The Christian nutball from Florida and his fervid band of Koran-torching zealots did not cause the rioting, death and destruction in Afghanistan – Murder-loving mullahs and their wild-eyed Islamist nutball followers did.
The fiery hordes who beheaded innocent UN workers in Mazar-e-Sharif knew nothing of last month’s Koran burning until Afghan Mafia Don Hamid Karzai trumpeted the news for political gain.
Senator Lindsay Graham (Republicrat – Dingdongistan)
Senator Graham echoes the Left’s shrieking that Terry Jones has blood on his hands. He proposes to make federal law Sharia-compliant by punishing American citizens who burn the Koran, and he does so with a classic phrase that has launched a thousand tyrannies…
“Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war.”Fresh from the koran burning, Terry Jones now says his church will put Mohammad on trial. What’s Graham’s response to that? A ban on mock court proceedings?
Ignorant petty statists like Graham would give murderous religious bigots who live in third world toilets veto power over the God-given rights of Americans. His comments reveal a despicable mindset that has no place in the United States of America. The better answer is for the Unites States to stop messing with crazy people. Shit-canning our endless war doctrine would put a stop to such “we’re at war” Wilsonian jackbooting.
I can excuse General Petraeus’ comments; he has a war to fight and a political message to convey to the Afghanis. I understand the “putting the troops in danger” argument, since I was one of those troops in Afghanistan years ago, but I can’t help but think the real danger to our troops is to put them in a hostile environment with both hands tied behind their backs.
Thanks to the international left, CNN and pacifists here at home, we cannot fight a war the way it needs to be fought. Our political establishment is too weak-kneed to stand up for our values, and too stupid to beat our ideological foes in the propaganda game, so we should just stay home. We cannot crush the bad guys. Every bomb hits an innocent civilian or the ubiquitous wedding party, so every engagement is treated with kid gloves. This spares legions of jihadis to fight another day, more emboldened than when they woke up that morning because they "beat" the United States by not being killed.
Breaking America's Addiction to Stability
An overemphasis on stability — and, perhaps, an erroneous definition of what “stability” even is — has begun harming, rather than helping, American interests in several current crisis spots. (Thanassis Cambanis – Learning to Love Change )Precisely. We should have turned Afghanistan over to the Northern Alliance after toppling the Taliban and left it at that. Sure, it would have led to further turmoil, but who cares? The place was never a Garden of Eden, and American dollars and blood will never make it so.
Fighting halfway only prolongs the wars and creates more death and heartache. This is what happens when private contractors drive foreign policy.
ReplyDeleteI haven't heard anyone calling for any limitation on free expression. All I hear is people calling pastor Jones what he is: an irresponsible, self-aggrandizing, scumbag demagogue. We have the right to call him that too.
ReplyDeleteThat dumb remark about, "Thanks to the international left, CNN and pacifists here at home, we cannot fight a war the way it needs to be fought," is really no better than Jones' idiotic displays. This is the same stupid tripe we heard about Vietnam. Patently false, sleazy at best, it is the whining apologetic rant of the Hawk about a war we can't win.
So, how do we "fight a war the way it needs to be fought"????
Really???? I'd love to know.
Kill everyone????
And every war is different. Are you suggesting that every war is hampered by the mythical Hydra of "the international left, CNN and pacifists here at home"???
Puh-lease. You must be smarter than that!
JMJ
No Jersey, YOU are smarter than these ignorant comments.
ReplyDeleteLindsay Graham suggested we outlaw koran burning since "we are in a war." That is a limit on free expression. If he bought the koran, he has a right to burn it. Period.
Are you defending Graham?
You want to know how to fight a war? Read about General William Tecumseh Sherman.
What are our objectives in Afghanistan? Do you know? If so, explain. If not, go home.
Graham is always a military sycophant first and everything else after. There's no way it's going to happen.
ReplyDeleteI know all about Sherman and have studied him extensively. I understand why he did what he did. But again, every war is different. Going around burning little villages all over Afghanistan would be about the stupidest thing we could imagine doing! There is no set of developed cities supplying the insurgency. No breakable supply-chain from the enemy. It is a guerilla war in a primitive, mountainous hellhole.
Our objective in Afghanistan was to prop up a stable central government that was as liberal as possible. We have failed at this. It's time to come home.
JMJ
My point on Sherman is not that we should be indiscriminately burning villagers out of their homes.
ReplyDeleteWe should be finding and killing bad guys wherever they hide, including crossing into Pakistan. We should be killing them, regardless of whether they are hiding behind women and children or not. We cannot do that, so it is a fool's errand.
"Our objective in Afghanistan was to prop up a stable central government that was as liberal as possible. We have failed at this. It's time to come home."
Well stated. We agree.
In my opinion, the Rev. Terry is a fool and I will defend to the death his right to be a fool. Saria law does not trump our constitionally protected and God given rights. Period!
ReplyDeleteTo Mr. McJones:
Some of my friends did not make it back fro Vietnam. Some did. Two of those that did ( and they did not serve in the same unit) told me almost identical stroies. Each told me that they owed their lives to South Korean soldiers who were not restrained by the same rules of engagement as they were. Need I say more?
Oh God, here we go with the "bad guys" thing. Silver, there are millions of people running around over there - how the hell would propose we sort out every "bad guy" from the rest of the population? You're right - we cannot. But it has absolutely nothing to do with "the international left, CNN and pacifists here at home."
ReplyDeleteI'm glad we agree on the situation, though. It's good to see someone like you sees that, and not just a lifelong civilian like me.
CoF,
Nonsense. That's just human nature. No one wants to fight and put their lives on the line and see their comrades blown to bits for a bad, losing cause. It's perfectly understandable and I feel for them. I really do. It's tragic.
But what could we have done? how many Vietnamese should we have killed? 5 million? 10 million? At least a million Vietnamese died in that conflict, they lost every major battle, and yet they were never going to stop fighting. Just how many Vietnamese do you think we should have killed to win that war? And for what???
It's insane.
We have to face reality: we are not supermen and we are not always right. We cannot win every war, and we should not engage in conflicts where this outcome is highly probable, let alone in conflicts in which we do not belong.
JMJ
Damn Jersey, don't you know how to just shut up and just acknowledge the experiences of other?
ReplyDeleteWe are pretty much in agreement.
Les,
ReplyDeleteWilson and FDR did not support a large, permanent, peacetime, standing military. I doubt most later presidents thought it was a good idea, but the politics of fear prevented action. Three later presidents stand out the most for military expansion, and unnecessary expansion at that - Johnson, Reagan, and GW Bush.
George HW Bush and Clinton both tried to begin reining in military spending, and seemed to be on a good track, and then 9/11 happened, and George W Bush and Co used the terrorist attack to balloon military spending, much to the delight of their particular corporate backers.
Whatever the case, it is not "progressive" to maintain a "large, permanent, peacetime, standing military." Just because an ostensible "progressive" supports a regressive policy, that does not make the regressive policy progressive. That would be like saying, "The rapist was Chritian, therefore rape is a Christian endeavor."
So, let's talk like grown-ups here.
FDR, who you so carelessly cited, also was a proponent of leadership by confidence and not fear. Reagan talked confidence, and somewhat applied it domestically, but the messages that supported massive military expansion all came from fear.
The politics of fear in the foreign sphere is how we have the massive military estate we have today. It is historically extremely dangerous. Countless great states have fallen because they spent too much, and put too much power on their military estates. As long as we have these paranoid, ridiculous, ludicrous extistential fears, We the People will continue down the path to militaristic ruin.
It is a Rightwing phenomena. Period. It is the Daddy State. When you vote Republican you perpetuate and compound the problem, and just because the Demcrats kowtow to these powerful politics of fear, that certainly does not make fear "progressive." To argue against that fact is just comically specious, at best.
JMJ
Jersey: You got your wires crossed and posted on the wrong blog!
ReplyDeleteLes ain't here man...
LOL!!! Sorry about that!!!
ReplyDeleteJMJ