Now I'm not an international scholar here but I think I understand certain aspects of human nature. I understand that what is persuasive to one person, or type of person, may not work with another. (flashing blue and red causes most people to pull over but we need spike strips for those who just aren't convinced)
Here's how I think that this ought to be applied to the Islamonutjobs we are encountering in Iraq/Iran/Crapistan/etc.
Bottom line: I care more about American's sons and daughters than I do about Iraq/Iran/Crapistan/etc's sons and daughters. I care more about Americans interests (security, economic, moral, etc) than I do about these other backwards countries.
So put me in charge of this war and my first official order says that all terrorists (loosely defined as "anyone that even has a bad dream about looking sideways at one of our soldiers") who are captured get thrown in a 5 X 5 cell naked with feral swine as cellmates.
Any and all interogation techniques that are deemed effective by the men on the ground will be employed. (as opposed to letting the men in the suits who lie for a living and pretend to care about "the folks" while making 3.8 times the median salary of the American worker and working about 1/8 as hard decide what "feels good")
Our soldiers would be authorized to shoot/blow up/incinerate anything that even looks suspicious.
Terrorists who are killed in battle are buried with pig guts, pig heads, pig feces, etc. Crude headstones with phrases such as "Where's your Allah now?" and "If those pigs were a virgins does that count?" would be erected over these graves.
Terrorists who were identified (captured or killed) would have their families houses destroyed.
As for nation states who contribute to our boys dying in any way shape or form (Iran and co): I can't put a value on the life of an American citizen and I will not try to. So I'm just going to use a round number: one of our soldiers/citizens lives is worth 50,000 lives of your citizens.
We'll start by nuking Tehran and two or three major cities in Iran and if they still want to play after that then the 50,000 rule comes into play. WE WILL BURY YOU.
Egregious examples of rooting against America from the media would result in arrest for treason. You do not have a first amendment right to encourage bloodthirsty savages to continue fighting.
What I'm saying is that I would become more vicious than the enemy. I would attack them with their own facist religion and deny them their heaven. I would get the intestinal fortitude to use our weapons that are more powerful than their weapons. I would terrorize them until they begged us to stop.
12 comments:
I actually really like this idea. Go in there with overwhelming force and annihlate them. Is it the sensitive thing to do? No, but how sensitive are they towards us?
These degenerate throwbacks have no regard for human life, except their own. How many threats do we need? How many beheadings do we need to see? How many more terrorist attacks on our soil will we need to convince us that this enemy needs to be squashed like a fly on an outhouse wall!
I would put Jack Bauer in charge.
I don't see that their fascist religion is all that different from your fascist religion.
On behalf of the three hundred million Americans who would prefer not to have our nation despised by every other living human being in the world, I hereby thank you, Daniel, for not running for office.
On behalf of the three million Americans who really don't care what a bunch of Europeans who were getting bribed by Saddam think, thank you for voicing the frustration all of us feel with the latest incarnation of evil, Islamic Jihad against the western world.
Its interesting to see how people will go to any extent to excuse evil, rather than confront or acknowledge it. That this weakness can be transformed within into a feeling of superiority over their fellow man, rather than confront the enemy that has vowed to destroy them, is a testament to the astounding malleability of human morality.
On behalf of the aforementioned three hundred million, or at least a majority thereof, who recognize that the U.S. is neither all-powerful nor unconditionally respected by the rest of the world, Europeans or otherwise, thank you for demonstrating the need for putting an end to politically-motivated terrorism in ways that don't just leave us with more of it to deal with.
"Its interesting to see how people will go to any extent to excuse evil, rather than confront or acknowledge it. That this weakness can be transformed within into a feeling of superiority over their fellow man, rather than confront the enemy that has vowed to destroy them, is a testament to the astounding malleability of human morality."
Oddly enough, I was about to say almost exactly the same words. The difference, of course, being that the evil that I see you excusing, instead of acknowledging or confronting, is the war. I'm forcing myself not to bring up the plethora of other factors and complexities involved here, because I'd like to hear your answer to this question: what does it mean to you that the United States have directly caused more death, destruction, violence and misery in Iraq, in four years, than al Qaeda has in the entire history of its existence?
Your question presupposes that I accept your assertion that the US has killed, in a cold blooded fashion, to the extent Al Quaeda has.
We have on record two things that are incontrovertible.
a) Al Queada blew up the world trade center killing 3,000. They have admitted this, thus, no controversy.
b) Al Queada has stated that they intend to kill, and keep killing, anyone in the western world that does not immediately convert to their vision of Islam. This has been stated by bin Ladin on numerous occasions. I don't think there is any controversy regarding this.
Given that I do not see the following:
a) That the US has killed more than Al Quaeda in an unprovoked fashion? Please list sources as to exactly how you arrive at a count surpassing 3,000 that the US has killed directly and in an unprovoked fashion as an attempt to start a war with the Islamic world in general or Al Quaeda in particular. Please do not give body counts from Iraq without a breakdown as the vast majority of these deaths seem to be from secretarian violence within Iraq rather than by US soldiers. You will need to give the exact figure of deaths, by US hands that have been judged murder, rather than battlefield deaths enforcing the Iraqi surrender and fighting mercenaries.
b) Please list, giving sources of some sort of generally respected nature, where the US has issued a proclamation stating that unless the Islamic world converts to the US world view that we intend to kill them all. This would establish parity with Al Quaeda and thus substantiate your position of moral equivalency.
c) If you can list b. please list sources that explain exactly how such a proclamation is rationalized given that the two wars we fought previous to Iraq/Afghanistan were to help Muslims i.e.. Kosovo and Somalia.
If you can not give figures of such a body count, Muslims killed in cold blood by US soldiers or personnel amounting to over 3,000 then your statement is unsubstantiated and thus meaningless.
If you are going to somehow blame Shia on Sunni violence as being the responsibility of the US in the same way that the world trade center bombings are the responsibility of Al Quaeda, then your statement is meaningless. The two have no moral equivalency and to draw the parallel is odd to say the least.
I await your response, to substantiate it will require facts of an absolutely fantastic nature to which I, and I suspect the vast majority of the western world are not privy. Your elucidation of these facts I would imagine will be quite earth shaking and pretty much be the news story of the decade.
Good luck!
No, no, that's now how the game is played. We're going without facts, remember? You made this quite clear in your cogent opening statement: "Its interesting to see how people will go to any extent to excuse evil, rather than confront or acknowledge it... confront the enemy that has vowed to destroy them." Point-counterpoint following this thesis can only exist if we postulate absolute polarity of degrees - i.e. we are fighting a single enemy, the "Islamonutjobs" as Daniel eloquently titled them, and that this enemy if a manifestation of pure evil. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Saddam Hussein, the two dozen militarized factions fighting for regional or national control of Iraq - all must be reduced here to "the enemy."
Now, you claim that I made the assertion "that the US has killed, in a cold blooded fashion." Wrong on both counts, I'm afraid, which makes the rest of your response more or less obsolete. First, no condition to the effect of "a cold blooded fashion," or any fashion, has been proposed, except by you. Second, I did not use the word "killed." Rather, I used the word "caused," in conjunction with the adverb "directly." In other words, the total sum of the death, destruction, violence and misery attributed to the United States is simply the number of Iraqis who are presently dead, self-exiled, etc. minus the number of those who would be in the same states of life if the invasion had not taken place.
The most conservative estimates - those counting specifically-reported cases - place the number of dead a little over 55,000. This, for those less math-inclined, is about 18 times the times the total number of deaths on September 11, 2001. Violence and misery are admittedly a little harder to measure, but with the addition of the 20% of the population that has fled the country, I have clearly made a solid case.
What an astonishing statement:
"In other words, the total sum of the death, destruction, violence and misery attributed to the United States is simply the number of Iraqis who are presently dead, self-exiled, etc. minus the number of those who would be in the same states of life if the invasion had not taken place.:
Basically this makes all war, regardless of any other consideration, more evil than surrender., since responding to the aggressor almost always results in more deaths than the initial aggression.
Examples:
More Germans were killed in WW1 and 2 because the US participated, than had we stayed out.
More Japanese were killed in WW2 than had we not fought to defend ourselves.
More Americans dead in the Civil War than had it never been fought.
In fact, I cant think of a single war in which more people did not wind up dead in fighting it than if they had simply surrendered on day one.
Second - You make the assertion that any death in Iraq is attributable to us. 55,000 dead? Those were all innocent civilians killed by US forces? I don't think that is true.
While you are at it, can you please tell me exactly how Al Quaeda is completely removed from any blame in your mind in this figure, since Al Quaeda leaders seem to be regularly popping up in Iraq?
Lastly: You are the one who drew moral equivalency by saying we had caused more misery etc. in Iraq than Al Quaeda ever did. Since you draw the moral equivalency, I ask you to back it up. That is why I ask for your figures of exactly how many we have killed in cold blood as compared to Al Quaeda. The 55,000 number is all well and good, but quite weak since there is no break down as to how many of those were outright murdered, which is necessary for the moral equivalency you draw. Until you can provide that figure your argument is pretty weak and constitutes something of a false syllogism.
All death and destruction is equivalent
Al Quaeda killed 3,000 people on 9/11 and thus caused death and destruction
Car deaths for that year were over 3,000
Cars cause more death misery and destruction than al Quaeda.
Cars are more evil than al Quaeda
First - in each of your examples, you focused on a single factor: death. If death were the only measure of a war's relative legitimacy, then by that logic, you'd be exactly right - war would be worse than non-war in nearly every case. (The most prominent exception would be World War 2; had the war not been fought, the victims of the continuing Holocaust in the following decades may well have exceeded the 54 million war deaths.)
But if you'll recall, I listed three other factors: Destruction. Violence. Misery. Each word given the broadest possible definition, the combination of these things justify some wars and condemn others. Every war causes all four, which just revalidates the simple truth that even a child can understand: war is evil, and a war is only justified if it is the lesser of two evils.
Applying this more complete definition, I would make the following final judgments: WWI was utterly pointless and caused more problems than it solved; WW2 saved entire nations from fascist dictatorship and the execution of innocent people; and the American civil war preserved a core principle of government and liberated millions from slavery.
As an aside, I also find it interesting that the only two choices you acknowledge are "fight" or "surrender," as if the aggressor too is not responsible for the continuation of the war it started. This being the case with the United States in Iraq, the third option, "withdraw," should be considered. Withdrawal and surrender are not the same thing outside of rhetoric; if we were to "surrender" to one of the dozens of factions we've been fighting in Iraq, we would literally be handing the keys to the White House to, say, al-Sadr. We're not quite at that point. It is not "us," the whole of our country, that has lost the war; it is the military force sent there by our government. And they will not be laying down arms and giving themselves up, as they would in a "surrender." We'd pull them out. A tactical retreat that would in no way give any of the Iraqi factions a blank check to slap us around in other parts of the world. Not that they'd really want to; for most of them, the USAF and the Green Zone government they're defending are just one of their many domestic problems.
Second - you're using the word "killed" again. We're not talking about the same thing. "Caused" was my word, "attributable" in the sense of linchpin responsibility. Even if al Qaeda claims that their actions were provoked by the United States, al Qaeda still bears responsibility for the WTC bombing, the Cole, 9/11, and their other attacks. Similarly, even if the United States claims that its actions were provoked by weapons that Saddam Hussein did not have and actions that Saddam Hussein was not doing, the United States still bears fundamental responsibility for the existence of the war.
Lastly: I drew moral equivalency between the direct effects of the actions. I have completely ignored the matter of causes, following your example. Your position is that "evil" should be "confronted," and you clearly condemn attempts to explain (which you equate with "excuse") why people do evil things.
There are reasons that cause people to turn to terrorism and use it against us. Those reasons can be identified and eliminated. We don't have to kill terrorists if we can peacefully stop them from becoming terrorists in the first place. We have the power to prevent the next generation from loathing us as their fathers did.
But if we're not going to acknowledge those reasons, then I have no choice but to judge the United States - more precisely, the Bush administration and the 109th Congress that enabled him, including, yes, too many Democrats - in exactly the same way that you judge al Qaeda, sans causality, sans legitimacy, sans intention, solely in terms of the "evil" that they have done, and thus are.
>the simple truth that even a child can understand: war is evil, and a war is only justified if it is the lesser of two evils.
War is evil? Who ever made that pronouncement? If someone attacks you, you are totally justified in defending yourself. War invariably wrecks more damage than surrender. so by your logic, surrender would always be the only morally acceptable choice.
>WW2 saved entire nations from fascist dictatorship and the execution of innocent people
Wait a second, you aren't following your own logic. Resisting Hitler cost far more lives than surrender. Look at deaths in France vs. deaths in Russia. It also caused far more destruction and misery than had we let Hitler simply Own Europe. This is why we had the Marshall plan.
>the third option, "withdraw," should be considered. Withdrawal and surrender are not the same thing outside of rhetoric
You need to re think this one. Bin Ladin specifically listed our withdrawal in Somalia as the main reason he felt he could attack us with impunity. Video of this has been broadcast fairly widely. Given that this past history and actions bear out the exact opposite of this statement to be true it is a little odd to believe it would suddenly be viewed differently by our adversaries.
>We'd pull them out. A tactical retreat that would in no way give any of the Iraqi factions a blank check to slap us around in other parts of the world.
Neat idea but again born out nowhere in recent history. Id suggest reviewing the Clinton policy of essentially not confronting the terrorists. It sure seems like that gave them a blank check to attack us. I kind of doubt a retreat would be a lot different. What past history supports your statement?
>even if the United States claims that its actions were provoked by weapons that Saddam Hussein did not have and actions that Saddam Hussein was not doing, the United States still bears fundamental responsibility for the existence of the war.
Saddam did everything in his power to convince the world he had WMD's. That is why every country believed he had them. Saddam was in material breach of his surrender. For that, he got a visit from us. I don't exactly see how that adds up to us bearing responsibility. He was given ample chance to live up to the terms of his surrender, he didn't live up to those terms, no getting around that one.
Just to be clear. Are you saying that if I hold up a 7-11. And I do everything in my power to convince the police I have a gun and then I get shot, then that is the fault of the police? That's some wild logic, but ok, I guess.
>I drew moral equivalency between the direct effects of the actions. I have completely ignored the matter of causes
Exactly, and that's why your moral equivalency is faulty. This is why shooting someone who is coming at you with a knife is morally different from shooting school children playing. The direct effect is the same, but they are not morally equivalent. This is where your logic really breaks down.
>Your position is that "evil" should be "confronted," and you clearly condemn attempts to explain (which you equate with "excuse") why people do evil things.
Yep, I sure do. Basically I come from the school of thought where if someone says "I intend to kill you" I don't really waste a lot of time trying to understand them, I defend myself. This is why Hitler is acknowledged as evil regardless of the onus of the treaty of Versailles.
>There are reasons that cause people to turn to terrorism and use it against us. Those reasons can be identified and eliminated. We don't have to kill terrorists if we can peacefully stop them from becoming terrorists in the first place. We have the power to prevent the next generation from loathing us as their fathers did.
This presupposes that whatever the reasons are, they are both valid and solvable. My experience, and the experience of the ages seems to indicate otherwise. When some fanatic scapegoats you for all their problems, its to be very hard to reason with them and get them to stop killing you since it tends to not be in their interest.
By the way, can you also share this knowledge with the Jews? I mean people have been popping up wanting to kill them forever and I know they would absolutely love to have this knowledge of how to make fanatics not want to kill them.
>I have no choice but to judge the United States - more precisely, the Bush administration and the 109th Congress that enabled him, including, yes, too many Democrats - in exactly the same way that you judge Al Quaeda, sans causality, sans legitimacy, sans intention, solely in terms of the "evil" that they have done, and thus are.
Go ahead and judge. Your reasoning is pretty faulty as demonstrated in this statement. I, and I think most people, have judged Al Quaeda precisely because of their intentions etc. It is you who are judging in this weird vacuum of moral equivalency where wanting to kill people because of fanaticism is the same as wanting to kill the fanatics in defense. An example:
Why did we go into Iraq?
To enforce the surrender terms, to get rid of WMD's and to establish a democracy and thus curtail Saddams terrorist activities. Any problem with that?
Why did Al Quaeda attack the US?
For the reasons they stated, we are infidels and must be destroyed.
Good luck on reasoning things out with fanatics. Its good in the theoretical world but frankly for real world applications it is a little lacking in terms of historical success.
- "War is evil? Who ever made that pronouncement?"
...what am I supposed to do with that? How, really, do you expect me to respond to even the suggestion of an argument that war is not evil? Read a book. Or watch a movie, if you don't have the time. Or talk to a bloody veteran, if you honestly think the rest of us are just too touchy-feely to stomach it. "Who ever made that pronouncement?" What the hell. I did. Here and now. I dare you to argue it.
- "War invariably wrecks more damage than surrender."
I disagree.
- "Wait a second, you aren't following your own logic. Resisting Hitler... caused far more destruction and misery than had we let Hitler simply Own Europe. This is why we had the Marshall plan."
I disagree with this, as well. Aside from the fundamental misery of lacking the freedoms of speech, of thought, and in some cases of life itself, and aside from the fact that Germany would very likely have attempted to expand beyond Europe if left unchallenged, there is the overriding fact that the people of Europe wanted our help. We were greeted as liberators in France, and that's a moment in American history that every President since Truman would love to have repeated.
- "You need to re think this one. Bin Ladin specifically listed our withdrawal in Somalia as the main reason he felt he could attack us with impunity."
This is irrelevant to my point that surrender and withdrawal are not the same thing. We did not surrender to any Somali faction, formally or effectively.
- "Id suggest reviewing the Clinton policy of essentially not confronting the terrorists. It sure seems like that gave them a blank check to attack us."
Certainly. President Clinton himself has admitted that his failure to respond to the bombing of the Cole, for example, was a mistake. But "the terrorists," in that case, consisted of al Qaeda. We're not talking about the same people here. There are over two dozen independent factions in Iraq, and most of them would have neither the capability nor the intention to follow us home; when our military withdraws from the country, we will simply cease to be a factor in their plans. For the Mahdi Army, for example, to arrange a terrorist attack against the United States even after our withdrawal would be like the United States in 1783 carrying on and invading Great Britain.
If you want past history, it's that simple. Self-interest. For the vast majority of Iraqi combatants, continuing conflict with the U.S. post-withdrawal simply wouldn't further their agendas.
- "Are you saying that if I hold up a 7-11. And I do everything in my power to convince the police I have a gun and then I get shot, then that is the fault of the police?"
Are we really back to this? Of course not. I'm saying it's the fault of the police if every single one of them clearly sees the little orange bit that means it's a plastic toy gun, but because they're really itching to kick some criminal posterior and it looks good in the papers, they go ahead and shoot, then spend the next four years saying things like "would you rather have a criminal back on the streets?" and "it doesn't matter that we shouldn't have shot him, the important thing is to keep him alive," except they're not very good at it, and all the experts are saying that they should take the guy to a hospital or just let him die, he's just lost too much blood. And then the guy finally dies, but the police don't want to admit it, and the police chief decides to shoot the guy again in order to knock the first bullet out, but in reality he's doing it in the hopes that it'll ricochet into the leg of this other guy standing nearby, so that it'll piss him off a bit and they can get into a new fight and everyone will forget about the first guy, and at this point the crowd finally jumps the police and everyone takes a deep breath.
- "This is why shooting someone who is coming at you with a knife is morally different from shooting school children playing. The direct effect is the same, but they are not morally equivalent. This is where your logic really breaks down."
At last, you've realized the point I was trying to make...
- "When some fanatic scapegoats you for all their problems, its to be very hard to reason with them and get them to stop killing you since it tends to not be in their interest."
It is. But a fanatic can't act alone. He has to convince other people - a lot of other people - if he really wants to do anything about it. We most certainly have the right to defend ourselves against him, but it would be foolish not to make it our top priority to convince his contemporaries that we're not what he says we are. It would be a very different story if bin Laden's claims were lies, and if every Middle Eastern person could see that if he chose, but that's not the case. I don't say this with the petty intent of needlessly criticizing my government' actions, because the criticism is anything but pointless. Things like Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo turn people against us; we reap what we sow and it's really not worth it. And it's not just the bad things we're doing, it's all the good things we should be doing. There are so many steps we can take to end poverty, eliminate religious indoctrination, and if nothing else make it one of our highest active priorities to find a resolution in Israel, even if it's not going to happen for another sixty years.
The people of our country show amazing compassion, hope, generosity, and tolerance on a daily basis, and our government needs leaders who can channel that into a foreign policy that doesn't work only to maintain this cycle of us-versus-them that nobody can win. In all honesty, did you ever truly think that the invasion of Iraq would ultimately lower anti-American sentiment and terrorism? In all honesty, Daniel, do you believe that treating our enemies worse than Jews in concentration camps will help our cause? It won't. For exactly the same reason that al Qaeda could never destroy this country even if they downed a hundred of our planes.
I'm going to say this for the hundredth time, just in case anyone still feels, yet again, like making the same old straw man argument against me. I am not saying we should reason or negotiate with the terrorists. I am saying we should make an appeal to the people whose support the terrorists need to survive. Come on - we're a nation that lives in a permanent election year. Haven't we learned a thing or two about good PR?
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