ScottSA

It seems most of the folks who have actually been to either war or the third world or both are on the alleged "hawk" side. I wonder why that is? Maybe a dose of reality is helpful in clarifying what needs to be done? Maybe some experience with the stark realities of life close to the bone? Maybe the knowledge of the immediacy of life when someone is actively trying to take yours? Maybe because knowing how 9/10s of the world lives over there makes one appreciate what we have here?

This is the sort of nitpicking that so devalues you as a poster. So what if Gandhi used non-violence? Are you suggesting that Leonidas should have used non-violence? Was Chamberlain right? If Churchill had dropped spongebats on Germany and fired marshmallows at Heinkels, would that have helped Hitler see the light? Are you a complete idiot? The fact that you can point to one or two counterexamples is meaningless. So what? One reason Gandhi "triumphed" is that he was opposing a civilized occupier, and one loth to use force against native Indians by that time, but the real reason is that Britain couldn't afford to keep its colonies. Gandhi triumphed by default. How do you think Gandhizynski would have fared greeting German Panzers with a message of peace at the border of Poland in September 1939? What would Attla have done if he were suddenly faced by old Gandhi in his travels across Asia? How do you think Gandhiberg would have fared in the Warsaw Ghetto? Timothy McVeigh? Just how much currency are you going to try to get out of that? You saw the list of Islamic atrocities for the last three months...take out Iraq and there are STILL hundreds, and all over the globe to boot, and you use McVeigh as a counterexample? I'm glad you didn't shake in your boots in Applebees. I'm glad that you can feel so smug about directing your anger at McVeigh instead of a "minority group" in the wake of 911. Very sophisticated indeed. Perhaps your smugness will give inspiration to the wahabbists in Saudi Arabia, and encourage them to allow minority groups into their country at all...

"Circle of death"? Is that some variation on "cycle of violence"? Y'know, the world is not a big self-help group where if we all hold hands and smoke a doob, we'll all get in touch with our inner child. You DO realize that, right?

So you think there is zero chance of the British attacking either? Because if one is possible so is the other. I really don't think the Brits are going to escalate the situation unless something happens to the sailors. But if they did initiate a limited blockade, the Iranians really couldn't do much about it, short of killing the sailors. They certainly wouldn't mount a ground invasion against a country occupied by the US. Not unless they're convinced the 12th Imam is curbing at the bit and rarin' to go. It's quite a mismatch between the 70s hardware Iran has and the 21st century stuff the US has.

And allow the Iranians the excuse to send a thousands of troops to take Basra. There is zero chance of that happening. The US would like nothing more than to utilize their standoff capabilities and the Iranians would be insane to initiate a ground war.

But sometimes the solution to problems is. Sometimes the choice is very stark indeed, like when it's kill or be killed, either them or you. Sometimes there isn't time to cogitate. People who can't be decisive lose.

Oy vey...

Did the boxes have the owner's name and address and telephone taped clearly on the outside of it. This is the question I keep asking, and it keeps getting evaded. If yes, please show me where. If no, your analogy is nothing but a lie. Well I think "lie" is a little strong, but if you get a package with your neighbour's address clearly written on it, do you need to open it to make sure it's not addressed to you? Let's take the anoalogy a bit further to reflect the actual reality. If you move into a house, and you find a box sitting on the floor, and the box has a sticker on it saying "deliver to" and then the address you know is where the former owners have moved, do you have to open the box to make sure it's not yours?

Did the boxes have the owner's name and address and telephone taped clearly on the outside of it. This is the question I keep asking, and it keeps getting evaded. If yes, please show me where. If no, your analogy is nothing but a lie. Well I think "lie" is a little strong, but if you get a package with your neighbour's address clearly written on it, do you need to open it to make sure it's not addressed to you?

Wouldn't it be more manly to talk about it instead?

The only problem with the "loser" thesis is that Harper is...well...Prime Minister. He can't be that big of a loser...

Speaking of "propaganda filters"...

And every women you have ever known who is worth knowing no doubt has a fairly traditional view of men, too. So called "sensitive men" are really feminized beta males, and although lionized by the feminist movement as arch ideals, they never really were very popular with women. Now the alpha-male is back as an ideal and it's really about time.

There seems to be a great deal of confusion around here as to what happened, so I'll repost this: For the folks who make an analogy to a wallet, there is no need to open a wallet if it's not only taped shut, but has the owners name address and telephone number taped clearly on the outside of it. The box has the yellow moving sticker clearly visible on the outside, saying where it came from and where it was supposed to go. I suspect, from seeing how things work around that union-infested neck of the woods, that the boxes were left on a trolley in the corridor of Wellington, and a Liberal member simply walked by and scooped a box or two. Maybe more, for all we know. Security is incredibly lax on the Hill...all staff have access to everything...the little green P pass allows everyone unfettered access to everything.

What can anyone say to this kind of nonsense?

Woody, you re-enforce my impression of you everytime you post. This time you've hung a dunce sign around your neck. How anyone can post a snippet saying one thing and then argue that it says precisely the opposite is far beyond me.

Sure it is. But you seem a bit confused. The war was won in a little over two weeks, with the ousting of the Baathist regime. The occupation, on the other hand has been underfought from the beginning, althouth the cacophany from the press has made it seem far worse than it really is. Somehow a constant repetition of the casualty count of US soldiers turned into a gleeful mantra on the news, and constant repetition of "mounting toll" and other neat catchphrases have been guarenteed to leave the impression amongst armchair warriors than Iraq is nothing but an unmitigated disaster. It's not at all...it will just take time...Bush tried telling everyone that from the beginning, but no one was listening.

Yes. Do you know what a paranoid schizophrenic is?

Concepts like those have really nothing to do with gender. They are found through out the human race. And without "U", there is no honour. Concepts like those are at the heart of the gender divsion. Ask any feminist. CBs protests are intrinsically bound up in the feminist viewpoint. According to both postmodern and standpoint feminists, "male" concepts (duty, honor etc) are offshoots of rationality, which is seen as a male trait, while emotion, with its offshoots of empathy, compromise etc are seen as "female". I don't have any particular argument with feminists on this point; my disagreement with them lies in the normative value attached to both. Thankfully the rest of humanity is beginning to rediscover male Virtu.

Douhet was extremely influential between the wars. When the B-17 began rolling off the production lines, it was seen as the fulfillment of Douhet's vision. In terms of morality, Douhet made the simple but effective case that war is hell, so the faster you get it over with, the better.

I think moderateamerican's defintion is about as good as it gets. Concepts like honor, duty and courage have been devalued for the last several decades, because they entail something called sacrifice...long out of vogue after decades of decadent 'me'ism and feminization, and it's long past time that it reawakened. Thank God it is, finally. What CB seems not to realize is that there's a time for softness, or 'compassion' as he calls it, and a time for strength, or 'violence' as he dismissively calls it. Sometimes softness doesn't work. I suppose the Spartans could have dressed as flower children and greeted the Persians, in which case Leonidas would have lived to a ripe old age in peaceful vassalage to Xerxes. That would have been the 'compassionate' thing to do, the 'mature' thing to do in CB's mind. But really, it would have been the easy thing to do, the thing that involved no sacrifice. Leonidas could have gathered the Spartans together and drawn up a bunch of placards with bumpersticker slogans denouncing the imperialism of the Persians, and then taken the lot to the pass at Thermopylae where Xerxes would have rolled over them in a second with nothing but a chuckle at their naivete. The hardest thing Leonidas could do was to refuse to compromise and, with the knowledge of certain death, fight for his women and children and possesions. Maybe it was a stupid thing to do, but it was the right thing to do. It is what a man would do. Softness is taken as weakness by minds who never lost the knowledge of violence, and our current Islamic enemy knows all too well that violence pays. It's written right in the enemy's holy book. It's more clear to the enemy than it was to Hitler, because in this case they believe God stands behind them, and God is never wrong. God won't compromise, and God wants Sharia throughout the world. What is there to compromise about? How does one 'compromise' with an absolute? You either bend to it or you fight it uncompromisingly. It doesn't matter why the enemy thinks what the enemy thinks, or what the root causes are...sometimes it's really very simple: either you fight or you surrender. Here's something I wrote a while ago that I think addresses CB's "complexity" meme: Thursday, August 03, 2006 Alfred and the complexity of war A fellow took me to task the other day for referring to "Europe" as if it is a monolithic entity. We were discussing Islamic ghettoization in Europe, and he made the point that the situation is far too complex to paint with a broad brush and that one must look at each country in Europe individually in order to discuss the subject. He is right of course, unless the point of the conversation is Islamic ghettoization in Europe. It is true that parts of Europe are ghettoized and other parts are not. It is also true that Texas was not involved in the American revolution and that Saskatchewan was not involved in the war of 1812 (since neither existed at the time). Yet that does not make it untrue that the American revolution took place in America or that Canada was a protagonist in the War of 1812. Nor is it false or misleading to say that Europe faces Islamic ghettoization; the fact that parts of Europe are not yet ghettoized is hardly an assurance that they won't follow the parts that are if ethnic immigration floodgates are left open across Europe. Heuristics, meaning in this case the use of shortcuts or rules of thumb, is a useful tool without which we would not be in a position to communicate anything to anyone. Taken to its logical conclusion, without the use of heuristics we would be reduced to a state of the egocentric particular and only be able to think, but not talk, about our individual selves. It is the very complexity of life which makes it necessary to reduce it to understandable categories. I would dismiss this entire exercise as a latterday version of the debate on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, except that the "complexity" critique is becoming an overused meme these days. It represents one of the more glaring flaws in modern academia: a tendency to inflate a subject with endless facets and in the process preclude any hope of arriving at a conclusion. Beyond that and far more annoying is the fact that neo-liberals seem to have fallen in love with "complexity". What was spawned in academia has become in the hands of neo-liberalism a rhetorical tool; one with the twofold value of allowing the user to appear to seize the intellectual high ground and sidestep all arguments into the bargain. But how valid is it really? Its fine to reject simplicity in favour of complexity, but somehow users of the complexity mechanism never seem to get around to talking about the myriad perspectives they have cleverly introduced to the subject. In fact, the implied suggestion is that the given subject is too complicated to deal with at all. Thus any argument this mechanism is used against has not been addressed...it has merely been devalued and sidestepped. The rhetorical complexity meme is often used to devalue arguments for the use of force against Islam. Whenever someone calls for war against Syria, Iran, Hezbollah or Hamas, some pseudo-intellectual on the left is quick to leap up and assure us that the issue is far too complex to address through the use of brute force, and that the "warmonger" is brutish for even entertaining such simplistic thinking. If pressed to expand upon this alleged complexity, the leftist looks stunned for a moment and then invariably trots out the usual mantras of "poverty", "ignorance" or "imperialism" as if nothing more need be said. If pressed harder, the leftist will retreat to the position that war ought to be a last resort; a tautology that has no end, since there will always be other resorts, including perpetual diplomacy, capitulation and abject rout. Ultimately the complexity argument usually means that the leftist has no real understanding of the issue, but knows that calling something "complex" elevates his non-understanding to an appearance of wisdom. Alfred, King of Wessex, was both a scholar and a warrior. He could have taken the role of either when he faced the Danish Great Army at Edington in the year 878. He could have examined the enemy minutely, observing the myriad complexities of the opposing shieldwall and how this or that Dane or camp follower didn't really look like his heart was in it and that perhaps a bit of wergeld might calm their nerves. He could have reasoned that if his Saxons insisted upon attacking or even stubbornly standing their ground it would only make the Danes angrier and more alienated, and he would have been right. He might have reflected that Nordic Paganism was probably at its heart a religion of peace, despite its worship of warrior gods, violent battle death, and supernatural transport to Valhalla. He might even have deduced that it was only the Dane Guthrum and his henchmen who were the instigators, and that the great mass of Danes were moderates. Had he done all of the those things he might have been known to history as "Alfred the Clever". Fortunately for the survival of Anglo-Saxon England, Alfred instead took the simplistic and artless route of seeing the Danish shieldwall for what it was: a horde of barbarians clamouring for blood, loot and rapine. And so he thrashed them and then he thrashed them again and after the slaughter he forced a truce on them, forcibly converting Guthrum to Christianity in the process. Then he built the borders of Wessex into a fortress and made a point of thrashing the Danes each time they encroached. For his brutish simplicity in time of need, and for laying the groundwork for a true and lasting peace with the Danelaw, Alfred is the only King in the long and illustrious history of Britain to be honored with the title "The Great". Rarely in history have we seen anything so farcical as the situation we have now between the West and Islam. On one side the enemy beats its shields and howls for our heads, while on the other side we look for any possible excuse...not just to avoid war...but to avoid acknowledging that the enemy even exists. I deeply sympathize with the idea that war ought to be a last resort. War is a horrible thing to behold, and the war that is coming will be nasty, brutish and long. But the barbarians are here whether we like it or not, and they want war, and there is nothing very complicated about that.

The USSBS concludes that strategic bombing was extremely effective against industrial targets. Read what I wrote. It eventually collapsed German war production. Bomber command's main thrust was not the destruction of german morale. That particular attempt was made only later in the war...most bombing of Germany was aimed at industrial areas and only hit civilian areas because the technology to pinpoint bomb didn't exist. The british used night bombing to attempt terror attacks somewhat more frequently, the the US focussed on day attacks on industrial areas by and large.

The same can be said equally of some the right wing members of this board. I don't think I have to go any further than this very topic to pove that point. Something about how left wingers hate our society because we don't support a war with Islam. No, it's not something about how left wingers hate our society because you don't support a war with Islam, and the fact that you even trot out that strawman is a case in point of what Argus is saying. The fact that you hate our society is evident from your slavish addition to attacking our society in each and every instance. If some one points out that Iran kidnapped British sailors, you immediately start defending Iran and condemning Britain. If someone points out that 911 and about 100 murders per day are done by Muslims, you immediately point to the crusades or some abortion bomber to show that Christians are "just as bad". In every instance, you and the lefties on this and other boards equivocate and squirm and do everything you can think of to try to A ) show that Islam is innocent, B ) that Islam is not innocent, but it's our fault anyway, or C ) that Islam is not innocent, and in the rare cases that you can't pin the blame on us, that somehow because of something we did 800 years ago we're just as bad.

CB: since you're clearly relying on google U to come up with your rather desperate arguments (dunno how someone in the military doesn't know this, but...), I suggest you look at the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. It's the foremost primary source used by anyone with even a modicum of knowledge in strategic studies as regards WWII strategic bombing, and it's the primary source behind all the stuff you've googled up. It's not easy to find on google unless you know what you're looking for, and you clearly don't, so here's a link: http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed...groups/243.html There are other primary sources too, including writings by Bomber Harris that I can't be bothered looking up for you, but in general, they agree that strategic bombing was exceptionally effective when used against industrial targets, and of limited value when used as Guilo Doucet (you won't find much about him at all on the net I suspect) thought it ought to be used, as an instrument of terror. I would argue that it WAS effective in Japan, when nukes became available. However, in Germany, Harris perhaps said it best (and I'm paraphrasing): that terror bombing in Hamburg and Dresden had the effect of pushing people into a pit, withdrawing the ladder, and throwing rocks at them until they climbed out. What I'd like to know is why you are forever loping into subjects you know nothing about, becoming enmired in quicksand, and then stupidly insisting upon arguing until you're well over your head.

I'm going to ask you this question once more, and I'll include another question that you failed to answer. What are "real men"? What are "real women"? See? If you don't know what a real man is, me telling you isn't going to help. Keep hiding your eyes from masculine men lest they give you a woody, and don't worry about who is a real woman...they are only interested in men who know what masculinity is all about. Anyway, I'm tired of this silly game, so I'll let you and pipsqueak Figleaf continue your desperate ridicule of masculinity, and get the last word in. Toodles, boys!