the point where we have the popular will to pass laws like this, the general atmosphere is going to be very unpleasant for muslims and most people don't want to live in a place they are so unwelcome.

We don't have to go around hunting down every muslim, just like we didn't hunt down every former Nazi in Germany. We arrested the big wigs and made it impossible to practice Naziism in any public, meaningful way, and Naziism disappeared.

The key is going to be to recognize that our relatively recent dogma about the US being a "creedal nation" that has no distinct identity, except for allegiance to the idea of having no distinct identity, is a suicidal mistake.

Combined with that, we need to throw off this ridiculous, self-defeating idea that it is wrong to discriminate between belief sets, such as Islam and Christianity. We are a distinct, historical people with a Christian ancestry (whether we are believers now or not), a distinct ethnic makeup, a distinct language and culture. We have every right to protect those things - as much right as any other people on earth.

We need to start thinking of Islam as another kind of Naziism instead of as a religion. Then the answers to questions like "how do we identify muslims?" become clearer. How did we identify Nazis?

As to the commenter who criticized my separation idea as surrender, saying we have to fight them: maybe we will need to fight them (preferably on their land, not ours) but we absolutely have to get them out of our countries too. We cannot allow this fifth column of muslims to be setting up colonies in our lands, which is what is happening. But before we start a general invasion of the Middle East to try to wipe out Islam, why don't we try separation first? Send them back home, get out of their lands, and see if that doesn't do the trick. We don't need to be in their lands. They'll still sell us oil - they need to sell it to someone since they have no other significant source of income.

By the way, I believe the Serbs were successful, weren't they, in ridding their lands of muslims? Except that the US flew in and bombed them until they gave up? My understanding is that we bombed them because they were on the verge of complete success in forcing the muslims out of the disputed land. If we want to expel muslims from our lands, who's going to stop us?

If you agree that we are a distinct people who are entitled to preserve ourselves, an invaluable resource is Lawrence Auster's web site.

11/11/2006 07:31:00 AM  

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