"Iran still refusing to halt enrichment"
"Bush Assassination movie coming to U.S. theaters"
"Syria foils American embassy attack"
"Oliver Stone hints at film tackling 9/11 'conspiracy'"
So it's obvious that while terrorists and the states that support them are still hard at work on their plan to destroy our country and our way of life, the liberal moonbats are hard at work blaming the Bush administration for all the evils in the world. The dichotomy is breathtaking.
I realize that Christians of good faith can hold differing political views. I try hard not to look upon Christians with socially liberal viewpoints as apostates, and there are certainly a lot of things that are distasteful to me about the Bush presidency (although probably not the same things that liberal Democrats have against it). However, this irrational hatred of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al, is starting to become psychopathic. It's amazing to me that people are so blinded by their politics that they cannot see that there is an enemy out there who would just as soon see both sides lying dead in a pool of their own blood. I was heartened after the September 11th attacks to see both sides of the political spectrum come together symbolically to stand against terrorism, but I feared that it would be short-lived. I had no idea it would be like this.
I disagree with the way that the administration has prosecuted the war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, although interestingly enough, the war-fighting part of both wars was initially incredibly successful. Unfortunately, we seem to have become so concerned with convincing everyone that we don't want to stay any longer than we have to that we have relinquished the initiative, and most of the territory, to the enemy. I am a bit of a history buff, and I have just finished Shelby Foote's three-volume, 3000+ page history of the Civil War. As a Southerner, I will be committing a little bit of a sacrilege here, but for the sake of argument, let's compare the South to the Islamist fanatics we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Southerners had fewer resources, less people, less land, and less weapons than the North. They had nothing going for them but a fanatical belief in the justice of their cause and their personal honor. However, for a good part of the war, almost every battle was won by the South, and if things had gone slightly differently at Gettysburg, the South could possibly have forced an end to the war.
What are the parallels? Like the anti-war crowd today, there were many in the North who weren't interested in fighting to keep the South in the Union. They frankly didn't think that the Southern states were worth the effort. Many went into the war thinking that it would be over in a matter of months - as a matter of fact, many of the first enlistments only lasted three months, and thousands of Union soldiers left the army without having fought at all. There were many in the North who wanted nothing to do with fighting a war over slavery, thinking that the slaves weren't worth risking white men's blood to free. And of course, there were those who were enthusiastic at first, but who became tired of the seemingly relentless conflict.
So what can we learn from the North's successful prosecution of the war? It is a little-known fact that only one major battle in the Civil War was fought on Union soil, again similar to the current war. When the Union moved over Southern territory, total war was waged. Crops were eaten or burned, houses were burned down, livestock was slaughtered, factories were destroyed, railroads demolished. The ability to live on the land was removed, and the Confederate Army was slowly beaten down by hunger, lack of clothing, and shear hopelessness.
Now one might argue that the battle to win hearts and minds would be forever lost if we decided to wage total war on our enemies with overwhelming force. However, I would contend that we never had much chance to win the hearts and minds of most of the inhabitants of Iraq and Afghanistan. They mistrust our motives, they have varying degrees of affinity with our enemies, and they have a long history of animosity toward the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Also, the bungling, ineffective way in which we have managed the post-war situation has created less confidence in our eventual success than there was before we started.
Now I'm not advocating burning down Baghdad. What I am suggesting though, is that the so-called "Bush Doctrine" should be completely implemented. The countries should be smothered with American troops. Weapons smugglers coming from Iran and Syria should be bombed, and strategic targets in Iran and Syria bombed as well, if efforts aren't made to cooperate. Terrorist/insurgent fighters should be tried quickly and executed. The Iraqi police should be brought under control and tried for crimes that they commit. The countries should be blockaded to the best of our ability. And leaders that foment unrest, even if they are members of the "government" (I'm talking about you, Muqtada al-Sadr) should be apprehended and imprisoned if possible, and killed if not.
Winning the U.S. Civil War was not about wiping out the hatred of the typical Southerner for the Yankees (some would argue that it still exists). It finally boiled down to Grant's determination to removing the South's will to fight, and accepting nothing less than "unconditional surrender." That was done by removing all hope the Confederacy had of winning. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the terrorists have figured out that, if our strategy doesn't change, they only need to hold on until Election Day, November 2008 for victory.
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