Recycled Content

Here's a post I put up at Roger L. Simon:



What we attempted to do beginning on September 12, 2001 is dying the the death of a thousand cuts.

This conflict will not be won by surgical strikes, regime changes, and free elections. At one time it could have been. We should have adopted a "hot pursuit" policy and wiped out Syria's Ba'athists in 2003. We should have declared war via an act of Congress, and identified the enemy explicitly as any identified jihadist group, or any state providing haven, support, or transit to the same.

The enemy has taken our measure, and knows that it has friends in high places in our councils.

A democratic republic united to face a common threat and committed to the principles of justice and simple survival might have pulled off an unprecedented low-mortality solution to this clash between civilization and barbarism. We've blown that opportunity. Our political Left, fresh off losing thirty years' worth of elections, has transferred their emptiness and anger to the politics and persons chosen by the electorate to replace them.

And our right has failed to lead effectively.

The Left are wilfully blind to the fact that if they sabotage our effort to win this war as a domestic political tool, they will have set the machine to gotterdammerung on rails. They will not see past the loss of petty political fiefdoms to a future guaranteed to hold events much worse than 9/11. Losing Vietnam killed millions of Asians - but the cameras turned away in embarassment. The veterans were in turn vilified, pitied, and exploited as domestic political pawns. Let us declare defeat now, and it will take more than a remote control selection to insulate us from the consequences.

I fear for my family. And we are about to allow a betrayal of our servicemen and women on a scale that will make post-Vietnam look like a noble era.

Thousands, if not millions, more infidels are going to have to die at the hands of Islamists before idiots like Durbin and Truth and AI and the readership of Common Dreams gets it in their head that there are worse things than a Bush presidency. The muslim man in the street will just go back to business as usual once we are gone from the region. They will align with the powerful, or await the midnight knock on the door, as they have lived for generations.

It's not about country, it's about POLITICS, and they would gladly rip the beating hearts out of babies on an altar if they thought it would get them one step closer to power.




I am not a happy camper these days. History does not predict the future. It does provide a damned good analytical tool for predicting consequences for actions - especially where matters of cultural conflct are concerned.

Vietnam redux. I'd cry, but I'm too busy refreshing antibiotic prescriptions and ordering in a fresh supply of meds for my wife's chronic medical condition. And the water store and the food supply and the contact records...