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| We're Culturally Sensitive And Tote Really Big Guns-Steyn |
| 2011-05-07 |
| On Sept. 12, 2001, Gen. Musharraf was in a meeting "when my military secretary told me that the U.S. secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later." The milquetoasts of the State Department were in no mood for Musharraf's I'm-washing-my-hair routine, and, when he'd been dragged to the phone, he was informed that the Bush administration would bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't get everything they wanted. Musharraf concluded that America meant it. A decade later, we're back to Sept. 10. Were Washington to call Islamabad as it did a decade ago, the Pakistanis would thank them politely and say they'd think it over and get back in six weeks, give or take. They think they've got the superpower all figured out -- that America is happy to spend bazillions of dollars on technologically advanced systems that can reach across the planet but it doesn't really have the stomach for changing the facts of the ground. That means that once in a while your big-time jihadist will be having a quiet night in watching "Dancing With the Stars," when all of a sudden Robocop descends from the heavens, kicks the door open, and it's time to get ready for your virgins. But other than that, in the bigger picture, day by day, all but unnoticed, things will go their way. In the fall of 2001, discussing the collapse of the Taliban, Thomas Friedman, the in-house thinker at the New York Times, offered this bit of cartoon analysis: "For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones -- and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it." But they didn't, did they? The Flintstones retreated to their caves, bided their time, and a decade later the Jetsons are desperate to negotiate their way out. When it comes to instructive analogies, I prefer Khartoum to cartoons. If it took America a decade to avenge the dead of 9/11, it took Britain 13 years to avenge their defeat in Sudan in 1884. But, after Kitchener slaughtered the jihadists of the day at the Battle of Omdurman in 1897, he made a point of digging up their leader the Mahdi, chopping off his head and keeping it as a souvenir. The Sudanese got the message. The British had nary a peep out of the joint until they gave it independence six decades later -- and, indeed, the locals fought for King and (distant imperial) country as brave British troops during World War II. Even more amazingly, generations of English schoolchildren were taught about the Mahdi's skull winding up as Lord Kitchener's novelty paperweight as an inspiring tale of national greatness |
| Posted by:Beavis |
| #4 Or, as a Polish writer entitled his novel: This Way To The Gas Chambers, Ladies and Gentlemen. |
| Posted by: borgboy 2011-05-07 15:30 |
| #3 Whether its a picture of the charred remains being picked at upon Desert One, the dragging of the body of a fallen soldier in the Mog upon Black Hawk Down, or the bodies of the contractors hanging from the Fallujah bridge, the muzzies have set the standards for 'cultural sensitivity'. Know well this, the hand wringers and apologist who were absent their 'outrage' upon those incidents are now clearly showing they are with the enemy. It's not about 'civilized' behavior as much as surrendering to the enemy. They are saying 'shut up and get into the cattle car'. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2011-05-07 08:56 |
| #2 It took 13 years before the British could avenge Gordon's death and rid the Sudan of "Mahdism." General Henry Horatio Kitchener, who had been on the failed effort to rescue Gordon, led a new army up river, culminating in the uneven battle of Omdurman, near Khartoum, in September of 1898, in which the superior fire power of the British prevailed. Kitchener had the Mahdi's tomb destroyed and his bones cast into the Nile, so as to leave nothing for the Mahdi's followers to rally around, he would later explain. But the Mahdi's skull -- "large and shapely" as it would be described -- was presented to Kitchener, perhaps as a souvenir drinking cup. Kitchener suggested sending it to the College of Surgeons in London, where he thought Napoleon's intestines resided. When the word got out, there was a howl of fury from the British press, unfriendly questions in parliament, and a condemnation from Queen Victoria herself, who said that removing the Mahdi's skull was "too much like the Middle Ages, " according to Kitchener biographer, Philip Warner. Winston Churchill, who accompanied Kitchener's campaign, later wrote that he was "scandalized" by the "barbarous manner" in which Kitchener "had carried off the Mahdi's head in a kerosene can as a trophy." Kitchener wrote an apologetic letter to the queen and the head was secretly buried in a Muslim cemetery. On the day after Kitchener's victory, however, he wisely enlisted Mahdi's defeated army into his own Egyptian army, and no insurgency bedeviled the British in the Sudan thereafter. |
| Posted by: john frum 2011-05-07 07:36 |
| #1 Pithy |
| Posted by: newc 2011-05-07 02:49 |