passed the House today.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Islam is not a religion...great article from citizenwarrior.com
The following article is written by Martel Sobieskey and is reprinted here with his permission.
ONE THING is certain, Islam is not a religion by anything Americans believe one to be — not even close. In fact, Islam is the antithesis of what we deem to be religious. Above all, Islam is a totalitarian political machine of bloodthirsty conquest which zealously advocates the downfall of the U.S. government. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world…” because he was 100% non-political. In extreme contrast, Mohammed and the Koran bellicosely command YOUR KINGDOM IS MY KINGDOM, surrender or die! Let’s be to the point. It is sheer madness, exceedingly irresponsible, criminally negligent, and strategically suicidal to continue granting religion status to an absolutely aggressive and implacable ideology that demands the destruction of our government and all other religions.
It is well past time the truthful facts be told about Islam. Our leadership and intelligence community have lied and lied again, referring to Islam as a religion of peace. If Islam is to be categorized as a religion — then it must be called what it truthfully is — A RELIGION OF WAR. Unfortunately our leadership has become so inept, they have chosen to be in denial of this obvious fact, and entertain fanciful notions — that by calling a “bloodthirsty tiger” a “bunny rabbit” it will magically transform into one.
This means, we now have America’s Sugar Plum Fairy National Security Policy: All of the Islamofascists can be won over by simply labeling them “friends.” How dare we even utter the word enemy. That might upset them. We now have a national security mantra: Islam is perfect! Islam is perfect! Islam is perfect!
The purpose of this article is to introduce the proposition that Islam’s religion status is undeserving, that it should never have been granted in the first place, and that its religion status should be immediately rescinded.
Why? Because Islam — whether you call it moderate, militant, main stream, traditional or radical — is a relentless foe inherently programmed to conqueror its host nation. Fail to understand this point and Islam will continue “trashing” civil liberties, shedding bloody pandemonium, wreaking havoc, litigating as warfare, demanding special privileges, and instigating anarchy until its host country suffers irreparable harm if not outright defeat. Such is the virulent modus operandi being used by Islam in England, Spain, India, France, Thailand, Holland, Bali, Lebanon, Denmark, Sweden, Philippines, Russia, America and elsewhere.
Perhaps, this is why Dr. Paul Williams, author of Dunces of Doomsday so truthfully and valiantly states in Chapter 1, Refusing to Identify the Enemy:
“The enemy is Islam. Not a fringe group within the body of believers … Not radical Islam as if a faction can be separated from the “mainstream” Islam. But Islam itself, as expressed by the life and teachings of Muhammad …”
An Impostor Religion
To put it bluntly, Islam’s religion status should be rescinded because it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Trojan horse, an impostor religion that has arrived on our shore with malicious intent, deathly determined to replace our constitution with the Koran, and turn America into an Islamic nation controlled by Sharia law. Robert Spencer in his excellent book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, explains how so-called moderate Islam is having greater success at invading America than its counterpart, militant Islam. Shockingly, one may rightly conclude that America is now being conquered without Islam even having to fire a shot. Have we really become that docile, self-complacent and pathetic? The answer is Yes!
The Sham of Moderate Islam
Does this mean that even so-called moderate Muslims are hostile to America? It certainly does. Moderate Muslims support the conquest of America with a fervor equal to that of the militant Muslims. They cunningly play the role of the “good cop” in their good cop, bad cop charade deceiving we gullible Americans. In fact, the “two hands” of Islam aspire to choke the life out of America. One hand is called militant Muslims, the other hand is called moderate Muslims. These “two hands” work together, in their Koranically mandated asphyxiation pogrom, of strangling America into submission. This point cannot be overemphasized.
In 1974 Algerian President Boumendienne made a prophetic statement to the United Nations General Assembly:
“One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”
How accurately prophetic he was. Today, one can see no assimilation by Muslims in their host nations and they frequently exhibit open hostility, turning entire cities into Muslim enclaves which the police are reluctant to enter. In addition, their birthrate is four times the European average, creating a large cash-deficiency within the social welfare system. It is hardly an exaggeration to say Muslim immigration is like a “swarm of invading locusts,” devouring everything in their path.
Dutch Politician Geert Wilders, having suffered first-hand the “devouring” of his nation by so-called moderate Islam, unflinchingly states in his article, “The Islamization of Europe”…“There is no Moderate Islam.” The United States, like all besieged western democracies, must heed Geert Wilders' warning if they wish to protect themselves. Clearly, the safe harbor of religion status enables the “two hands” of Islam to launch clandestine raids upon their host nation, sapping its vitals from within.
A Road To Hell
The severity of the moderate Islam invasion is thoroughly understood by Islamic experts like Amil Amani. In his article, “A Bridge To 'Moderate' Islam Is In Fact a Road to Hell.” He emphatically warns there is no such thing as moderate Islam and to call it so is an oxymoron, a contradiction. Specifically he states:
“Since moderate Islam is oxymoronic, any moderacy in Islam is in fact incompatible and in conflict with essential Islam, its power structure and its controlling proponents...Islam is not personally or spiritually relevant. It is political, which is why it may never separate itself from government. Adherence is not a matter of voluntary devotion, but of the law, and violators are severely punished, including capital punishment...”
Another enlightened expert who has personally witnessed that moderate Islam is a road to hell is Brigitte Gabriel. In her book, Because They Hate, she gives a clarion call describing how the ruse of moderate Islam turned her home country of Lebanon into a “living nightmare.” She states:
“We were renowned for our hospitality, good heartedness, and generosity, just as America is known for the same qualities today. Sadly, those same qualities were the cause of our destruction...We did not realize that the intolerant Islamic side of our culture was gaining strength on the back of our western openness and pride in diversity.”
Most likely, Brigitte Gabriel would agree that providing religion status to Islam, believing mainstream Islam to be moderate, was a major contributor to the destruction of Lebanon. The key point is that so-called moderate Muslims are as fiercely intolerant as militant Muslims, but are more skillful at concealing their agenda and deceiving their host nation until the time is right for them to strike. Brigitte Gabriel tells how usually-peaceful Muslim neighbors who had befriended them for decades all of a sudden rose up to kill non-Muslims.
Murderous Intolerance
Such murderous intolerance is fully entrenched within Islam. The so-called moderates fully support these murderous attacks in their “hidden hearts,” rarely paying even lip service to the contrary. Their silence has been “deafening.” Why? Because they dare not challenge the inviolate precedents set by their prophet which would be a capital offense. For example, in 623 A.D. Mohammed was infuriated with the female poet Asma Bint Marwan for criticizing him, and sent his henchman to kill her and her five children. They ripped the infant from her breast and hacked it to pieces before her very eyes. They then made her watch the murder of her other four children, before raping and stabbing her repeatedly to death. After the butchery, Mohammed told his henchman, “You have done a service to Allah and his Messenger.”
The killing of persons who criticize Islam has never abated and perhaps is even more alive today than in the 7th century. A few years ago in the U.S. an Egyptian Christian, his wife and two children had their throats cut for challenging Islam, mistakenly believing our free speech laws would protect them. Nearly every day one hears of some gruesome murder, decapitation, or other violent crime committed by contemporary Muslims who are emulating the example of their prophet.
The Heart War
99.9% of all Muslims have a deeply-held secret agenda (wish) that Islam will conquer their host country and turn it into an Islamic nation. Such is their indelible religious conditioning. This obvious fact has been completely neglected, ignored, avoided and shunned by the leadership of western democracies to their great detriment, including America.
Fortunately we have one Islamic expert who is trying to awaken our leadership and his sleeping counterparts in the defense department and intelligence community. He is truly a “shinning star” and a person of insightful wisdom who should be promoted to the highest positions. Major Stephen Collins Coughlin has written a 333-page thesis entitled, “To Our Great Detriment.” (Read it here as a PDF document.) On pages 171-175 he provides a quote that reveals the concealed heart of so-called moderate Muslims. The Caliph (Pope) of the Ottoman empire spelled out what has always been the irrefutable law for all Muslims without exception:
“The heart war — and that is the lowest form of the war. And it is that the Muslim should believe in his heart that the infidels are enemies to him and to his religion, and that he should desire their disappearance and the destruction of their power, And no Muslim can be imagined who is not under obligation to this degree of war. Verily, all the people of the faith are under obligation to this amount without any question whatever, in whatever place they may be...”
Prediction
Permit me to make a grim prediction: Any country that continues to provide religion status to Islam, believing that moderate Muslims will save the day, has been “sucker-punched” and is guaranteed to suffer great havoc and disruptive chaos. The proof is undeniable. Look at the mayhem Islam has inflicted upon all western democracies over the past 20 years. The self-destructive formula is simple: Provide religion status to the sham of moderate Islam and your country will suffer great devastation.
Never before in human history has a nation’s leadership and intelligence community been so easily duped, confounded, played for fools, infiltrated and manipulated by enemy propagandists and apologists. Our leadership has become so pusillanimous in the face of Islamic bullying and brow-beating, they have become their lackeys, aiding and abetting the invasion of the very nation they are suppose to protect. The situation is critical. The demoting of Islam’s religion status will turn the tide and send a clear-cut message to Islam that the dust of Allah is no longer befogging our vision, enabling them to conqueror us.
Martel Sobieskey has 36 years research experience in the field of religious conditioning and its relationship to warfare. He is greatly alarmed that American politicians, military commanders, educators, journalists, intelligence analysts, security and police personnel have failed to comprehend the deeply entrenched jihadist conditioning inherent in all of Islam — moderates included.
ONE THING is certain, Islam is not a religion by anything Americans believe one to be — not even close. In fact, Islam is the antithesis of what we deem to be religious. Above all, Islam is a totalitarian political machine of bloodthirsty conquest which zealously advocates the downfall of the U.S. government. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world…” because he was 100% non-political. In extreme contrast, Mohammed and the Koran bellicosely command YOUR KINGDOM IS MY KINGDOM, surrender or die! Let’s be to the point. It is sheer madness, exceedingly irresponsible, criminally negligent, and strategically suicidal to continue granting religion status to an absolutely aggressive and implacable ideology that demands the destruction of our government and all other religions.
It is well past time the truthful facts be told about Islam. Our leadership and intelligence community have lied and lied again, referring to Islam as a religion of peace. If Islam is to be categorized as a religion — then it must be called what it truthfully is — A RELIGION OF WAR. Unfortunately our leadership has become so inept, they have chosen to be in denial of this obvious fact, and entertain fanciful notions — that by calling a “bloodthirsty tiger” a “bunny rabbit” it will magically transform into one.
This means, we now have America’s Sugar Plum Fairy National Security Policy: All of the Islamofascists can be won over by simply labeling them “friends.” How dare we even utter the word enemy. That might upset them. We now have a national security mantra: Islam is perfect! Islam is perfect! Islam is perfect!
The purpose of this article is to introduce the proposition that Islam’s religion status is undeserving, that it should never have been granted in the first place, and that its religion status should be immediately rescinded.
Why? Because Islam — whether you call it moderate, militant, main stream, traditional or radical — is a relentless foe inherently programmed to conqueror its host nation. Fail to understand this point and Islam will continue “trashing” civil liberties, shedding bloody pandemonium, wreaking havoc, litigating as warfare, demanding special privileges, and instigating anarchy until its host country suffers irreparable harm if not outright defeat. Such is the virulent modus operandi being used by Islam in England, Spain, India, France, Thailand, Holland, Bali, Lebanon, Denmark, Sweden, Philippines, Russia, America and elsewhere.
Perhaps, this is why Dr. Paul Williams, author of Dunces of Doomsday so truthfully and valiantly states in Chapter 1, Refusing to Identify the Enemy:
“The enemy is Islam. Not a fringe group within the body of believers … Not radical Islam as if a faction can be separated from the “mainstream” Islam. But Islam itself, as expressed by the life and teachings of Muhammad …”
An Impostor Religion
To put it bluntly, Islam’s religion status should be rescinded because it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a Trojan horse, an impostor religion that has arrived on our shore with malicious intent, deathly determined to replace our constitution with the Koran, and turn America into an Islamic nation controlled by Sharia law. Robert Spencer in his excellent book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, explains how so-called moderate Islam is having greater success at invading America than its counterpart, militant Islam. Shockingly, one may rightly conclude that America is now being conquered without Islam even having to fire a shot. Have we really become that docile, self-complacent and pathetic? The answer is Yes!
The Sham of Moderate Islam
Does this mean that even so-called moderate Muslims are hostile to America? It certainly does. Moderate Muslims support the conquest of America with a fervor equal to that of the militant Muslims. They cunningly play the role of the “good cop” in their good cop, bad cop charade deceiving we gullible Americans. In fact, the “two hands” of Islam aspire to choke the life out of America. One hand is called militant Muslims, the other hand is called moderate Muslims. These “two hands” work together, in their Koranically mandated asphyxiation pogrom, of strangling America into submission. This point cannot be overemphasized.
In 1974 Algerian President Boumendienne made a prophetic statement to the United Nations General Assembly:
“One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”
How accurately prophetic he was. Today, one can see no assimilation by Muslims in their host nations and they frequently exhibit open hostility, turning entire cities into Muslim enclaves which the police are reluctant to enter. In addition, their birthrate is four times the European average, creating a large cash-deficiency within the social welfare system. It is hardly an exaggeration to say Muslim immigration is like a “swarm of invading locusts,” devouring everything in their path.
Dutch Politician Geert Wilders, having suffered first-hand the “devouring” of his nation by so-called moderate Islam, unflinchingly states in his article, “The Islamization of Europe”…“There is no Moderate Islam.” The United States, like all besieged western democracies, must heed Geert Wilders' warning if they wish to protect themselves. Clearly, the safe harbor of religion status enables the “two hands” of Islam to launch clandestine raids upon their host nation, sapping its vitals from within.
A Road To Hell
The severity of the moderate Islam invasion is thoroughly understood by Islamic experts like Amil Amani. In his article, “A Bridge To 'Moderate' Islam Is In Fact a Road to Hell.” He emphatically warns there is no such thing as moderate Islam and to call it so is an oxymoron, a contradiction. Specifically he states:
“Since moderate Islam is oxymoronic, any moderacy in Islam is in fact incompatible and in conflict with essential Islam, its power structure and its controlling proponents...Islam is not personally or spiritually relevant. It is political, which is why it may never separate itself from government. Adherence is not a matter of voluntary devotion, but of the law, and violators are severely punished, including capital punishment...”
Another enlightened expert who has personally witnessed that moderate Islam is a road to hell is Brigitte Gabriel. In her book, Because They Hate, she gives a clarion call describing how the ruse of moderate Islam turned her home country of Lebanon into a “living nightmare.” She states:
“We were renowned for our hospitality, good heartedness, and generosity, just as America is known for the same qualities today. Sadly, those same qualities were the cause of our destruction...We did not realize that the intolerant Islamic side of our culture was gaining strength on the back of our western openness and pride in diversity.”
Most likely, Brigitte Gabriel would agree that providing religion status to Islam, believing mainstream Islam to be moderate, was a major contributor to the destruction of Lebanon. The key point is that so-called moderate Muslims are as fiercely intolerant as militant Muslims, but are more skillful at concealing their agenda and deceiving their host nation until the time is right for them to strike. Brigitte Gabriel tells how usually-peaceful Muslim neighbors who had befriended them for decades all of a sudden rose up to kill non-Muslims.
Murderous Intolerance
Such murderous intolerance is fully entrenched within Islam. The so-called moderates fully support these murderous attacks in their “hidden hearts,” rarely paying even lip service to the contrary. Their silence has been “deafening.” Why? Because they dare not challenge the inviolate precedents set by their prophet which would be a capital offense. For example, in 623 A.D. Mohammed was infuriated with the female poet Asma Bint Marwan for criticizing him, and sent his henchman to kill her and her five children. They ripped the infant from her breast and hacked it to pieces before her very eyes. They then made her watch the murder of her other four children, before raping and stabbing her repeatedly to death. After the butchery, Mohammed told his henchman, “You have done a service to Allah and his Messenger.”
The killing of persons who criticize Islam has never abated and perhaps is even more alive today than in the 7th century. A few years ago in the U.S. an Egyptian Christian, his wife and two children had their throats cut for challenging Islam, mistakenly believing our free speech laws would protect them. Nearly every day one hears of some gruesome murder, decapitation, or other violent crime committed by contemporary Muslims who are emulating the example of their prophet.
The Heart War
99.9% of all Muslims have a deeply-held secret agenda (wish) that Islam will conquer their host country and turn it into an Islamic nation. Such is their indelible religious conditioning. This obvious fact has been completely neglected, ignored, avoided and shunned by the leadership of western democracies to their great detriment, including America.
Fortunately we have one Islamic expert who is trying to awaken our leadership and his sleeping counterparts in the defense department and intelligence community. He is truly a “shinning star” and a person of insightful wisdom who should be promoted to the highest positions. Major Stephen Collins Coughlin has written a 333-page thesis entitled, “To Our Great Detriment.” (Read it here as a PDF document.) On pages 171-175 he provides a quote that reveals the concealed heart of so-called moderate Muslims. The Caliph (Pope) of the Ottoman empire spelled out what has always been the irrefutable law for all Muslims without exception:
“The heart war — and that is the lowest form of the war. And it is that the Muslim should believe in his heart that the infidels are enemies to him and to his religion, and that he should desire their disappearance and the destruction of their power, And no Muslim can be imagined who is not under obligation to this degree of war. Verily, all the people of the faith are under obligation to this amount without any question whatever, in whatever place they may be...”
Prediction
Permit me to make a grim prediction: Any country that continues to provide religion status to Islam, believing that moderate Muslims will save the day, has been “sucker-punched” and is guaranteed to suffer great havoc and disruptive chaos. The proof is undeniable. Look at the mayhem Islam has inflicted upon all western democracies over the past 20 years. The self-destructive formula is simple: Provide religion status to the sham of moderate Islam and your country will suffer great devastation.
Never before in human history has a nation’s leadership and intelligence community been so easily duped, confounded, played for fools, infiltrated and manipulated by enemy propagandists and apologists. Our leadership has become so pusillanimous in the face of Islamic bullying and brow-beating, they have become their lackeys, aiding and abetting the invasion of the very nation they are suppose to protect. The situation is critical. The demoting of Islam’s religion status will turn the tide and send a clear-cut message to Islam that the dust of Allah is no longer befogging our vision, enabling them to conqueror us.
Martel Sobieskey has 36 years research experience in the field of religious conditioning and its relationship to warfare. He is greatly alarmed that American politicians, military commanders, educators, journalists, intelligence analysts, security and police personnel have failed to comprehend the deeply entrenched jihadist conditioning inherent in all of Islam — moderates included.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Victor Davis Hanson on The Good......
April 1, 2009
The Good — Part III
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
After those depressing six “bad” and “ugly” trends, here are three things that bring at least some optimism in otherwise trying times.
The good...
1) Technology. For all the dangers and destruction inherent in access to instant electronic information and communication (cf. the subprime mortgage bundles and computer programs that accelerated innate human idiocy), there often can be much good in such a radically egalitarian enterprise. Today’s peasant in Guatemala with a cell phone or a stop at an internet café, has more knowledge of market futures at his hands than had aristocratic grandees of the 1940s.
I used to tote books and magazines on trips to do research and write contemporary commentary. Now? I can confirm in 10 seconds on the Internet that once again Sen. Dodd is not telling the truth or reread the Melian Dialogue of Thucydides in Greek, or learn what Sun Maid paid on free tonnage for raisins in 1982 — whether in rural Fresno County or in a dingy hotel in Mexico. In a debate once, an audience member with his laptop in the first row was able to correct the record instantaneously during the question and answer period. In some sense, the many have gained an enormous amount of power, and, for good or evil, the old hierarchies are crumbling (Who cares whether the debater has a MD or law degree if he is stating things that can instantly be proven inaccurate?)
Most of us would be long dead without Westernized/globalized medicine — something we seem to forget in the near hysterical demonization of the U.S. health care system. In 1979 an emergency operation and antibiotics saved me from a severed ureter cut by a staghorn calculus; in 2006 the degree to which Libyans had access to Flagyl, Augmentin and Cipro, and Westernized notions of surgical protocoal, saved my life after an operation for a ruptured appendix. Urocit-K (potassium citrate) alone provided relief from nearly weekly kidney stones.
All of us have similar stories of our own possibly short, unpleasant lives had it not been for brilliantly-trained doctors, courageous nurses, wonder drugs, and high-tech instrumentation. Unfettered reason, free speech, rationalism protected from zealotry and tribalism, and free-market capitalism have given us years of physical comfort and relief that pre-modern man could only dream of. Thousands of Western-trained doctors, researchers, and scientists daily provide us with breakthroughs that are making our lives far less nasty, solitary, poor, brutish and short.
I won’t deny that modern medicine — especially from my experience with lost family members undergoing failed regimens of chemotherapy — can be insensitive, misleading, and often excruciating painful. But by and large, American medicine has improved the lives of billions on the planet.
We forget how life has been transformed just from the 1960s alone. As a student, I used to drive a beat up car with spare points, plugs, an old alternator and starter replacement in the trunk. The clutch went out frequently — so I ended up at the side of rural highways quite often. In 1969 it was common to see California freeways littered with broken down cars; now it is a rare occurrence. I grew up with a father taking apart our dryer, washer, vacuum cleaner, and refrigerators almost monthly; today, they seem to run on autopilot.
In often insidious ways, technology is making daily life ever easier — and providing a much needed counterpoint to a culture and politics that get worse, as popular civility and wisdom vanish. (Wait! Some of you object: ease of life, affluence and leisure brought on by technology explain the end of the old cherished culture. It is not exactly so simple.)
2) Competent people. There is an entire nation of brilliant hardworking and uniquely gifted people within the United States like none other in the world — of all politics and beliefs. Critics of America fault our crime rate, growing illiteracy, and dismal education system (as I pointed out last time). But much of that pathology arises from America’s ambitious plans to educate, house, and take care of 300 million souls at levels found nowhere else in the world, amid all sorts of endemic poverty, the arrival of nearly 1 million illegal aliens per year (12-20 million already here), and millions more who have arrived legally in the last three decades abjectly poor from Asia, Africa, and South America. We notice our failures to ensure a massive equality of result in a generation, never the magnitude of the undertaking.
The fact is that one out of five Americans — an enormously large hidden nation of, say, some 60 million — is better educated, more innovative and optimistic than anyone else abroad. This meritocracy of the hyper-hard-working and talented — of all races, both genders, of varying ages, and no set religion — by and large, commits very little crime, follow the law, and pay their taxes without cheating. They’re either highly educated or magnificently trained by family and vocational schools in the various trades.
I have known brain surgeons who navigate through the mass of cerebral tissue to extract tumors without peripheral damage twice a day. I’ve seen electricians weave a spaghetti ball of wires through massive houses as if done by second-nature. I have been astounded by farmers who can walk through a five- acre orchard of peaches, glance at the hanging crop on 620 trees, and then determine almost to the box how many hundreds of boxes of fruit can be harvested from the grove.
In other words, there are millions of impressive Americans, who get up in the morning at 5AM, go to bed at 10PM, avoid the bars, the drugs, the crime — and carry the rest of the country on their backs. My only worry is that those in Washington misunderstand this rare cohort, and so demonize them as the “wealthy,” as if they bundled subprime mortgages on Wall Street and took $10 million annual bonuses. What President Obama should be doing is allotting a mini-second timeout from all the Chicago demagogic rhetoric about the “rich and powerful,” the noble needy and victimized, instead to praise those who paid their mortgages without a hitch, aren’t late on their rarely used credit cards, pay their bills when they arrive, and thereby allowing by their code others to default without ruining the country.
He needs to thank this invisible nation for paying most of the taxes, for creating the wealth to pay for community organizers and politicians, for not costing the government billions for self-induced health problems, crime, parole, counseling, drug rehab, and all the other pathologies that instead garner our attention. We are lucky to have these brilliant Americans of the old school; in toto they comprise a nation larger than France or Britain, and more or less ensure that the world abroad does not completely look like Libya, Venezuela, North Korea or Iran.
3. Soldiers. We are protected by the most competent, judicious — and lethal — military in the history of civilization. The great tragedy of Iraq is that no one really credits our soldiers for doing the near impossible: they went into the heart of the ancient caliphate, took out a genocidal monster, stayed on to foster consensual government, endured often poisonous attacks from critics at home (Cf. Harry Reid’s the war is “lost”, the slurs from Durbin, Kennedy, Kerry, and Murtha that our boys were terrorists or analogous to Baathists, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.), and triumphed at a cost less than during a major campaign in World War II (e.g., far less than say Iwo Jima, the Bulge, Okinawa, etc).
Today Obama was boasting that he could redirect soldiers to Afghanistan now that Iraq was quiet — as if in his mere 70 days he had anything to do with the bravery and skill that brought Iraq to its improving state, as if we’ve forgotten that he wanted all troops gone by March 2008, declared the surge a failure, and voted to cut off funding for the war. Iraq was won despite the politicians, contrary to the conventional wisdom, and largely due to the ingenuity of our soldiers.
What is the key to the success of our military, other than the traditional civic militarism as outlined in the Constitution and honed over two centuries of fighting? I can think of five reasons why the 21st-century American military is so successful.
1) There is an officer corps whose members are, to be frank, relics of an American past. They are ossified in amber as it were, and really do believe in passé things like honor, duty, country, God, sacrifice, and the continuation of the American experiment. Meet a Marine colonel, an Army major, an Air Force one-star, or a Navy captain and it is often as if you are talking to a younger version of your grandfather, as if we packed thousands of our best in ice around 1945, and then thawed them out in the 21st century. These odd men and women of the old breed will do almost anything as outlined in the Constitution to ensure that their country — you and I — is safe and continues on in perpetuity.
2) Our enlisted men have a rambunctious, upbeat attitude, if you will. This generation of youth seems unafraid, reckless even, and — despite the demonization in popular culture of the military, the male, physicality, etc. — seems to pride in being on the cutting edge of danger. They are superb fighters. Few would wish to test the U.S. Marines; the Marines or Rangers I had met in two visits to Iraq seemed to me far scarier than a masked al-Qaeda terrorist rambling on videos waving his scimitar. Indeed, they were scarier. Talking to a 20-year old Marine in Ramadi with bulging biceps, loaded down with 70 pounds of gear and weaponry, smiling as he lets on that he’s been up for 30 straight hours is a surreal experience.
3) The military has married intellectual life with command. Some of the brightest PhDs I have encountered are Army officers at the LTC and colonel level. The service’s recent efforts to send its best and brightest to graduate history and political science programs are paying real dividends. During the Anbar awakening, I watched a number of presentations by Army colonels on the Iraqi tribal system; they were often more sophisticated and astute talks than what I had usually heard as an academic at scholarly symposia. In short, we have some brilliantly educated and inquisitive — and outspoken — officers who do not see “book” learning at odds at all with Pattonesque audacity. (Now let us hope we can promote this new generation of colonels to generals.)
4) Technology. Something is changing with military technology. New applications and tools seem to be evolving at warp speed. The easily caricatured, clumsy massive industrial complex seems to be outmatched by near instantly created decentralized efforts involving innovative new drones, body armor, and munitions. The soldier adapts to battlefield electronics as he does video games and the internet. For all the slander directed at Donald Rumsfeld, few realize very early on he tried to articulate how new high-tech weaponry had added enormous lethality to military units, without a commensurate increase in manpower. When 90% rather than 10% of bombs and artillery shells hit the intended target it really does mean that in some situations (tragically not always in boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency), technology can substitute for mere numbers. Technology has not redefined war — itself a human enterprise that stays constant as long as human nature remains the same — but it has surely accelerated its processes, and so far Americans have mastered it like none other.
5) The sinews of war. Someone at Wal-Mart must have taken over the logistics of the U.S. military. Our troops are drowning in “stuff”. Mountain-high pallets of bottled water in the desert. Cat scanners in a tent city. On-line “cafes” amid the IEDs. 3,000-calorie dinners in the middle of nowhere. Bar-codes on everything from ammo boxes to boxes of plastic forks. We joke about this surfeit of things, and how it makes our military slow and plodding. In truth, they can go almost anywhere in the world, and in hours clone almost any landscape in America, from the sewage and power systems to the communications and food. There has never been any logistics remotely comparable to that of the present-day American military.
The real story of the last eight years is not really the political blunders in Iraq, but the ability of the military to adapt, change, and find victory when all said it was lost. In the dark days ahead, I suspect President Obama, once his soft-power initiatives to find peace with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, radical Islam, and Syria, begin to falter (I hope they do not, but suspect they will), will thank god he is commander-in-chief of the military we have. In his accustomed Novus ordo seclorum fashion, he talks always of the “mess” he inherited, never of the rare military he also inherited.
In short, many things are not all that bad.
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
The Good — Part III
by Victor Davis Hanson
Pajamas Media
After those depressing six “bad” and “ugly” trends, here are three things that bring at least some optimism in otherwise trying times.
The good...
1) Technology. For all the dangers and destruction inherent in access to instant electronic information and communication (cf. the subprime mortgage bundles and computer programs that accelerated innate human idiocy), there often can be much good in such a radically egalitarian enterprise. Today’s peasant in Guatemala with a cell phone or a stop at an internet café, has more knowledge of market futures at his hands than had aristocratic grandees of the 1940s.
I used to tote books and magazines on trips to do research and write contemporary commentary. Now? I can confirm in 10 seconds on the Internet that once again Sen. Dodd is not telling the truth or reread the Melian Dialogue of Thucydides in Greek, or learn what Sun Maid paid on free tonnage for raisins in 1982 — whether in rural Fresno County or in a dingy hotel in Mexico. In a debate once, an audience member with his laptop in the first row was able to correct the record instantaneously during the question and answer period. In some sense, the many have gained an enormous amount of power, and, for good or evil, the old hierarchies are crumbling (Who cares whether the debater has a MD or law degree if he is stating things that can instantly be proven inaccurate?)
Most of us would be long dead without Westernized/globalized medicine — something we seem to forget in the near hysterical demonization of the U.S. health care system. In 1979 an emergency operation and antibiotics saved me from a severed ureter cut by a staghorn calculus; in 2006 the degree to which Libyans had access to Flagyl, Augmentin and Cipro, and Westernized notions of surgical protocoal, saved my life after an operation for a ruptured appendix. Urocit-K (potassium citrate) alone provided relief from nearly weekly kidney stones.
All of us have similar stories of our own possibly short, unpleasant lives had it not been for brilliantly-trained doctors, courageous nurses, wonder drugs, and high-tech instrumentation. Unfettered reason, free speech, rationalism protected from zealotry and tribalism, and free-market capitalism have given us years of physical comfort and relief that pre-modern man could only dream of. Thousands of Western-trained doctors, researchers, and scientists daily provide us with breakthroughs that are making our lives far less nasty, solitary, poor, brutish and short.
I won’t deny that modern medicine — especially from my experience with lost family members undergoing failed regimens of chemotherapy — can be insensitive, misleading, and often excruciating painful. But by and large, American medicine has improved the lives of billions on the planet.
We forget how life has been transformed just from the 1960s alone. As a student, I used to drive a beat up car with spare points, plugs, an old alternator and starter replacement in the trunk. The clutch went out frequently — so I ended up at the side of rural highways quite often. In 1969 it was common to see California freeways littered with broken down cars; now it is a rare occurrence. I grew up with a father taking apart our dryer, washer, vacuum cleaner, and refrigerators almost monthly; today, they seem to run on autopilot.
In often insidious ways, technology is making daily life ever easier — and providing a much needed counterpoint to a culture and politics that get worse, as popular civility and wisdom vanish. (Wait! Some of you object: ease of life, affluence and leisure brought on by technology explain the end of the old cherished culture. It is not exactly so simple.)
2) Competent people. There is an entire nation of brilliant hardworking and uniquely gifted people within the United States like none other in the world — of all politics and beliefs. Critics of America fault our crime rate, growing illiteracy, and dismal education system (as I pointed out last time). But much of that pathology arises from America’s ambitious plans to educate, house, and take care of 300 million souls at levels found nowhere else in the world, amid all sorts of endemic poverty, the arrival of nearly 1 million illegal aliens per year (12-20 million already here), and millions more who have arrived legally in the last three decades abjectly poor from Asia, Africa, and South America. We notice our failures to ensure a massive equality of result in a generation, never the magnitude of the undertaking.
The fact is that one out of five Americans — an enormously large hidden nation of, say, some 60 million — is better educated, more innovative and optimistic than anyone else abroad. This meritocracy of the hyper-hard-working and talented — of all races, both genders, of varying ages, and no set religion — by and large, commits very little crime, follow the law, and pay their taxes without cheating. They’re either highly educated or magnificently trained by family and vocational schools in the various trades.
I have known brain surgeons who navigate through the mass of cerebral tissue to extract tumors without peripheral damage twice a day. I’ve seen electricians weave a spaghetti ball of wires through massive houses as if done by second-nature. I have been astounded by farmers who can walk through a five- acre orchard of peaches, glance at the hanging crop on 620 trees, and then determine almost to the box how many hundreds of boxes of fruit can be harvested from the grove.
In other words, there are millions of impressive Americans, who get up in the morning at 5AM, go to bed at 10PM, avoid the bars, the drugs, the crime — and carry the rest of the country on their backs. My only worry is that those in Washington misunderstand this rare cohort, and so demonize them as the “wealthy,” as if they bundled subprime mortgages on Wall Street and took $10 million annual bonuses. What President Obama should be doing is allotting a mini-second timeout from all the Chicago demagogic rhetoric about the “rich and powerful,” the noble needy and victimized, instead to praise those who paid their mortgages without a hitch, aren’t late on their rarely used credit cards, pay their bills when they arrive, and thereby allowing by their code others to default without ruining the country.
He needs to thank this invisible nation for paying most of the taxes, for creating the wealth to pay for community organizers and politicians, for not costing the government billions for self-induced health problems, crime, parole, counseling, drug rehab, and all the other pathologies that instead garner our attention. We are lucky to have these brilliant Americans of the old school; in toto they comprise a nation larger than France or Britain, and more or less ensure that the world abroad does not completely look like Libya, Venezuela, North Korea or Iran.
3. Soldiers. We are protected by the most competent, judicious — and lethal — military in the history of civilization. The great tragedy of Iraq is that no one really credits our soldiers for doing the near impossible: they went into the heart of the ancient caliphate, took out a genocidal monster, stayed on to foster consensual government, endured often poisonous attacks from critics at home (Cf. Harry Reid’s the war is “lost”, the slurs from Durbin, Kennedy, Kerry, and Murtha that our boys were terrorists or analogous to Baathists, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.), and triumphed at a cost less than during a major campaign in World War II (e.g., far less than say Iwo Jima, the Bulge, Okinawa, etc).
Today Obama was boasting that he could redirect soldiers to Afghanistan now that Iraq was quiet — as if in his mere 70 days he had anything to do with the bravery and skill that brought Iraq to its improving state, as if we’ve forgotten that he wanted all troops gone by March 2008, declared the surge a failure, and voted to cut off funding for the war. Iraq was won despite the politicians, contrary to the conventional wisdom, and largely due to the ingenuity of our soldiers.
What is the key to the success of our military, other than the traditional civic militarism as outlined in the Constitution and honed over two centuries of fighting? I can think of five reasons why the 21st-century American military is so successful.
1) There is an officer corps whose members are, to be frank, relics of an American past. They are ossified in amber as it were, and really do believe in passé things like honor, duty, country, God, sacrifice, and the continuation of the American experiment. Meet a Marine colonel, an Army major, an Air Force one-star, or a Navy captain and it is often as if you are talking to a younger version of your grandfather, as if we packed thousands of our best in ice around 1945, and then thawed them out in the 21st century. These odd men and women of the old breed will do almost anything as outlined in the Constitution to ensure that their country — you and I — is safe and continues on in perpetuity.
2) Our enlisted men have a rambunctious, upbeat attitude, if you will. This generation of youth seems unafraid, reckless even, and — despite the demonization in popular culture of the military, the male, physicality, etc. — seems to pride in being on the cutting edge of danger. They are superb fighters. Few would wish to test the U.S. Marines; the Marines or Rangers I had met in two visits to Iraq seemed to me far scarier than a masked al-Qaeda terrorist rambling on videos waving his scimitar. Indeed, they were scarier. Talking to a 20-year old Marine in Ramadi with bulging biceps, loaded down with 70 pounds of gear and weaponry, smiling as he lets on that he’s been up for 30 straight hours is a surreal experience.
3) The military has married intellectual life with command. Some of the brightest PhDs I have encountered are Army officers at the LTC and colonel level. The service’s recent efforts to send its best and brightest to graduate history and political science programs are paying real dividends. During the Anbar awakening, I watched a number of presentations by Army colonels on the Iraqi tribal system; they were often more sophisticated and astute talks than what I had usually heard as an academic at scholarly symposia. In short, we have some brilliantly educated and inquisitive — and outspoken — officers who do not see “book” learning at odds at all with Pattonesque audacity. (Now let us hope we can promote this new generation of colonels to generals.)
4) Technology. Something is changing with military technology. New applications and tools seem to be evolving at warp speed. The easily caricatured, clumsy massive industrial complex seems to be outmatched by near instantly created decentralized efforts involving innovative new drones, body armor, and munitions. The soldier adapts to battlefield electronics as he does video games and the internet. For all the slander directed at Donald Rumsfeld, few realize very early on he tried to articulate how new high-tech weaponry had added enormous lethality to military units, without a commensurate increase in manpower. When 90% rather than 10% of bombs and artillery shells hit the intended target it really does mean that in some situations (tragically not always in boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency), technology can substitute for mere numbers. Technology has not redefined war — itself a human enterprise that stays constant as long as human nature remains the same — but it has surely accelerated its processes, and so far Americans have mastered it like none other.
5) The sinews of war. Someone at Wal-Mart must have taken over the logistics of the U.S. military. Our troops are drowning in “stuff”. Mountain-high pallets of bottled water in the desert. Cat scanners in a tent city. On-line “cafes” amid the IEDs. 3,000-calorie dinners in the middle of nowhere. Bar-codes on everything from ammo boxes to boxes of plastic forks. We joke about this surfeit of things, and how it makes our military slow and plodding. In truth, they can go almost anywhere in the world, and in hours clone almost any landscape in America, from the sewage and power systems to the communications and food. There has never been any logistics remotely comparable to that of the present-day American military.
The real story of the last eight years is not really the political blunders in Iraq, but the ability of the military to adapt, change, and find victory when all said it was lost. In the dark days ahead, I suspect President Obama, once his soft-power initiatives to find peace with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, radical Islam, and Syria, begin to falter (I hope they do not, but suspect they will), will thank god he is commander-in-chief of the military we have. In his accustomed Novus ordo seclorum fashion, he talks always of the “mess” he inherited, never of the rare military he also inherited.
In short, many things are not all that bad.
©2009 Victor Davis Hanson
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