January 15, 2004

Latest terrorist bombing - more

From The Belmont Club comes an excellent take on Ahmed Yassin and the mother of two infants who chose to blow herself up. Wretchard writes: bq. The March Toward Total War One more unspoken taboo, the prohibition on female suicide bombers, has been broken by Hamas. bq. The United States has also changed its behavior in the course of the struggle. Whether conducting house to house searches in the Sunni triangle, demolishing the mansions of Ba'ath bigwigs, cordoning off whole towns like Tikrit, requiring the biometric measurement of foreigners entering the United States, intercepting commercial airliners with fighter aircraft -- it's not your dad's America. All the accepted limits on combatant behavior are gradually changing as the Global War on Terror enters its third year. bq. This gradual brutalization has happened before. During the first Christmas of the Great War, British and German soldiers fraternized in the frontline trenches before bloodshed hardened them and prevented its recurrence. Winston Churchill refused to send RAF bombers against Berlin in 1940. By 1944 he was firebombing Dresden. By the fourth year of war, some USN submarine captains were sinking Japanese lifeboats. Both the Boeing B-17 and B-29 were designed as precision daylight bombers, intended as "smart weapons" that would destroy enemy strength without causing collateral damage. By end of the war, the B-29 had been modified from their original mission into an area attacks, burning out every major Japanese city with firebombs and, in the end, delivering the atomic bomb. bq. There is an old military maxim which holds that if a war is prolonged enough, the two sides will come to resemble each other. It is a recognition that a prolonged, indecisive struggle is often more brutal than victory. Thanks to the 'peace lobby', victory is now an evil, a triumphalistic phenomenon, to be avoided at all costs. In its stead, they will require the alternative: the slow and growing encrustation of human soul, until, in the fullness of time, it resembles their own. Emphasis mine -- this is so true. The 'peace lobby' is blind to what they are doing, they fail to see that their actions are dragging our efforts down as well. The constant media bias gives the terrorists hope -- the eight years of waffling during the previous democratic administration taught them that with a little bit of terror here and there, the American troops would be pulled back and diplomatic efforts would be re-started. This is exactly the wrong thing to be doing with this culture. It is not by any means 'politically correct' to be talking like this but one must at times speak truth to power only this time, it is the hard truth of reality talking to the top-down bureaucratic, nanny-state power-hungry creatures of the new Left. It gives joy that they are such a minority in this nation but their shrill outcries seem to gather the media's attention. I would like to suggest something to them. It is demonstrably proven that your efforts towards 'peace' are prolonging our work in the Middle East. If you truly want peace; if you look deeply into your heart and see that true peace is what you are desiring, then how can your morally continue your protests when, again, it is prolonging the conflict? Sit down and shut up and let us do the work. Thank you! Posted by DaveH at January 15, 2004 4:11 PM