To my critics

Because there’s a serious lack of serious news, I’m using today’s space to answer some of my critics who took offense that I criticized Richard Cohen in his piece entitled “Wasted Lives” in the Washington Post. According to emails, my being named Idiot of the Day of some low-traffic Leftist blog (I’m not providing links because they don’t deserve the traffic) and comments here, I’m naive because I suggested that Cohen and the Democrats’ other willing accomplices in the media shut up for a change until the war against terror ends. This stems from the fact that I don’t understand asymetrical warfare, according to an aspiring journalist who hid her identity when she joined This ain’t Hell and posted a link to this particular blog post on her own blog at Salon.

Let me explain to this professional feminist a little about warfare. The objective of warfare is to defeat your enemy and to force your political will upon them. As was proven after the First World War, the only way to completely defeat an enemy is to crush him into dust and take away all of his stuff to teach him that there is nothing to gain from miitary operations against the rest of the world. We learned that particular lesson during our Civil War and introduced the concept to the world in the Second World War.

The Europeans had a tough time learning that lesson because they were pretty much convinced that State leaders were all rational people, which led to the Napoleanic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Great War and the Second World War. After the first three, armies that had been defeated on the battlefield, went home, rebuilt their armies and arms and started where they had left off. In fact, Europeans are so clueless, the Germans attacked France through the Ardennes Forest four times between 1870 and 1944 and each time the French were surprised. So why, pray tell, would we bother to listen to them when it comes to fighting wars? What lessons could we possibly learn from the apparently retarded Europeans who do the same thing over-and-over in exactly the same manner expecting different results each time?

I know the Left thinks it’s compassionate and enlightened to be merciful to our enemies. Look what being merciful to Saddam Hussein brought us. We let him escape with a large portion of his forces in 1991. Within weeks, he turned the remnants of his troops and tanks on his own population while we, the American fighting men and women who’d defeated Hussein’s Army, stood in mute disbelief along the Euphrates River watching the terror he’d wrought on the horizon. But we knew it was coming, we understand the consequences of not finishing a fight. In fact, when our commander announced on our radios that the ceasefire was in effect at about 8 am, February 28th, 1991, I turned to my Lieutenant and prophetically remarked “Our kids will be back to finish this”.

At that moment, we were still receiving fire from an entrenched enemy force. We just turned and drove off while Iraqi bullets richoceted off of our turrets. It took twelve years for US troops to pick up where we left off.

Well, I said all that to say this; war has objectives, it doesn’t happen in some vacuum of history like some arbitrary natural disaster. The war of the jihadists is a war against civilization. They prey on the sympathy of of reasonable people – but the jihadists are not reasonable people. Jihadists think that reasonable people are weak tools that they can manipulate to defeat a stronger, more rational foe. Jihadists live for headlines, they declare victory when reasonable people try to reach reasonable agreements with them. And because they’ve declared their victories, and consider themselves the victors, they feel as if they don’t have an obligation to live up to their end of the bargain. – and so the war continues.

When Mr. Cohen calls our troops’ deaths “wasted lives”, the jihadists revel in it. If the media and the Democrats got behind the war, got behind our troops, if the Left decided that winning this war was more important than winning the next election, there’d be no small victories for the jihadists. In fact, I’d bet that if ya’all’d been behind the war from the start, it’s be pretty much over. Why do I think this? Look at how quickly Qaddafi surrendered his weapons of mass destruction when this administration launched attacks against Hussein in 2003. Look how willing Arafat was to negotiate with Israel after the Gulf War – and then look at how arrogant he became during the Rye negotiations eight years later, when the Clinton gang tried to give him everything under the sun.

Without the purely political wrangling carried out on the front page of the newspaper everyday, there’d be nothing to win, asymetrical warfare be damned. Your asymetrical warfare is just a term used by pseudo-intellectuals to compound the sense of the uselessness of war, the immutable laws of total warfare remain in effect. The jihadists are only encouraged by your defeatist language. It’s you who doesn’t understand asymetrical warfare – all your handwringing and empty platitudes are exactly why the jihadists continue to fight. They have no real ideology to defend, no treasure to protect, no land or resources particularly worth our trouble. If you take away the possibilty of his victory, what cause has the enemy to fight and die?

Category: Media, Politics, Terror War