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2004-09-24 Home Front: WoT

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Posted by tipper 2004-09-24 9:26:35 PM|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Probably a good analogy. Glad he left out the Okinawa part.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2004-09-24 9:41:17 PM|| 2004-09-24 9:41:17 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 I would disagree, in that the Colonel doesn't go far enough. For this is not a conflict between warring nations, it is a war between civilization and vandalism. (My choice of words are very specific.) Civilization has reached out to every corner of the planet, and in a Darwinistic model, has supplanted archaic social models and cultural traditions. It has conquered them all, shown them to be inferior to modernity and all that is civilization. The defeat is total, there is no way to ignore the fact. There is no place where one can escape civilization.
The only hope left is to utterly destroy civilization. To break the machine. To tear down and obliterate that which you cannot grasp, in which you have no part. To vandalize. The Luddites, the fundamentalists, the nostaligics, Taliban, and anyone else who embrace the past and shun the present, are the enemy. Their path is clear, they have no choice: to fade away or to be destroyed. Or to destroy.

Posted by Anonymoose 2004-09-24 10:00:46 PM|| 2004-09-24 10:00:46 PM|| Front Page Top

#3 It's been an interesting day for opinions on Iraq. We've had Old Sarge from LewRockwell.com, the peace studies perfessor, and now the colonel in Baghdad. I tend to trust the colonel more than the other two, but maybe that's just me.

Posted by Fred 2004-09-24 10:02:51 PM|| 2004-09-24 10:02:51 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 Moose, good post, but I wouldn't underestimate the possibility that the jihadis are just sick bastards who like to kill people. (The corrective action remains the same.)

Posted by Matt 2004-09-24 10:32:26 PM|| 2004-09-24 10:32:26 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 Article: Like the United States in the Pacific in 1943, we are in a war of national survival that will be long, hard, and fraught with casualties.

I have serious doubts that WWII was a war of national survival. That's like saying the proper response to the Napoleonic Wars would have been to join in to defeat Napoleon, the Hitler of his time. WWII was undertaken to destroy the long-term threat from Japan and prevent either Hitler or Stalin from dominating the European continent. OK - it was wrapped up in simple terms like freedom, which most of the liberated nations never got, for one reason or another, but the point was to destroy both Japanese and German power and their empire-building tendencies.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2004-09-24 10:32:45 PM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2004-09-24 10:32:45 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 The War on Terror is going to end on terms more like that of the Cold War than WWII. Think of Afghanistan as our Korean War, and Iraq as our Vietnam War, except this time, we get to keep the victory our troops have won. Unconditional surrender of all the bait-and-switch sponsors of terror is not going to happen, but they will at least make a show of cracking down on their jihadis to avoid incurring Uncle Sam's wrath.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2004-09-24 10:35:18 PM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2004-09-24 10:35:18 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 Zhang - My only quibble with your comments above is that you seemingly haven't factored in the relentless march of technology. Specifically the destructive technology of modern warfare in the form of WMD. E.g., had Napoleon possessed the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of seconds, the power to level cities in the blink of an eye, and the capability to project that power worldwide in minutes, joining the forces allied against him would have been viewed with more urgency.

Even WWII, as terrible as that was, was a war fought by the old rules: sheer number of men and industrial capacity were strong indications of which side would prevail (and strong indicators of the precise location of dangers that required our attention). "Winning" entailed capturing and holding territory.

This new war is quite different. National sponsors of terrorism must be: a) prevented from acquiring WMD and related delivery capabilities by any means necessary (short term objective), and b) forced to cease and desist in their sponsorhip of terrorism. If we fail on either or both of those objectives this war will, at best, simmer along as a stalemate indefinitely and, in a more ominous scenario, degenerate into a series of open military campaigns by the west answered by covert WMD strikes from the enemy.

There exists the very real potential that this conflict will claim more lives than all the wars of the last century combined. There's still time (IMHO) to head off the worst of this ... but not much.

Posted by AzCat 2004-09-24 11:14:40 PM|| 2004-09-24 11:14:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 I think the genie is out of the bottle. Both the Russians and the Chinese are proliferating like crazy, and there is nothing we can do about it. We need (ballistic and cruise) missile defense - yesterday. Once that gets implemented, we need to work towards full coverage against a Chinese missile attack, and then a Russian missile attack.

After that, the only way anyway can come after us is by shipping a nuke in. But this will be a lot more difficult to do and keep secret than launching an ICBM out of the blue. And shipping more than one in will involve big risks with respect to ensuring secrecy. Meaning that they can smack us upside the head but not actually destroy these United States.

Posted by Zhang Fei 2004-09-24 11:39:43 PM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com] 2004-09-24 11:39:43 PM|| Front Page Top

12:42 Liberalhawk
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04:57 Zenster
03:24 Super Hose
03:13 Super Hose
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01:05 Sock Puppet of Doom
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01:02 Memesis
00:57 Mike Sylwester
00:56 .com
00:49 Super Hose
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00:39 Sock Puppet of Doom
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00:24 Memesis
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23:53 Zhang Fei