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2007.05.07
A Common Folly
Would you rather have a poor Republican nominee that is beatable or the best possible Republican candidate in the event that he wins the general election?
This is a very good question. For me the most important issue in this race is life. That is saving the lives of all of those Iranians and Americans who will be killed if a Republican is elected as the next president which will almost certainly mean war against Iran and if a Democrat is elected this will almost certainly mean there will be no war against Iran. That is the most important issue in this race to me along with Iraq, which in a similar fashion, electing a Republican will mean more chaos and a Democrat will likely mean more peace.
Hogwash. How can any politician deliver "more peace" in this era?
Iranian agents are providing money and weapons for the carnage in Iraq. The Iranian regime is already at war with us. The prudent response would be to provide a little payback. Binding our hards won't lead to peace there. In fact, it'll provide further incentives for the Iranians -- and other totalitarian regimes -- to utilize violence outside their borders.
As for Iraq, a Democrat can take out the troops but that won't be followed by some magical flowering of peace. Quite the contrary, it will signal to the umma that America lost -- and that the Al Qaeda-led Jihadists won.
What would happen after that?
A. These Jihadists retire and live a wholesome existence.
B. The Jihadists accrue prestige among their co-religionists; Arabs flock to the "strong horse"; tyrants crush dissidents throughout the Middle East; Islamists get even petrodollars than before; the Allah-ordained violence is then exported at a more ferocious rate to the West.
In essence, a Democrat will merely get a cruel pause to war like the period between September 1938 and September 1939. Far bloodier battles will resume later.
That's the rub. Most people don't include the hundreds of thousands who'll be killed by the terrorists in their body count arithmetic. That is the cost of packing up and leaving Iraq to the hyenas.
It's quite simple: cowering in front of the Islamists in Iran and the terrorists in Iraq will never buy America and the West any security. Only through their annihilation will we have peace.
Posted by Isaac Schrödinger at 02:09 AM in Politics, USA, World War IV | Permalink
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It's quite simple: cowering in front of the Islamists in Iran and the terrorists in Iraq will never buy America and the West any security. Only through their annihilation will we have peace.
Maybe true, but there's a limit to what a democracy is willing to do without sufficient provocation.
The Muslim world hasn't absorbed the lessons of the World wars, that it's idiotic mass suicide to fight a war against a fully armed country now that technology has advanced.
Look at the pictures of Dresden, and you understand why the Germans flip flopped away from being conquerors. You're looking at a city - at the state of a country, and it's as if you wreaked a car by crashing it into a concrete wall at freeway speed. Nothing left. Everyone dead.
The lesson should be obvious. You can never make war on anyone who is capable of decimating your cities from the air.
But the US could wipe out the entire middle east with a very few of our missiles. We don't even need to scramble pilots to do it. The end could be automated, and could happen in a single day with no human soldiers involved.
Yet, they still attack us, idiotically relying on our own morality to avoid slaughtering them. But they should know that human compassion and morality have limits. No one will choose compassion over repelling an invasion, so there is no way for them to ever succeed.
But if Muslims had absorbed the scene of Dresden's destruction (which was arguably not even a military necessity - it was revenge by the British, they should understand that too). If they understood that it will be them - that modern warfare means that this will be everyone's fate, then they'd have to eject Mohammad and his demand for war. They'd have to give up Islam...
But we do have morality, and we are more compassionate than previous generations. It will take a long time, a generation maybe, before we're ready to terrorize our enemies right back... But hopefully that time will give Islam a chance to rack up a series of smaller disasters and, perhaps, finally learn the lessons of the 20th century, over half a century later than everyone else did.
Or maybe they'll really attack us hard and bring Armageddon down upon themselves all at once.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | May 7, 2007 1:07:47 PM
OT:
Posted by: Josh Scholar | May 7, 2007 2:24:26 PM
