December 20, 2006

MAKE WAR, NOT LOVE

Finally, some good uses for all those smuggled arms:

Dec. 19, 2006 11:48
2 dead as 2nd PA cease-fire crumbles
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH AND JPOST.COM STAFF

Hamas gunmen killed two Palestinian policemen loyal to the rival Fatah movement early Wednesday, just hours after the sides agreed to a new cease-fire meant to end more than a week of factional fighting...

        President Bush has repeatedly asserted that we are in a war, although he shrinks from naming the enemy: totalitarian Islam. However, his State Dept. and Defense Dept. seem to have a peculiar understanding of what "war" means. Our Generals and our diplomats all seem to have been trained in the art of therapy rather than the art of war. They take enormous pride in their cultural sensitivity, rather than in their killing skills. Not a Patton or a Curtis LeMay among them. No way someone like Patton could rise in today's military bureaucracy. The model of a modern General is Colin Powell. His bureaucratic skills helped him get to the top of the State Dept., an organization of therapeutic wordsmiths who believe we have no real enemies, only people who misunderstand our good intentions.
        Let us perform a thought experiment: imagine that assorted State Dept. bureaucrats wake up tomorrow and realize we're in a war to the death and that our enemies are jihadists of every stripe--sunnis and shia, Fatah and Hamas, ayatollahs and sheiks and their assorted followers. Our networked enemies are bound together in a death cult whose aim is a perfect sharia world. In its pursuit, they have been killing one another for 14 centuries. Now they've turned their sights on us. Our foes are barbarous and are incompetent at most life tasks---hence their envy and hatred of Israel and the Jews. It's humiliating to be smacked in the face by reality; fantasy is far more comforting. While these backward fantasists appear to be skillful at waging guerilla war, that is illusory. It takes no great warrior talent to hide among civilians, detonate bomb belts while disguised as women, launch RPG's into hospitals, and blow up small children on playgrounds. The correct word to describe such behavior is 'cowardice'. We collude in the illusion that our foes are terrifyingly powerful, our therapeutic mindset resembling the stance of a masochistic wife "explaining" that her violent alcoholic husband had a difficult childhood. We play by Marquis of Queensbury rules, pulling our punches while our foes hide in mosques, disguise themselves as civilians and hide their weapons in apartment buildings. Anyone who grew up dealing with playground bullies knows that bullies are cowards. They're weaklings whom we are treating as if they were strong men, thereby supporting their delusions of adequacy.
        Until now we've fought with one hand tied behind our backs as if we were afraid someone we targeted might get angry. How awful, we could blow up a mosque serving as a munitions dump! We carefully avoid targeting one of their designated "Holy Cities." Incidentally, what makes their 'holy' cities more sacred than my city, New York? Instead of issuing pathetic appeals for Hamas and Fatah and Islamic Jihad to stop killing each other, we should be encouraging this internecine war among our foes.
        If we simply used the word 'war' as it has been used before our Post-Modernists gave it a kinder, gentler meaning, we would stop our endless attempts to intervene when our enemies are killing each other. Then we might cease referring to our "war on terror", an absurd p.c. way of disguising the true enemy: totalitarian Islam. Why is Condi Rice begging Hamas to stop shooting at Fatah and vice versa? Why are we endlessly palavering with Shiite ayatollahs and Sunni clerics when both of them regard us as infidels to be killed or forcibly converted? Why is our State Dept. eager to talk with the Iranian leadership, instead of encouraging revolution against it? All of these absurdities are the product of our Post-Modern therapeutic view of the world, which is really a symptom itself of our wavering confidence. Do our advanced military thinkers now read Lacan and Derrida instead of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu?

"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

        Notice, Clausewitz does not suggest that the enemy's grievances need to be sympathetically addressed. Nor does he urge a multi-cultural egalitarian approach to conflict. All of James Baker's and Lee Hamilton's deep thinking produced nothing as useful as those two sentences of Clausewitz. Clearly, we have not made the situation unpleasant enough, nor have we convinced the enemy we are going to stay. Quite the opposite. Our latest plan--to "surge" more troops to Iraq is offered with the implicit promise that it will be followed shortly by a drawdown of troops. Furthermore our troops fight within the constraints of rules of engagement that seem designed to persuade our enemies that we are delicate and sensitive souls, more concerned with avoiding collateral damage than with defeating them.
        If we could rediscover our martial vigor, then we could win this war rather quickly. President Bush now stands alone, as Churchill did, against the counsel of all his cautious advisers. This is probably his final opportunity to change history. And in truth it's not that difficult to discern what he ought to do. If we grasp the nature of our enemy---8th century minds, steeped in fantasy, then we know where to strike them. Notice how enraged they become when their symbols are mocked or destroyed. Their rage is the rage of the frightened and vulnerable. They are more afraid of women than the average member of the BLGT alliance. The great Heavyweight champ Joe Frazier told how to win a fight: "Kill the body and the head will die." That should be our motto for the war against totalitarian Islam. Horsefeathers has observed human nature closeup and personal for many years, and the kind of infantile rage emanating from Islam is not--contrary to the great Mark Steyn--a mark of self assurance and growing confidence. It is the collective tantrum of vulnerable and frightened children unable to keep up with the other kids who've mastered arithmetic and are moving on to more difficult subjects. The further and further Islam has fallen behind the rest of humanity, the more fearful and humiliated its practitioners have come to feel, and the more they collectively retreat into fantasy and symbols. Thus an attack on those symbols, the body of Islam (reminding them they attacked our secular ones at the WTC), would constitute a blow to their primitive collective faith and a corrective to their grandiose utopian fantasies. As a further "reality check" we hope the President puts aside political correctness and emulates Churchill, not with words but with deeds. All he need do in his national speech is explain that we are in a World War, that Iraq is one battlefield on which we have suffered defeats, just as we did many times in World War II, but from this defeat we've learned the nature of our enemies and will use the full range of our power, up to and including nuclear weapons to utterly annihilate them. Furthermore, the United States, as the guardian of Western civilization will not permit a second holocaust. Then let us hear that our air power has removed the symbols the jihadis worship, the mosques they make pilgrimages to in Mecca and Medina, as well as the nuclear program undertaken by the Iranian Hitler, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If the President acts decisively the country will support him. The media typically misunderstands the results of the recent elections. Americans want to win. This is a war that can be won, but only if we possess the will to fight. Hurry up, please Mr. President.