June 24, 2005

GITMO ON MY MIND

"Cesare Borgia was considered cruel; notwithstanding, his cruelty reconciled the Romagna, unified it, and restored it to peace and loyalty. And if this be rightly considered, he will be seen to have been much more merciful than the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed. Therefore a prince, so long as he keeps his subjects united and loyal, ought not to mind the reproach of cruelty; because with a few examples he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies; for these are wont to injure the whole people, whilst those executions which originate with a prince offend the individual only."
--Nicolo Machiavelli

"If the enemy is to be coerced, you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make. The hardships of the situation must not be merely transient - at least not in appearance. Otherwise, the enemy would not give in, but would wait for things to improve."
-Karl Von Clausewitz

        Horsefeathers views Iraq as one battlefront in a global war--World War IV. The ‘War on Terror’ is a term designed to obscure the ideological nature of the struggle. This war, in its essence, is no different from our 20th century wars against totalitarianism. Having vanquished Nazism and Communism, we are now challenged by a totalitarian, anti-semitic ideology disguised as a religion, Islamo-Fascism. The principles required for victory are no different than in any war: impose our will on our enemies by force of arms. Those enemies, sensing our superior battlefield strength, realize that our vulnerability lies not in our military capability, but elsewhere, in our highly civilized reluctance to use overwhelming force against our foes.
        Over the years, especially since the Vietnam war, adversaries have learned to go for our soft home front underbelly-the MSM- and opinion shaping academic wordsmith elites. These hothouse flowers of Western civilization believe all conflicts between cultures can be peacefully resolved using words in a psychotherapeutically empathic manner. They believe, like Danny Pearl, that we can all just talk, and thereby resolve our differences. Their model is the happily remembered college seminar for students who scored high on their verbal SAT’s. They graduate to positions in the MSM and, if they attended the right Ivy League schools, may get to sit on the editorial board of the New York Times. Once there, any powers of critical thinking erode in the politically correct liberal smog and David Brooks begins to sound like Tom Friedman, while Maureen Dowd keeps alive the hope that childhood never has to end while her ex-lover, John Tierney bloviates about compassionate conservatism.
        Spurred on by therapeutic Liberalism, we constrain ourselves on the battlefield, seeking to win hearts and minds, to understand the grievances of our enemies rather than to annihilate them. The usefulness of the uproar over Guantanamo is that it exposed the Liberal mind and its utopian view of human nature, vividly, for all to see. We hope the Dick Durbins and Howard Deans keep talking. Through all the crocodile tears he shed, the number two Democrat in the Senate apologized not for the content of his remarks comparing Gitmo to the Gulag, etc., but for hurting the feelings of those delicate souls who took his words the wrong way. And why, after all, should he apologize? Let’s grant the man the respect of acknowledging he meant what he said. His views were laid out carefully in a prepared statement designed to articulate his brand of thinking about our role in the world. The Dick Durbin mindset believes our aims in Gitmo should not include inflicting harsh punishment on murderous Islamist fanatics, and we certainly should not use brutal means to extract information. Instead, our goal should be to show the Muslim world how decent, caring and civilized we are. Regrettably, the Durbin fantasy that we are somehow better, having transcended human nature and risen above such petty human wishes as the desire for revenge, is a dangerous delusion. Durbin will only persuade his fellow true believers and perhaps Kofi Annan, whose job depends on belief in the shared fantasy called the ‘United Nations’. Fortunately, we are quite as capable as the Jihadis of inflicting extreme violence on those who would harm us.
        The Horsefeathers criticism of Gitmo is that it resembles Club Med more than Saddam’s torture chambers. Life at Gitmo should be nasty, brutish and short for the kinds of people held there. These are the folks responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents at the WTC, for the cowardly slaughter of babies with car bombs, for pretending to be civilians and then killing their trusting victims. It should, in our view, not only be a lot harsher, but its harshness should be unapologetically made known to the Arab world. It would make many Arabs aware we haven’t forgotten, nor are we interested in gaining the good will of those who cheered 9-11. It troubles us that no prisoners have died at Gitmo and that, instead, they are gaining weight, getting excellent medical care, and are given time to pray for guidance in killing more Americans. We’d recommend telling the Islamic head choppers we can equal their savagery—and then go further. Desecration of the Koran, the Mein Kampf of Jihadis? An excellent idea, insofar as it humiliates and causes our enemies to submit to our superior strength. Does this make us, as the Dick Durbin utopians would have it, no better than our enemies? No. Quite the opposite. It simply means we value our lives, our country and our culture and refuse to submit to the Jihadi war on the infidels. Certainly when fighting a treacherous enemy, we had better be able to utilize our savage wisdom, acquired over the centuries. As the saying goes, ‘freedom isn’t free’ and if we wish to keep it we’ll have to utterly destroy its enemies. If we succeed in detaching ourselves from our primitive human nature, we will surely be destroyed by those who are comfortable with their own murderous wishes as they go about killing the infidels.
        Fortunately, their have been among us people like Harry Truman and Winston Churchill. These men were clear about human nature, and able to live with their own aggression, channeling it into the task of defeating the enemies of freedom. The warrior mindset is not the same as the therapeutic one. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin and Dresden; even we infidels, when backed to the wall, can unleash deadly destruction, rather than empathic interpretation. Human nature, it turns out, is the same on the upper west side of Manhattan as in Fallujah, and calling in the therapists to help ‘work through’ the trauma is not going to help. When faced with those who would kill us, the answer is to kill them first, and in large numbers. Body counts can be meaningful, and each dead Jihadi is one more powerful warning to those considering taking up arms against us. Had the West gone to war and destroyed Hitler in 1936 we know millions of lives would have been saved. Instead, thanks to the ditherings of pacifists and appeasers, eager to demonstrate their moral bona fides, far greater carnage ensued. If politically correct, therapeutic Liberalism and its sexually ambiguous allies among the wordsmith intellectuals prevails, then Western civilization will truly be ripe for collapse. Our criticism of the President is not of his goals. We agree with him: "These terrorists...we have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
        We greatly appreciate the President’s leadership in the months and years post 9-11 He was re-elected by a public that supported his martial vigor and clarity of purpose. He possessed Churchillian courage and resolve. Yet even Churchill wavered at Yalta. We wonder at the kind of strength it takes for any man to withstand the endless assaults President Bush has endured over the years--from our side, no less! Still, we hope he will not blink. We want him to remember his own words, to hang tough, and get much tougher with Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. The public wants the bold leader of post 9-11 days. Why has he been so reluctant to grant Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s request to go after Syria? We are concerned that the endless assaults on him by the MSM and academic elites have weakened his will to utterly defeat our enemies. We note his reluctance to apply overwhelming force in battle, as in the first siege of Fallujah, and the pride he and his military leaders take in minimizing civilian casualties. We have nothing in principle against minimizing casualties, except insofar as doing so is designed to get the Arab world to like us better and thus hamper our efforts to root out and kill enemies. We prefer warrior pride of the sort shown by George Patton and Curtis Lemay in World War II, over the subtle concerns for Islamic sensibilities expressed by our Kennedy School trained Generals. Aerial bombardment of Syria would let the Jihadis know: they can run but they can’t hide. As currently fought, the enemy swims in the sympathetic sea of Arab hatred of America, hiding amongst civilians who cheered 9-11, confident that we lack the stomach to come after him. Mecca and Medina, as well as Damascus and Teheran should be treated as what they are, sanctuaries for the enemy. After a 48 hour warning to all Jihadis to lay down their arms and surrender, those terror havens should be subjected to the same level of devastation we unleashed in World War II over Berlin and Tokyo. Seeking to win the favor of the multi-cultural P.C. police by pulling our punches is futile, and will lead to far worse devastation down the line. Remember, for all the recent aggravation caused us by Germany, we have had 60 years of peaceful post war relations with our former enemies. No kamikaze pilots have launched themselves against us in those 60 years, nor have any Germans undertaken to kill off the non-Aryans among us.
        Hurry up please, Mister President, it’s time. Do not “to avoid a reputation for cruelty” permit Pistoia to be destroyed. Let’s finish the job.