RE: Geodesic neoconservative empire
-- On 29 Oct 2004 at 10:20, Tyler Durden wrote: We're not reducing the quantity of government, just consolidating under a single growing Borg-like government, namely the US. This presupposes the US intends to rule Afghanistan and Iraq, which is manifestly false. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG TCB2vWoGyhVihGigpgZNddyxcR+FX8/hDPZankmv 4jNqo70KLA5nfPvXptDt0z6bJGMJ0LDIX5iVsCD/p
RE: Geodesic neoconservative empire
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, James A. Donald wrote: On 29 Oct 2004 at 10:20, Tyler Durden wrote: We're not reducing the quantity of government, just consolidating under a single growing Borg-like government, namely the US. This presupposes the US intends to rule Afghanistan and Iraq, which is manifestly false. Agreed. Our interest in not in Afghanistan/Iraq per se. Our interest is in ruling the *planet*, rather than any individual pissant player. --digsig James A. Donald -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core S. Plath, Temper of Time
Re: 2000 curies of Ci
At 10:54 AM 10/29/04 -0700, Bill Stewart wrote: At 09:19 PM 10/28/2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote: Perhaps you meant Cs-137. Halliburton loses mCi of Am-241 etc monthly. MilliCuries? That's a bit surprising, though losing microCuries of it would be more likely. An average home smoke detector has 1-5 microcuries, and industrial detectors go up to 15, according to one or two articles on the web which may be outdated. So you're saying they lose hundreds to thousands of smoke detectors a month? They lose the neutron sources used for well logging. They contain mCi amounts of Am241 and other hot 'topes. They use a reaction with Be to produce neutrons from alphas, like the early nukebomb initiators. More often, soil-density gauges are lost/stolen from road crews. They also have fractional Ci amounts of RDD-able topes. But they're very useful; fairly sturdy; acceptable risk. See http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/event-status/event/2004/ and read a few days' reports.
Ruling the planet
At 09:24 PM 10/29/04 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: Agreed. Our interest in not in Afghanistan/Iraq per se. Our interest is in ruling the *planet*, rather than any individual pissant player. Silly JA, we want to rule the frickin' solar system. Give GWB a line of Peruvian and he'll go off on Mars. The more cluefull know about certain more proximate artificial and aggressive satellites, but we can't discuss them. Got Shutter Authority?The Zionists do... I'll see your Iranian UF6 and raise you a Dimona...
Re: Winning still matters, etc...
At 05:09 PM 10/30/04 -0400, R.A. Hettinga wrote: The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the struggle. The large pit of smoldering radioactive glass is probably not an option.. The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to harvest Westerners. The cannot even make is patently offensive; why do nitration when what you need is around? And how many Americans could wire a Casio or Nokia to a det cap on their own? They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees to alter the battlefield landscape. Obviously the US mil industrial machine is not the weak link. But what they can accomplish is to maim or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify the trauma and savagery of their attack - and do so often enough to make 300 million of us become exhausted with the entire mess. Say 10 years from now, the dead marine count is in the high 5 figures, (perhaps they are drafted), there's more snuff-videos than porn on the web, the US *will* give up and leave, and the Jihad LLC will have won. 10 years, 20 years, whatever. Persistance works. And the martyrs enjoy the virgins, at best the infidels play harps and fly around the clouds, yawn. I'll see your IED and raise you Brittney's belly-button.
Re: Geodesic neoconservative empire
On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 09:24:20PM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote: Agreed. Our interest in not in Afghanistan/Iraq per se. Our interest is in ruling the *planet*, rather than any individual pissant player. Empires never last, and if there's going to be a new one, it's going to be Chinese. (Of course it won't last, either). It sucks to be old-growth in a large new-growth market. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgp9MyKcAfxHN.pgp Description: PGP signature
bin Laden gets a Promotion
GodDAMN George W is a dumb fuck. If the guy's IQ had broken the 3-digit barrier he might have figured out that by nearly directly replying to the new bin Laden video he's basically elevating bin Laden to a hostile head-of-state. OK you TLA snoops...surely some of you montioring this list must have noticed that? Where are Mr Asswipe's brilliant advisors? Isn't this kind of acknowledgement practically Rule 1 in your anti-terrorist manuals? Or do you tacitly cooperate for the sake of job security? (ie, bin Laden gains more followers--more terrorism--more need for laws and YOU guys.) And don't get me wrong, I think this image shift for bin Laden will probably end up being a good thing (ie, we stop fuckin' around over there), but unfortunately a bunch of us will probably end up getting blowed-up or whatever in the process. We know you're there so why not come in on an anonymous remailer and tell us how it feels to be you these days. -TD _ Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
At 2:42 PM -0400 10/30/04, Sunder wrote: the Turd Sandwich? Turd Sandwich, of course. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
RE: Geodesic neoconservative empire
On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, James A. Donald wrote:
This presupposes the US intends to rule Afghanistan and Iraq,
which is manifestly false.
Since this chain started by ragging on RAH about it being a
_geodesic_ neo-{Khan, con-men} empire, you're both correct -
there isn't a conflict between ruling them by proxy
and not ruling them directly, assuming that the Commander-in-Chief
can get Our Puppet Iraqis to take over ruling their country for us
as was supposed to magically happen when we knocked off
our previous puppet. It didn't help that the Iraqis have
con-men of their own like Ahmad Chalabi telling our con-man
how easy it would be (which is what they wanted to hear)
and we've not only had to get a new puppet, we've had to
do an awful lot more work that we were supposed to.
At 07:24 PM 10/29/2004, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Agreed. Our interest in not in Afghanistan/Iraq per se.
Our interest is in ruling the *planet*,
rather than any individual pissant player.
I've never been clear how much the neo-con gang
(Wolfowitz, Leo Strauss, et al.) desire to
give America a cohesive sense of national purpose
through empire was because they cared about actually
controlling the rest of the world and
how much was because they cared about ruling America.
Bill Stewart [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ask yourselves why we didn't attack Sweden
At 9:09 PM -0700 10/30/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'm surprised the Ask yourselves why we didn't attack Sweden comment isn't discussed more http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yesid=5096 HUMAN EVENTS ONLINE: The National Conservative Weekly Since 1944 'Europe Will Be Islamic by the End of the Century' by Robert Spencer Posted Sep 16, 2004 How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-laden career to be strangely disingenuous about certain realities of Islamic radicalism and terrorism, told the German newspaper Die Welt forthrightly that Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century. Or maybe sooner. Consider some indicators from Scandinavia this past week: Sweden's third-largest city, Malmø, according to the Swedish Aftonbladet, has become an outpost of the Middle East in Scandinavia: The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nations's third largest city. It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengård, Malmø, for twenty years, and still don't know how to read or write Swedish. Ambulance personnel are attacked by stones or weapons, and refuse to help anybody in the area without police escort. The immigrants also spit at them when they come to help. Recently, an Albanian youth was stabbed by an Arab, and was left bleeding to death on the ground while the ambulance waited for the police to arrive. The police themselves hesitate to enter parts of their own city unless they have several patrols, and need to have guards to watch their cars, otherwise they will be vandalized. The Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, has become the first Dane-free Danish school. The students now come entirely from Denmark's fastest-growing constituency: Muslim immigrants. Also in Denmark, the Qur'an is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it is unlikely, given the current ascendancy of political correctness on the Continent, that critical perspectives will be included. Pakistani Muslim leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed gave an address at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo. He was readily allowed into the country despite that fact that, according to Norway's Aftenposten, he has earlier make flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes. In Norway, he declined to answer questions about whether or not he thought homosexuals should be killed. Elsewhere in Europe the jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq. And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 bombings in Madrid, have taken control of a wing of a Spanish prison. From there they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, We are going to win the holy war. The guards' response? They asked the ringleaders please to lower the volume on the prayers. What are European governments doing about all this? France is pressing forward with an appeasement campaign to free two French journalists held hostage by jihadists in Iraq. The Swedish state agency for foreign aid is sponsoring a Palestinian Solidarity Conference, which aims, among other things, to pressure the European Union to remove the terrorist group Hamas from the EU's list of terrorist groups -- despite Hamas's long history of encouraging and glorifying the murder of civilians by suicide bombers. What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. Bat Ye'or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, the institutionalized oppression of non-Muslims in Muslim societies, chronicles in her forthcoming book Eurabia how it has come to this. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication before Islam in pursuit of short-sighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a 'civilization of dhimmitude,' i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing. After the Beslan child massacres, however, there are signs from Eastern Europe that this may be changing. Last Sunday Poland turned away one hundred Chechen Muslims who were trying to enter the country from Belarus. This is the sort of measure that the countries west of Poland have been so far unwilling to take. But since one cannot by any means screen out the jihadists from the moderate Muslims, and the moderates are not helping identify the
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
As usual, South Park is a great source of wisdom. So, are you voting for the Giant Douche or the Turd Sandwich? --Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--- + ^ + :Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ --*--:and our people, and neither do we. -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + :War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -
Re: We are revealed by what we hate. (fwd)
Now, Bob, master your knee jerk eye-poke: Brooks is a regular on the Lehrer show, paired with Shields for, cough, balance. Muddle v. muddle, judge-judied by muddle. Brooks is the only one of the three without orange hair, the other two a generation older. And he's near wattleless. His sparse hair is honest compared to the henna, hair enhancer, make-up and wrinkle filler on the two turkied-geezers seeming coutured by the same Madame Toussaint as Peter Jennings' boyish mortician deathshead. Which returns to the Osama make-over. His nose looks much bigger, longer and wider, eyes closer together. The sage-of-the-desert color combination of his face and hands, beard, robe, hat and backdrop look as if it was shot in New Mexico, or maybe Israel pretending Lawrence of Arabia remake. So who's holding the sage, and where, who's scripting the spiel, who's got the most to gain to keep Osama unburied, dead or alive? Most exciting, though, is who's gonna launch the election day massive massacre on behalf of the pret a porter suspects, in the can and ready to show.
We are revealed by what we hate. (fwd)
I think George's handlers have finally found their Inner Truth. They have finally come out openly to declare that hate is what drives them. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 0xBD4A95BF An ill wind is stalking while evil stars whir and all the gold apples go bad to the core S. Plath, Temper of Time -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 11:52:16 -0400 From: GeorgeWBush.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Alif Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ICYMI:Two Articles on Osama Politics IN CASE YOU MISSED IT... The Osama Litmus Test By DAVID BROOKS The New York Times 10/30/04 ... Bush's response yesterday to the video was exactly right. He said we would not be intimidated. He tried to take the video out of the realm of crass politics by mentioning Kerry by name and assuring the country that he was sure Kerry agreed with him. Kerry did say that we are all united in the fight against bin Laden, but he just couldn't help himself. His first instinct was to get political. On Milwaukee television, he used the video as an occasion to attack the president: He didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He outsourced the job. Kerry continued with a little riff from his stump speech, I am absolutely confident I have the ability to make America safer. .. But politics has shaped Kerry's approach to this whole issue. Back in December 2001, when bin Laden was apparently hiding in Tora Bora, Kerry supported the strategy of using Afghans to hunt him down. He told Larry King that our strategy is having its impact, and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively, and we should continue to do it that way. But then the political wind shifted, and Kerry recalculated. Now Kerry calls the strategy he supported outsourcing. When we rely on allies everywhere else around the world, that's multilateral cooperation, but when Bush does it in Afghanistan, it's outsourcing. In Iraq, Kerry supports using local troops to chase insurgents, but in Afghanistan he is in post hoc opposition. This is why Kerry is not cleaning Bush's clock in this election. Many people are not sure that he gets the fundamental moral confrontation. Many people are not sure he feels it, or feels anything. Since he joined the Senate, what cause has he taken a political risk for? Has he devoted himself selflessly and passionately to any movement larger than himself? We are revealed by what we hate. When it comes to Osama bin Laden, Kerry hasn't revealed whatever it is that lies inside. To View the Article Please Visit: www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/opinion/30brooks.html Politicizing The Bin Laden Tape By William Kristol and Stephen F. Hayes The Weekly Standard Online 10/29/04 .. The Bush campaign wisely avoided going political. But the Kerry campaign--in comments from a top adviser and the candidate himself--did not. Kerry gave what appear to be his first extemporaneous comments about the tape in a previously scheduled satellite interview with Kathy Mykleby, a veteran anchor with WISN TV in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. .. But Kerry finally couldn't resist politicizing the tape: I am prepared to wage a more effective war on terror than George Bush, he added. Kerry's comment was unfortunate, and mild compared to those made later in the day by his senior foreign policy adviser, Richard Holbrooke. In an appearance on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Holbrooke, who has rejected the notion that we are in a war on terror, said this: The U.S. is determined to defeat al Qaeda and its allies and the war against their use of terrorist tactics. Holbrooke then went on the attack. The tape shows that he's still around. We should have captured him and we haven't. And the other thing it shows, illustrates a key point which is that Senator Kerry in his relentless pursuit of terrorism is going to be very aggressive. The tape doesn't show that but Senator Kerry's comments continually--his experience shows that Osama bin Laden will draw no comfort from a Kerry presidency. .. Blitzer: Are you concerned though that when Americans see this videotape--it'll be all over the news media as you can imagine, not only today but in the days to come--they will be reminded of what happened on 9/11 and they'll say, 'You know what, I'd better vote for Bush because he's tougher in dealing with al Qaeda than Kerry.' Said Holbrooke: I don't think so. I think it also raises a much deeper question: How can this grotesque mass murderer be out there on worldwide television more than three years after 9/11? Holbrooke punctuated the next sentence with exasperated pauses between his words. Why--haven't--we--captured--him--if the Bush administration was going to be so effective in the war on terror? President Bush said in the debates that he's rolled up 75 percent of al Qaeda.
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
At 5:26 PM -0400 10/30/04, Sunder wrote: No! You must vote for the Giant Douche! Or the Terrorists Win! Dude. Go see the episode. Look at the font on the Turd Sandwich float. Of *course* I'm for the Turd Sandwich. I can even give you the torrent file, so you can confirm your error... Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Osama's makeover
At 05:23 PM 10/30/04 -0700, John Young wrote: Which returns to the Osama make-over. His nose looks much bigger, longer and wider, eyes closer together. The sage-of-the-desert color combination of his face and hands, beard, robe, hat and backdrop look as if it was shot in New Mexico, or maybe Israel pretending Lawrence of Arabia remake. And did you see the wire up his back and the earpiece? Or maybe its hard to get good tailors in Pakistan.
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
No! You must vote for the Giant Douche! Or the Terrorists Win! But won't someone think of the chldren! If you vote for the Douche, the ChllLdren will die! ROTFL! --Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--- + ^ + :Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ --*--:and our people, and neither do we. -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + :War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. - On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, R.A. Hettinga wrote: At 2:42 PM -0400 10/30/04, Sunder wrote: the Turd Sandwich? Turd Sandwich, of course. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 02:42:25PM -0400, Sunder wrote: As usual, South Park is a great source of wisdom. So, are you voting for the Giant Douche or the Turd Sandwich? My candidate is Mr Hanky, Poo party. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net pgpSoQcbyxMnZ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
At 12:26 PM -0700 10/30/04, Eric Murray wrote: Its almost as if they're both following Karl Rove's playbook. Yeah, that's it. Bin Laden's in Karl Rove's pocket. Cheers, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion
On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 02:29:51PM -0400, Tyler Durden wrote: GodDAMN George W is a dumb fuck. If the guy's IQ had broken the 3-digit barrier he might have figured out that by nearly directly replying to the new bin Laden video he's basically elevating bin Laden to a hostile head-of-state. Bush needs bin Laden to be as scary as possible. I'm amused by the timing. Its almost as if they're both following Karl Rove's playbook. Eric
Re: bin Laden gets a Promotion, UBL=Moses
At 10:16 PM 10/30/04 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 02:42:25PM -0400, Sunder wrote: As usual, South Park is a great source of wisdom. So, are you voting for the Giant Douche or the Turd Sandwich? My candidate is Mr Hanky, Poo party. I'm voting for Kodos. [Simpsons ref] UBL was pleasantly rational in this one. Even explained the origin of the tower-dropping plans, which was a nice bit for the historians. I'm surprised the Ask yourselves why we didn't attack Sweden comment isn't discussed more; then again I find even intelligent people refractory to that obvious question. UBL still thinks lay Americans elect their leaders, or have a clue what they're doing, but he is a man of strong faith. He even gave a succint reminder of the way out, Leave my people alone, Moses like. Time for more locusts, frogs, red tides, or modern equivalents, I'm afraid. Extra points for the commentary on Bush Sr learning about dynasty from the Saudis, etc, and installing his sons as governors. -- M. Atta -an Army of One
Re: We are revealed by what we hate. (fwd)
Brooks on The Lehrer Report last night did indeed go berzerk in the face of Shield's superior defense of Kerry's reasonable approach. Brooks repeatedly agreed with Shield's analysis showing Bush/Cheney was dogmatic, inflexible and incapable of admitting error, then went on to defend their fundamental righteousness as being what you have to do to win against others having the same characteristics. He said reasonable people like us, meaning the three on the show, are not typical of those Bush/Cheney are appealing to. Their base consituency does not want equivocation they want to be right, and win, no matter what other countries may want. Brooks conceded that this desire for being a winner take all, by force if necessary, concealed a fear of being ignorantly wrong, and that any candidate which exploited this fear by promising might is more powerful than knowledge and doubt will do very well. This argument is made here by James Donald, and before him, Tim May and groupies. To be sure the armaments makers aplaud this rock-headedness of the cowards who always advocate that others die -- preferably in large numbers -- for the safety of the yellow-striped shickenhawks needing their necks wrung. Yeah, yeah, they'll rooster-crow about popping their peashooters at anybody who violates their isolationist piss-markings of triadic carriers, boomers and stategic bombers. But what the cowards want is for somebody to cuddle them like mommy did, to keep a tit ready to slumber-suck away nightmare doubts. Brooks got so worked up, Shield's had to pat him on the back to assure the weenie his futile defense of idiot hatemongerers didn't mean he'd get booted from the elite in-nut-hut.
Re: Winning still matters, etc...
Hoover Institution says it all. Heh. Will to win is the opium of warmongerers, Nietszchean armchair blowhards. Come on, Bob, you did the philosophy turn, poke holes in the blather coming from these righteous pedants hustling for the military/natsec ghouls, extorting the public for expensive useless hardware, exhorting families to breed dead-heading patriotic youngsters. Rhetorical bloodlusters, they be, who never took a bullet in the spine, no spine in fork-tongued snakes. Put these vapid thinktankers in a veteran hospital toting bedpans, sniffing gangrene, hearing a quadriplegic beg god to headchop clubhouse shits who drunkenly cry for war.
Winning still matters, etc...
At 1:36 PM -0700 10/30/04, Bill Stewart wrote:
RAH about it being a
_geodesic_ neo-{Khan, con-men} empire
Okay. Enough pissing in the wind. Time for a Turd Sandwich...
Cheers,
RAH
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/hanson/hanson200410290825.asp
The National Review
October 29, 2004, 8:25 a.m.
The Power of Will
Winning still matters.
Victor Davis Hanson
The terrorists cannot win either a conventional or an asymmetrical war
against the United States, should it bring its full array of assets to the
struggle. Indeed, the Middle East, for all its revenue from inflated oil
prices, has a smaller economy than Spain's. It has never won a war against
a Western power. Arab nations lost in 1967, 1973, 1991, and 2004. Hence the
fatwas must go back to millennia-old glories about Saladin, the siege of
Cyprus, the Moors, and the Caliphate - about the last examples of Islamic
victories over the West. The Middle East's only successes in 1956, or
during the 1980s in Afghanistan, were due to either a United States' veto
of British operations or the importation of American stinger missiles. The
Iranian hostage crisis, Lebanon, and Mogadishu were Western retreats, not
battlefield defeats - grievous, yes, but hardly arbiters of relative
military advantage. The present terrorists are a nasty sort, but they are
still not the SS or millions of Tojo's crack Japanese troops; nor do they
have the organization or the skill of the Vietcong or NVA. These are losing
hundreds of jihadists every week in Iraq and have failed to retake
Afghanistan.
So why do the now-surrounded and desperate insurgents in Fallujah think
they can prevail, especially after the rout of the Taliban in six weeks and
the implementation of a consensual government in less than three years in
Afghanistan? In a word, the jihadists and their fellow-travelers are once
again convinced that this time it will be different because the West, and
the United States in particular, have neither the patience nor the will to
endure their primeval killing of a post-Saddam Iraq.
Beheadings, suicide bombings, mass executions, and improvised explosive
devices are not intended to destroy or even defeat the U.S. military.
Rather, they are aimed at the taxpaying citizens back home who fuel it. In
a globalized world of instant communications, a bin Laden or Zarqawi trusts
that most of us would prefer to take out the garbage than watch a
blood-curdling video clip of yet another Western hostage kneeling before a
half-dozen psychopaths as they begin to saw off his vertebrae. They hope
that we the sickened ask, Why waste our billions and hundreds of lives on
such primordial folk? - wrongly equating 26 million who wish freedom with
a few thousand criminals and terrorists.
The improvised explosive device is a metaphor for our time. The killers
cannot even make the artillery shells or the timers that detonate the
bombs, but like parasites they use Western or Western-designed weaponry to
harvest Westerners. They cannot blow up enough Abrams tanks or even Humvees
to alter the battlefield landscape. But what they can accomplish is to maim
or kill a few hundred Westerners in hopes that our own media will magnify
the trauma and savagery of their attack - and do so often enough to make
300 million of us become exhausted with the entire mess. The message of
Arabic television is that the Iraqis are supposed to blame us, not their
brethren who are killing them, for the carnage. Not our power, but our
will, is the target.
Al Qaeda and their appendages in Iraq do not know the requisite numbers of
dead or wounded Americans necessary to break the resolve of the United
States, but brag that with 1,000 fatalities they are nearing their goal -
and thus a few more will give them a change of administration, schedules
for withdrawal, an abandoned interim Iraqi government ripe to pluck, and a
Lebanon-like paradise to reconstruct the lost sanctuary of Afghanistan. In
other words, they are desperate for a reprieve from their looming
destruction. Al Qaeda - the Base - without a base is not much of a
terrorist organization since its own proud appellation has become an ironic
joke.
Despite the three-week victory over the Baathists, there is some reason for
the Islamists' optimism that they can break our will - given a decade of
nonchalance after the first World Trade Center attack, the Khobar towers,
the USS Cole, and an assortment of other unanswered murders in the 1990s.
The April withdrawal from Fallujah - whether due to worry about Iraqi
civilian or our own casualties - was a grievous blow. The Spanish debacle
was an even worse Western defeat. Killing about 200 Spaniards got a
Socialist and anti-American prime minister elected and an almost-immediate
troop withdrawal from Iraq - even though such appeasement was met not with
thanks but with a subsequent attempt to blow up the judges of the Spanish
High Court.
Meanwhile, here at home, John Kerry talks about timetables for
Re: We are revealed by what we hate. (fwd)
At 12:48 PM -0700 10/30/04, John Young wrote: The Lehrer Report I think that says enough. ;-) Stupidly, RAH -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
