It's Amazing What a Little of One's Own Thought Can Do . . .

February 11, 2007:
"America," you elected this miserable megalomaniac - now you'll live with it.

Responding to Carl, Emily, Susanne, and others, I can only say that I think I've made my view very clear, the view that half-way, indecisive measures are usually both ineffective and immoral. While the U.S. Congress - both Democratic and Republican parties, i.e., go on deliberating and dithering endlessly, men and women whose lives are their responsibility go on being maimed and dying.

People unwilling and without the moral courage to be decisive simply have no place in the role of leadership, and we are seeing that fact played out on the world stage.

"There is," General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur once said, "no substitute for victory." There is a corollary: "And moral men do not wage warfare when victory is not their objective." Even further, moral men - men of honor - wage war in a manner calculated to end the warfare as quickly as possible.

As with any lethal fight, the only justification - and the only honorable course - is self-defense or the defense of the life of another. It is, accordingly, probable that war cannot be waged morally for political purpose. We seem as a nation to have forgotten that, something I personally detest.

That's because no matter what anyone may say by way of expiation, self-justification, or self-defense, the lives of our soldiers killed in Iraq have been lost for nothing. There was never in the mind of any person reasonable and well-versed in military tactics any hope of victory there. As several soldiers in Iraq know and have confided in me, their enemy knows that when we have left, he will have his way. It is, after all, his country.

Speaking parenthetically, save it! Unless you are prepared to say categorically what you mean by "win," you don't have a valid argument. If "win" means establish a democracy in Iraq, you must explain how you would persuade everyone there to alter or abandon their religion - democracy is against Islamic law, you know. Neither has it ever been possible to achieve victory by passive and/or static defense - whether that of terrain or otherwise. If by "win" you mean subjugate - in direct contradiction of our publicly stated purpose for being there - you need at least 650,000 (that is a mathematically demonstrable fact) troops and the willingness to do whatever is necessary to destroy the will of the Iraqis to fight.

Every successful general and studied historian without exception, after all, knows that one does not win wars solely by killing one's enemy; you win by destroying your enemy's will to fight. They are not the same.

The U.S. war on Iraq is a failure doomed to failure because it is being waged by the corrupt and cowardly government of a people become corrupt and cowardly. The manner of our waging the war there is not unlike the gruesome way we execute the death sentence here at home. Too fastidious to do the right and simple thing, kill the condemned instantly, we dither endlessly, arguing about supposedly "humane" (anything that can be made to sound painless) methods. Knowing full well that a human being struck with a shot that destroys the brain stem dies instantly - before his nervous system can register any sensory feeling at all - we go on with insane nonsense like gas chambers, lethal injections and the hideous like. It is inconceivably cruel, yet we are incapable of anything better.

In the Land of the Free, where not only are innocent men all too often condemned to die, they are condemned to die cruelly. We are, in short incapable of either justice or humane execution of sentence, because we lack the courage and honor to what is required.

We are "incapable" for the same reasons we are throwing away the lives of our soldiers in Iraq, in other words. Unable to rule ourselves in a just and honorable way, we presume to show other nations how to rule themselves with justice and honor.

While whether we will ever be better remains to be seen, I personally have no hope whatever. The U.S. is, after all, a Ship of Fools."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Fools