well, yes, just what does the world need with another blog?
there seems a sufficiency.
as i walked home from breakfast, into something just on the gale side of a freshet, rain and little soft hail stones pelting my face, soaking my pant legs and cap, cold wind stinging my cheeks, i saw a bright red left-handed cotton glove lying sodden on the side walk. something began to strike me as odd about it as i continued along. neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of pacific n.w. morning socked in by what i call "the grayness" could keep me from that glove, so i returned to it.
it lay flat, the fingers splayed out, except the ring finger and little finger were crossed to the palm. and it occurred to me what was odd about it. although the index finger and the middle finger were in the "peace sign" posture, the thumb was “improperly” pointed to the side, the little and ring finger oddly folded over it.
after musing over my observational powers, i leaned over and "corrected" the glove, so that the thumb was resting over and upon the ring finger bent into proper position, the little finger folded quietly beside the ring finger over the palm.
i left the sodden sock just where i found it on the sidewalk but now making a more intelligible gesture, like the “impeach bush” chalk markings left on sidewalks by activists.
as i walked away, i thought to myself, "give war a chance!"
segue.--
what are we to do in assigning a proper label to our soon to be successfully completed adventures in iraq and afghanistan. are we to call these military campaigns war, or police actions, or are we to use the unsatisfactory to me label of “war on terror”
there are niceties involved here.
for one, we did not and do not fight nation states in any usual sense. as a matter of fact, we remain in those places at the continued request of duly elected and internationally recognized governments, even though we entered afghanistan against the taliban and iraq against saddam hussein’s regime on a conventional war footing, but those campaigns were soon over and successfully completed. so, the issue remains, what do we call our present endeavors in those places?
mostly we don't fight in any conventional sense, very often. since the marine assault on fallujah, several tussles around sadr's compound/mosque in baghdad, a couple of set piece battles in afghanistan, not very “opportunities” have presented themselves to our troops to wage conventional battles. the al queda, the taliban, the iranian proxies, the egyptian wahhides, and the rest of the arabian "foreign legion" have learned that you do not stand toe to toe in combat with american infantry & tanks, or united states marines under any circumstances, unless you mean to be seriously mauled. any group silly enough to try has gotten the express elevator to heaven and the 72 virgins, which prospect cannot be all that damned great, because not many have evidenced a desire to commit suicide in front of a bunch of blooded up marines and soldiers.
in four years of fighting, the number of american troops who have died by directed small arms fire, i.e., rifle, machine gun, mortar rounds, rpg while engaged in direct combat and fire fights, has been astoundingly small. i will go out on a limb, and say certainly not over 1,500 and perhaps not over 1,000 in four years of operations of the over 4,000 soldiers and marines who have died in those theatres.
no, it is the damned ied's and accidents that have inflicted the bulk of the damage, not so much in numbers killed, and i don't want to be callous here, just accurate, but in horrible injuries, such as loss of limbs, eyesight, etc.
let's put several things in perspective.--
in our civil war, union troops trying to force an assault over a small bridge defended on a facing hillside by dug in southern troops armed mostly with black powder single shot rifles, but also small artillery field pieces, suffered 4,000 dead in minutes, most of the casualties at the height of the battle occurring with 30 minutes or so. so bitter and fierce was the fighting that neither side would quit the conflict so the other could take its dead from the field, a striking departure from the usual niceties of the era.
this is the battle called "cold harbor," and indeed it was, for many a brave man.
in the american civil war, over a period comparable to our stay in afghanistan and iraq, union and confederate troops fought 29 battles exceeding or equaling the battle at waterloo:29 engagements the size of waterloo, a single battle which sealed the fate of nations and of a once invincible dictator and conqueror of much of europe.
in the same period in which u.s. forces have been in iraq and in afghanistan, the russian army has suffered about 1,200 to 1,500 "peace time" deaths per year. i have not checked in a while, but the russian army has suffered perhaps more peace time deaths than the u.s. military has endured while actively engaged in limited combat.
in that period the united states has expended less than 1% per annum of its federal budget in matters related to the prosecution of these activities. suffice it to say, this is in preposterous comparison to the percentage rates of the federal budget devoted to fighting wwii, and, even korea and viet nam.
i hesitate to call our campaign war.
it is no longer prosecuted against countries, and it was not for very long.
it has not been fought on soil against the express wishes of any recognized government, for some long time now.
the campaigns in afghanistan and iraq are not fought under any "rules of engagement" similar to that governing the rules of conduct of armies actually engaged in the task of trying to kill as many enemy soldiers as humanly possible while attempting to limit the casualties inflicted upon our troops.
as a matter of fact, exactly the opposite rules are imposed upon our soldiers as they go about their daily routines. everything our soldiers do is designed to minimize "unnecessary" casualties which as a consequence makes their prosecution of their duties ever so much riskier to them. that our troops have maintained their morale under these conditions is indeed testament to their enthusiasm and sense of duty.
so, i do not call what we are doing “ war,” because these campaigns are not prosecuted as a war is traditionally prosecuted. my view is if you are in war, you should identify your enemy and set about killing as many as quickly, surely, and efficiently as possible. and, that includes whoever hasn't the sense or the native wit to preserve themselves, who gets in the way.
so, here we have another red sock, lying on another sidewalk, trying to say something about itself, but its fingers garbled, its meaning in disarray. as a society, we have walked past that sock, and ignored the dis-ease that it has caused amongst us, but no one has had the presence of mind to study it, and try and figure out where to put the fingers, and it what order. how do we arrange the fingers to make sense? what do we call these things in which we are involved, and what is the larger context which explains that which involves us?
well, let us go back to a beginning which provides some context.
9/11?
no, not precisely, as it goes back a lot further. i am not going to exhaustively treat all the various acts of terrorism perpetrated over the last 50 years against the west, by the like of the beider-meinhoff gang, or by carlos the jackal, or by black september, or any of the rest.
certainly, all of it was initially state sponsored, an unholy alliance of soviet/ russian training, operations directed by the soviet proxy romanian intelligence services, saudi money and fanatical egyptian clerics who provided the intellectual underpinnings for this initial spate of terrorism against the west and the united states and israel in particular.
certainly there was that aspect of it.
but the threat we confront today has undergone a transformation, and it has shaped our reaction to it and the form of the military and intelligence campaigns we now undertake.
so, for looking at this 9/11 is a convenient, if not entirely accurate place to start, and works within the grasp of the contemporary "attention span" for these sorts of things.
the transformational element in all of these later day conflicts, the current terror war, the element that drives the al queda involvement, the involvement of hamas suicide bombers, of abbas suicide bombers, of suicide bombers bought and paid for on the gaza and west bank by saddam hussein, by the iranians, by the chechnyan rebels who have visited upon the Russians what they created, ... , the common element has been the individual muslim motivated by religious fervor to commit acts, acts which have as their motivation religious impulse, to kill as many people of whatever stripe, including children and infants in swaddling and sucking at their mothers breasts, who they believe enemies of islam. these terrorists strive to kill as many people as is humanly possible, so that they spend may spend their eternities in religious and physical bliss, so that they may their lives in devotion to islam, and kill the foes of islam, that being anyone who is not Islamic, and especially anyone who is jewish.
it was, i believe, not a brilliantly chosen tactic on the part of the arabs and their russian handlers, but a tactic chosen in desperation, as every conceivable conventional attack launched against israel, and against the united states to force us from the middle east andthe mediterranean, had failed utterly and ignobly.
the arabs acting as russian proxies we beaten soundly at every turn. they were defeated in conventional warfare, utterly most of the time and on the one occasion they caught israel off guard, they squandered the opportunity. they were soundly and routinely thrashed in the clandestine intelligence operations that went on for time to time. and, they were horribly embarrassed by the special military operations the israeli’s launched in lebanon and the like, attacking the leadership of the plo. to this day, if you say the word “entebbe,” most literate persons will know whereof you speak.
so was born the suicide bomber.
the terror war was transformed.
as a consequence of the suicide bomber islamic terror has abandoned the nation state, for the most part, as a vehicle to seek the destruction of israel and the united states and whoever else they conceive of as enemies. iran remains deeply involved as a “state,” but this is a special condition, as iran is a theocracy of which it makes precious little sense to conceive it as driven by conventional “statist” motivations: iran, is in essence, an Islamic mosque. these hostilities, so far as we experience them now, are not carried on by nations, nor are they directed by nations. the acts of one nation in particular, that being iran, are entirely consistent with the aim of the jihad terror, that being the destruction of israel and driving the united states from the mediterranean: but these are the immediate aims of islam. oh, nations friendly to these goals, such as saudi arabia and egypt and lybia and syria, help with finance, and training, but how trained do you have to be to walk into the middle of a wedding and push and button and blow yourself and some innocents who happen to let you into their company, into smithereens. not really very adept at anything, really.
no, the vehicle of this terror is an individual made resolute by religious teaching, conviction, and the formal approval of a religious institution which approves of, sanctions, and directs the destruction of human life in order to gain the supremacy of islam. so, what do we call this?
i call this religious war.
the campaigns in afghanistan and iraq started out and were immediately conventional military operations. and the operations undertaken as conventional military operations were swiftly and brilliantly concluded by the likes of military campaigns seldom seen in history, rivaling the napoleon mastery of warfare not seen from from american armies since the heyday of robert e. lee’s command of the army of virginia.
but, when they should have been concluded, they weren’t. when yet another arab army faced and suffered ignominious defeat, when the afghan taliban and al queda were routed in months when the soviets could not do it in 9 years, when the conventional fighting was over, it was supplanted.
conventional war gave way to religious war.
in the civil war in spain ideological irregulars came from the world over to fight a battle between fascism and marxism on soil. the events in spain morphed soon enough into world war two.
in afghanistand and iraq, conventional war morphed into a battle of religion, as irregular troops have come from the world over to fight a battle which they see as between islam and the foes of islam, particularly the “great satan,” the united states. this battle, first begun in deadly earnest in afghanistan and iraq, has enlarged, and will morph into worldwide confrontation between the competing values of the west, and the values of islam.
that is why i became a blogger.
my mission is simple.
i want this conflict to be known for what it is, and to be called what it is. this conflict, as it is waged in afghanistan and iraq, is a religious war, started and carried out by islam, whose immediate goals have been the destruction of israel and the expulsion of the united states from the middle east and are now, buoyed by their success, the conquest of europe and england, and then the united states.
well, hold on there, young fellow, i can hear you saying it now, that's not what the politicians and the elected officials call it. why, president bush just gave a dinner for the muslims, and walked in his socks at a mosque.
and, given that the middle eastern countries don’t have a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out, isn’t this just a little bit preposterous.
this perception is why i became a blogger. to put the fingers on the little red sodden cotton glove in the right order, and to point them to the right truths. i would add this observation.-- i know this to be a religious war, this war we wage, because the jihadist warriors, and clerics and their supporters, have declared it upon us, and have told us repeatedly that it what it is. one has to give one’s enemy some credence in his declarations.
others have explained these matters far better than i, and cover this aspect far more than i intend to. for a very good explanation of all of this, i would suggest you turn to http://www.atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com , http://www.yidwithlid.blogspot.com , http://www.breathofthebeast.blogspot.com , and http://www.jeremayakovka.typepad.com , on a regular basis and read their excellent coverage and explanation of the threat all of this poses to us.
i have a different purpose in mind. i do not intend to cover these matters on a regular basis. my intention is more down to earth. i intend to deal with how to combat these threats, how to fight and destroy them, before they can destroy us.
that is the direction i intend to point the fingers on the little red sodden cotton glove. time to go look for it.
Not a bad mission. I'll be there wi'cha. Readin', commentin', and puttin' it out to any one that'll listen.
So far this blog is just like the soup starter, "Great Beginnings", keep it up my friend, lookin' forward to more of your insight and expertise.
Gun Up.
mdd
Posted by: --mdd-- | December 31, 2007 at 02:50 PM