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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
Live free or die!
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July 26, 2003
Are we thuggish enough?
I fear that we are not being violent enough in Iraq and the Middle East generally. I'm a nice guy- really. I'm not particularly violent, certainly not sadistic or cruel. I try to play nice wherever possible.
However, I fear that we have not sufficiently gotten the message through to our enemies that the US is not to be trifled with. Sure, we pretty well walked right through the Taliban and the Baath party machinery.
Thing is, our military was so precise and controlled in getting just the most necessary military targets that a lot of these people haven't figured out that they are beaten. By any objective standard, the US beat the stuffing out of their regimes. However, some of the people are in denial. Epistemology is not a strong suite in Arab culture.
People were as wicked and more in Germany and Japan during WWII. Yet after we beat them, we didn't have guerilla warfare against our soldiers. They changed their tunes right quick like, and were acting like decent civilized countries again in a fairly short order.
Of course, we just goddam destroyed their countries. We firebombed Dresden. Then of course, there was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We devastated them past any point where anyone could trick themselves into thinking they had any choice other than repentance and capitulation.
I have no desire to nuke Baghdad, or anyplace else. However, if we dick around with these Muslim extremists long enough, eventually some of them are going to throw something really nasty at us. If we get 20 or 30 thousand people (or more) killed with poison gas in Atlanta or Kansas City, something on the order of nuclear retaliation will be inevitable.
We have to break through the mental and social dysfunctions of all these cultures enough for them to get the message that you can't try to kill Americans or have anything to do with those so inclined. We're not doing them any favors by playing nice if it ends up with us having to hit them 10 times worse down the road. Yet we've got people arguing that we're being too rough just by releasing pictures of the dead Hussein boys.
Are we getting through? The efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq have certainly changed the behavior of Uday and Qusay Hussein, among other nasty customers. There are 10s of thousands of jackasses who have been so neutralized.
We've also had some other significant ripple effects coming out of our efforts to date. Syria has quieted down. The Iranian government is at least pretending to be helpful- though they are likely responsible for a good portion of the jackasses shooting at US now in Iraq. Even the Palestenians are becoming a little more amenable to reason.
Still, there are people shooting at our troops in Iraq. Still there are people planning more attacks on US civillians. Can we get sufficient understanding and co-operation from their countrymen to stop them before they perpetrate evil bad enough that it will cause US to have to get all Old Testament?
What is the least amount of killing and destruction that will put the fear of Yahweh into our enemies? That's the $64,000 question.
posted by Al at 7/26/2003 03:25:00 AM
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