I was being somewhat facetious. For the last 5 years the current administration has been speaking of the dangers of radical islam. They may have been too PC in thier rhetoric but I can't honestly blame them for that in light of the giant $hitstorm that arises any time anyone in the group says something remotely forceful. Emergency preperation procedures were part of it. As I remember they were mocked for at least trying to convince people to be ready for a disaster or coming up with some type of system to aid in the response if there is a need. It seems they did more for preparadness than did Ray Nagin in New Orleans.

Here we are late in the game and people seem to be just now realizing that those folks over in the middle east don't like us, in fact, they want to kill us. Many of us have had our noses stuck so far up our own rear ends that all we can talk about is how much America sucks and it's all our own fault. Meanwhile the folks in the Middle east keep planning and silently thanking the dumbarses over here that think it's all our fault. It's been talked about for at least the last 5 years.

It kinda funny that once again the Nascar crowd gets brought up in a deragatory manner. That crowd gets it, they have for the last 5 years. That's why they helped vote the guy into office. I'd much rather have your average Nascar guy with me in a tight spot than your average new yorker or san franciscan.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

This is you in a nutshell. So utterly convinced of our divine right that it doesn't occur to you that our serious unpopularity with the rest of the world might not be an accident and could lead to grief. Yes, many people in the world want to come here, it's largely because they'd be richer here and we do in fact have more freedoms than many other countries. Still, our behavior abroad is less and less wise and several powerful countries are lining up against us. Banded together, they could give us real trouble.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

...negativity aimed at this country by citizens of this country....

Good lord it's not negativity. Simply put, we can change our own behavior much more effectively than we can change others. If we have behaved foolishly, we should fess up and correct ourselves. The hawks call this "appeasement."

For the 1800th time, the good book points out that it is prudent to treat others as we would be treated. We don't do that too often. Instead we behave like feudal landlords, exacting tribute and appropriating harvest.

As for treating the Gitmo guys better than we treat our own, yeah, I'm just sure you'd be happy under similar circumstances in a tropical paradise somewhere on the Southern coast of Iran, under an indeterminable sentence -- life, effectively -- surrounded by people you hate. And I haven't even got into the loud music sessions with bright lights and full blast air-conditioning while in their skivvies.

Brilliant, just brilliant, we say we're keeping them off the battlefield while our very actions insure the recruitment of many times their number.

But hey, no worries, we finally got the #2 man in Al Qaeda in Iraq. How many times have we gotten the #2 man?

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Dude, you barely try to comprehend what he's saying. Sending a relative handful of troops over there, way too many of whom are not mature enough to handle the weird stress of the situation, and bombing hell out of national treasures -- whether or not Saddam was living in them at the time -- is what has led to the current no-win situation. Doesn't mean that our very vialbility as a civilization is a no-win deal.

Bush's problems go way beyond poor speaking or vocabulary skills. I don't think he's an intelligent conniver even. He just stubbornly clings to threadbare, "we are the greatest" mythology with some sort of belief that it has been divinely ordained. Can you say "over-confident" boys and girls?

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

Have you ever even been to a foreign country? Mexico and Canada don't count.

How exactly do you propose we "fess up to our past bad behaviour" in the current situation? (not that I buy your "america is to blame" argument for 1 microsecond; I'm just interested in how you're going to spin this one)

"gee, Mr. Ahmadinajad, oh so sorry if I didn't pronounce your name right, I realize that we have stolen your oil for centuries and that whole kidnapping our citizens thing back in the 70's, well it was completly deserved. But since we are responsible for all of the problems in your part of the world these days, do you think that it would be ok if you just didn't want to hurt us if we said we were sorry? It's ok, you having the nuclear energy and all. I'm glad we came to this understanding and we can all live peacefully now that we realize that it was us the whole time that caused all the hate and discontent."

Let's see with regard to Gitmo...

You bet your arse that I would rather have the treatment you outline rather than the treatment our soldiers and citizens get from the other side. At least I'd still have my head whilst I was so horribly shivering in my skivvies and listening to loud music. BTW, ever driven on a road in this state? Several of our young folk are violoating their own geneva convention rights by forcing themselves to listen to loud music. And if you'll check out some of the younger women, they are further torturing themselves unconscionably by wearing less than what most consider underwear out in public. I'm sure they run into some pretty damn cold air conditioning now and then - oh the humanity! I've even heard - you may want to sit down for this - that there are places in this country, called fraternities I think, that have gone so far as to place the undergarments of the opposite sex onto other peoples heads! Ah the cruelty, I can speak no more of these horrors!

Oh yeah, those folks in Gitmo are there because they are suspected terrorists. Almost forgot that point. Was Nick Berg a terrorist? How about all those kids in Beslan or those folks in New York or Jakarta or Madrid or London or Bombay? Were they terrorists? Great try at equivalency there

I'm sure you'll be equally upset in the coming weeks. Evidently the number 2 guy that you are so upset about catching is singing like a canary. There should be many more to follow. Besides, I'm sure the Iraqis are probably way more excited than you are. This is the guy that planned the bombing of one of their big mosques. Not a very Islam thing to do for a muslim.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I, and I believe most Americans and others around the world, supported going into Afganistan to get the people responsible for 9/11. Iraq is an entirely different story. That is where they lost me, most Americans, and most everyone else around the world. Their eagerness to enter Iraq, and their timing, is very suspect and where their "war on terror" fell apart.
Didn`t surprise me one bit.
Good question. Likely whatever rove says to gain political advantage, not what`s good for the country.
So people should not speak their mind here in the land of the free? Just what "freedoms" are we supposed to be defending and pushing on the rest of the world by gunpoint? And President Smirkenswagger is constantly telling us he isn`t bothered by what people say/think.
You are correct here. I forgot to mention the clueless Escalade piloting soccer mom crowd. They`d not survive a one week scarcity of Starbucks and cell phone shutdown. And the average American. Every stand in line in the grocery store? Take a look around next time if you indeed do the shopping. Tell me how a good deal of the people you see there would survive a run on Cheese Doodles and their almighty TV Guide. They will fall like flies when the puffed up junk food and entertainment tv are no longer on the shelf.

Miss the message? What message? There`s been none other than the rovian "everything is OK".

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300TD W124, Two VW TDI Passat Wagons,Cummins Ram 250, Kubota Tractor
23 cylinders sipping the sweet sauce of the soy bean

Back to the title of this thread for a sec....

Is there a prescription for what would definitely NOT win?

B

Ohhh B, knock em out

How about the present path. Creating more of the enemy than you are able to kill/capture, as admitted by Rumsfeld himself and a few of the generals, is sure to keep us on the downward slide.

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300TD W124, Two VW TDI Passat Wagons,Cummins Ram 250, Kubota Tractor
23 cylinders sipping the sweet sauce of the soy bean

This article is a nice dose of REALITY on the subject.

Mike

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The Waiting Game
Do we really need further convincing of the threat we face?

By Victor Davis Hanson

Hezbollah’s black-clad legions goose-step and stiff-arm salute in parade, apparently eager to convey both the zeal and militarism of their religious fascism. Meanwhile, consider Hezbollah’s “spiritual” head, Hassan Nasrallah — the current celebrity of an unhinged Western media that tried to reinvent the man’s own self-confessed defeat as a victory. Long before he hid in the Iranian embassy Nasrallah was on record boasting: “The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death.”

Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trumps that Hitlerian nihilism by reassuring the poor, maltreated Germans that there was no real Holocaust. Perhaps he is concerned that greater credit might still go to Hitler for Round One than to the mullahs for their hoped-for Round Two, in which the promise is to “wipe” Israel off the map.
The only surprise about the edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf that has become a best seller in Middle Eastern bookstores is its emboldened title translated as “Jihadi” — as in “My Jihad” — confirming in ironic fashion the “moderate” Islamic claim that Jihad just means “struggle,” as in an “inner struggle” — as in a Kampf perhaps.

Meanwhile, we in the West who worry about all this are told to fret instead about being “Islamophobes.” Indeed, a debate rages over the very use of “Islamic fascism” to describe the creed of terrorist killers — as if those authoritarians who call for a return of the ancient caliphate, who wish to impose 7th-century sharia law, promise death to the Western “crusader” and “Jew,” and long to retreat into a mythical alternate universe of religious purity and harsh discipline, untainted by a “decadent” liberal West, are not fascists. It is almost as if Alfred Rosenberg has returned in a kaffiyeh to explain why Jews really are apes and pigs, and why we must recapture the spirit of our primitive ancestors.

Next, in the manner that Hitler was to be understood as victimized by the Versailles Treaty, so too we hear the litany of perceived grievances against the Islamic fascists — George Bush, the West Bank, Gaza, or now Lebanon. But does anyone remember that bin Laden quip, four years before 9/11, when Mr. Bush was still governor of Texas: “Mentioning the name of Clinton or the American government provokes disgust and revulsion.”

Even as we split hairs over whether terrorists flocked to, or were created by, Iraq, the jihadists make no such distinctions between their theaters of operation. Listen to al Qaeda’s Aymin al-Zawahiri: “The Jihad movement is growing and rising. It reached its peak with the two blessed raids on New Yor k and Washington. And now it is waging a great heroic battle in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and even within the Crusaders’ own homes.”

“Even within the Crusaders’ own homes” would include, I think, the planned attacks against opponents of the Iraq war, such as Canada and Germany. Their often shrill, and sometimes blatantly anti-American, antagonism to the 2003 war still earned them no exemption from efforts to chop off the head of the Canadian prime minister or to blow up hundreds of Germans on passenger trains.

Here at home we witness “al-Qaedism” — fanatics shooting Jews in Seattle, murder at the Los Angeles airport, an SUV running over innocent pedestrians in San Francisco or driving over students in North Carolina, sniping in Maryland. And we shrug them all off. Surely such incidents can be explained, are not connected, occur at random — anything other than the truth that the constant harangues of the Islamic fascists really do filter down, even if rand omly and spontaneously, to a number of angry and alienated young Muslim males in the West.

Some cling to the notion that Islamic rage is not the manifestation of an elemental hatred, but is merely about land. That’s about what bin Laden said in 1998 when he urged all Muslims to murder all the Americans: “to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an obligation incumbent upon every Muslim who can do it and in any country — this until the Asqa Mosque (Jerusalem) and the Holy Mosque (Mecca) are liberated from their grip.”

But the long overdue withdrawal of soldiers from Saudi Arabia (who were out in a godforsaken desert and nowhere near the “Holy Mosque”) had no more effect on al Qaeda than did the Israeli departure from Gaza and Lebanon on Hamas and Hezbollah. As in the case of Hitler’s serial demands for return of the “stolen” German Sudetenland and then Czechoslovakia, land was never the real issue. Perceived loss of pride and status, hatred of the Jews, and unbridled contempt for a liberal West were.

The truth is that we are in a pause, a lull in a great storm that broke upon us five years ago on September 11. We are waiting to see when and where and how — not really if — the Iranians test their envisioned bomb. “Another 9/11” is now part of the lexicon, suggesting that most Americans accept that an amorphous enemy that tries to knock down the Sears Tower, to blow up the Holland tunnel, to explode airliners over the Atlantic, and to slaughter commuters from London to Madrid to the Rhine may finally get lucky once — and that once could be a death warrant for thousands of Westerners.

After 9/11 we were at war with a fascist creed that had trumped any damage to the homeland wrought by all earlier enemies, whether Germans, Italians, Japanese, or Russians. But now, five years later, we are in a holding pattern, waiting in a classic bellum interruptum — whether in exhaustion from this long war in A fghanistan and Iraq, or complacent due to our very success hitherto in preventing jihadists from enacting mass murder in the United States.

So we are in limbo — a sort of war, a sort of peace. Lulls of this nature are not such rare things in history. The Athenians and the Spartans between 421-415, or the Western Europeans between October 1939 and May 1940, likewise thought the squall had passed — the respite a sign that the enemy was satiated, or was occupied elsewhere, or had had a change of heart, or that times of transient calm might mean permanent peace

We all wish it were so, but in private also fear that the worst — whether from al Qaeda, Iran, or their epigones — is to come.

Our pundits and experts scoff at all this concern over Islamic fascism — as crude propaganda, neo-conservative war mongering, a veiled agenda to do Israel’s bidding, conspiracies to finish turning America from a republic into an empire, or just old-fashioned paranoia.

Their argument for thinking the danger is slight is that either we have already won, or we don’t really have a credible enemy to defeat other than a few thugs better left to the FBI and federal attorneys: the jihadists may sound like Nazis; but they lack a nation-state and thus the means to harm the West to any great degree. Intent is irrelevant, if the means are absent. Sure, there is a Mein Kampf, but no Wehrmacht in the Middle East.

There are three rejoinders to this notion that the Islamic fascists are hardly serious enemies, and cannot be compared to the old-time fascists who once started a war that led to 50 million deaths.

First, Islamic fascism is already the creed of the government of an oil-rich and soon to be nuclear Iran. Secular authoritarians like Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf could easily fall, and the nation’s nuclear arsenal with him, into the hands of the madrassa Islamists. It is not inconceivable to envision several nuclear bombs among o ne or more theocratic governments in the years to come.

Second, in an age of weapons of mass destruction, global terrorism, and culpable deniability, authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes can, without being traced, subsidize and sanction killers, who in turn, with the right weapons, can kill and maim tens of thousands.

Third, in an interconnected and often fragile world, the mere attempt to blow up trains, jets, and iconic buildings results anyway in millions of dollars in damage to the West: ever more expensive airline security, cancelled flights, and money-losing delays and interruptions in a general climate of fear.

Each time Mr. Ahmadinejad opens his mouth, or Mr. Nasrallah shoots off a primitive rocket, the global stock market can dip, and the price of petroleum spikes. A good dissertation is needed to ascertain how many billions of dollars Ahmadinejad has conned for his theocracy by means of his creepy rhetoric alone, through price hikes on the dai ly export of his oil. Since this war has progressed, oil has gone up from $25 a barrel to over $70, now adding an additional $500 billion per annum to the coffers of Middle East dictatorships.

Given Iraq, Afghanistan, and the acrimony at home — so similar to the debate right before Pearl Harbor over the earlier discounted fascist threat to the United States — we apparently are waiting for the enemy to strike again, before renewing the offensive.

So while we keep our defenses up at home, foster democracy in the heart of the Middle East in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope the globalized march of modernity undermines jihadism faster than it can disrupt the 21st century, we also wait — for the next blow that we know will come.



— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian

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1979 300 SD
350,000 miles
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1982 300D-gone---sold to a buddy
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1985 300TD
270,000 miles
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1994 E320
not my favorite, but the wife wanted it

www.myspace.com/mikemover
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Thanks, MikeMover. On target as usual.

B

1. We could continue to browbeat ourselves that this was our fault.

2. We could pull out of Iraq prior to a stabilised and ready government existing there.

3. We could continue to see the threat as terrorism rather than fascist islamism.

4. We could trust that the UN will solve the current problems and that it has the best interests of Western Civilisaton in mind.

5. We could pursue an isolationist policy with regard to the rest of the world.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Interesting article, Surf.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

I admit that anytime I see the names "Stephen Hayes" and "Weekly Standard" in the same sentence, "fantasy" is one of the first words that comes to mind, but I don't think it applies to that article. I don't see anything controversial there. As far as I know most people agree that Saddam and al Qaeda crossed paths from time to time. I believe they even tried to form alliances a few times, but the weight of the evidence is that they were rivals, if not enemies, but the time we invaded in 2003. Bin Laden emphasized their adversarial relationship when he released a recorded statement urging muslims to rise up against the infidel Saddam Hussein.

The President continues to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. He also continues to deny that he would make any such link. It's very dishonest.

i dont see what difference it is whether you say islamic facism or terrorism. just words.

tom w

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.