Posted on 11/22/2006 10:05:56 PM PST by B-Chan
The war in Iraq is lost. The most powerful military in the world is incapable of defeating the tribal rabble of that hapless failed state. I admit it: the liberals were right and I was wrong. The war, though well-intentioned, was a mistake. How could this have happened?
It happened because the nation lost the war at home. Our military could easily defeat the so-called insurgents in Iraq in the same way we defeated the Japanese: by brute force, ruthlessly and indiscriminately applied. We could with no great effort reduce the entire country of Iraq to a smoking rubble populated solely by shellshocked, starving people. We could put every tribal warlord, gang leader, and rabble-rousing imam in Mesopotamia up against a wall and give them what Ceaucescu got. We could install a MacArthur to rule the country by diktat from a GHQ instead of propping up some farcical "representative government". We could institute curfews, censorship, and bans on public gatherings, just as we have done in past wars. We could announce a policy of reprisals for guerrilla action: for every U.S. soldier killed by an IED, ten villages would be evacuated and leveled.
But to do so would rip our own country apart. There would be marches, riots, burning buildings. The media would have a field day, just as they did during Vietnam. Why? Because the American people no longer support war -- ANY war.
***
And what have we learned from this mistake?
1. The military cannot win a war overseas without winning public opinion at home.
2. Without press censorship and a propaganda campaign the military will lose the battle of public opinion every time.
3. No American president is going to call for press censorship or a propaganda campaign.
Therefore, it becomes obvious that the military can no longer win wars overseas.
And therefore, we must no longer commit American military forces to any foreign conflict.
I'm afraid Patrick Buchanan was right, albeit for the wrong reasons. We should not send our forces to fight in foreign wars ever again -- not because doing so is immoral or against the national interest, but because thanks to all-pervasive propaganda the American people will no longer support such wars.
***
It is impossible to fight a war halfway. To win, one must mobilize one's country from top to bottom, then use that mobilized might to crush the enemy, destroy his ability to make war, shatter his will to resist, occupy his centers of power and industry, control his food and water supplies, kill his leaders, co-opt his culture, indoctrinate his children, and garrison enough troops in his country to seize control of it for at east a generation afterward. War must be total or not at all.
However, thanks to a decades-long program of political and social indoctrination, the peoples of the Western democracies no longer deem total war as acceptable. They have been carefully trained to believe that there is never a good reason to fight -- including self-defense. In their minds civilized people simply do not resort to violence for any reason. To such people, the death or injury of a single "innocent" civilian as a result of U.S. military action is a war crime. Never mind that by this standard practically every military hero in history is a war criminal; until we have magic weapons that can tell the Bad Guys from the Innocent Bystanders with 100% reliability, it will be impossible to wage war without committing war crimes.
The people have spoken. Our country can no longer fight wars. Therefore, we should end this one now.
***
Those of you who support democracy and/or republicanism, behold the ultimate fruit of popular rule: the Will of the People, captured by the skill of demagogues, this is why nose-counting as a means of determining national policy ultimately fails. this is why representative government eventually destroys that which it is meant to preserve. Just as an oceangoing convoy is only as fast as its slowest ship, a nation where the government is run by the consent of the governed is in the end only as smart as its most gullible voter. The republic our founding fathers designed has not failed; it works only too well. We the people have failed. We have failed to be good, honest, moral people, people with beliefs and ideas strong enough to resist even the most insidious propaganda.
I include myself among this unhappy number. I trusted the Bush administration to take our country to war. Instead, we got -- well, I don't know what we got. Some kind of quasi-war, a half-ass "global war on terrorism" that our leaders never intended to win. And we got it by voting.
***
As a monarchist, I am often asked "What happens if you end up with an evil or incompetent king?" My reply is "What happens in a republic if you end up with an evil or incompetent people?" In each case the result is chaos, dissolution, and ultimately anarchy. In a monarchy the solution is at least within human reach. After all, an evil or incompetent king is only one man, with a head that can conceivably be chopped off. But how does one chop off the head of The Sovereign People?
The answer, of course, is with leadership -- real leadership. In the case of a bad king, a leader arises from the aristocracy, a man with a natural charisma so strong that his troops follow him out of love, not for money or on the basis of some political ideology. This leader gains the backing of his fellow nobles and the imprimatur of the Church, rallies the Army to his side, deposes King Wicked, and assumes the throne himself. That is how an evil or incompetent body politic is properly killed.
In the case of democracy or republicanism, however, there is no source of leadership. We have no aristocracy, no nobility, no class of people trained from birth in the sacrament of noblesse oblige, no one destined by their natural proclivities to rule. (And we no longer care what the Church has to say.) We republicans and democrats have only the People -- capitalists (the rich), shopkeepers and artisans (the middle class), proles (the working class), and criminals. All of these groups are too busy to rule themselves; capitalism, shopkeeping, art, labor, and crime occupy them completely. None of these people have the education, the training, or the inclination for the task of government; therefore, they choose "representatives" to govern them, choosing these on the basis of whichever candidate's propaganda is sweetest to their itching ears.
Neither do these groups have the capability of raising up a true leader; the best that can be expected from them are robber barons (capitalists), con artists (shopkeepers and artisans), grifters (the working class) and tribal warlords (criminals). From where will come the Leader to save the Republic from its own people?
From the Army, of course.
It was true in Spain. It was true in Chile, it was true in France. It was most famously true in ancient Rome: after the Democracy, the Dictator. Democracy springs from Republicanism like sprouts from manure, and Dictatorship follows Democracy like a flower from the bud. Later, after Franco or Napoleon or Pinochet or Gaius Julius Caesar has hanged the traitors, purged the politicians, regulated the capitalists, made the streets safe for shopkeepers and artisans, ensured that the proles eat every day, and killed off or enslaved the criminals, comes the Empire -- where law, order, and justice are restored, kept safe from demagogues, propagandists, and the people by the Crown.
Will America follow this path? It's happened to other superpowers. I'm not smart enough to know what's possible in our own country's future. But I do know this: voting isn't going to fix the problem. Voting is at the root of the problem. And that's true no matter which bunch of demagogues you vote for.
And I know one more thing: it's going to get worse before it gets better. The rot is too deep. No amount of politicking is going to save us now. Our best strategy as the tottering republics fall is to assume the role of the abbeys during the Dark Ages: pray, husband our resources, pray, preserve our culture, pray, build our knowledge, pray, perfect our skills, pray, protect our own, and pray. We conservatives must recognize that liberalism has won, the People -- that is, the propagandists who manipulate them -- reign supreme; and that in time this revolution will lead to chaos, ruin, and the fall of civilization, just as it has throughout history. The Vandals have taken Rome; our duty is to keep the flame of civilization alive until Charlemagne comes around at last.
This has nothing to do with digging a bunker or building an arsenal; it means instead to concentrate one's time, treasure, and talent on protecting and caring for one's family, neighbors, and community. We need less street protests, campaign PACs, and TV ads -- instead we need more rosaries, more friends helping each other through tough times with interest-free loans, more prison visits, more people giving sandwiches to bums, more kids learning beekeeping or shoe making, more writers of heroic adventures (especially science fiction and fantasy!), more Bible and Torah experts, more hometown baseball, more backyard barbecues, more foreign-language lovers, more dreamers, more rabbis, bricklayers, priests, wipers of asses, nuns, stay-at-home parents, deacons, gleefully violent kids cartoons, cantors, slapstick comedians, altar boys, astronauts, war heroes and cartoonists -- in short, we need fewer ideologues, politicians, and other self-worshipers and more good people from every walk of life.
I love America. I vote, serve on juries, pay taxes, and am a military veteran. But I still have a few functioning marbles left, and one thing I've learned from forty-one years' attendance at the University of Real Life is that politics, ideology, and government do not make a country good. Good people make a country good. Therefore, the best, most patriotic thing we can do for our country is to pay as little attention to politics as possible and concentrate instead on becoming better human beings. By loving God and our neighbors we can do more for America than any ideology, platform, or political party could ever do.
***
So what is to be done? I'll post my strategy for getting out of this mess later in the week. For now, I'm going to genuinely give thanks for my wonderful life.
ENDE
No, you were right. Now you're wrong.
You must be a Plato-bot.
We shall see how long this insanity lasts in News-activisim. :)
You're giving him the benefit of the doubt. I suspect he was wrong both times! :)
I've come to many of these conclusions over the past couple of months. There can be no other reason that the forces of the U.S. are fighting house-to-house month after month in what can only be described as a stalemate.
One head at a time, my friend. One head at a time.
It is simply because the average Joe doesn't believe we are at war. Until war visits his home he won't believe it.
Personally I believe we will have the will to fight - and win - but it will only happen after a substantial number of our people are dead or dying.
The bottom line, sooner or later a western city will get nuked. How we respond will determine if we will survive as a free people or not.
Then there are those of us that will never surrender to the despair....as tired and beaten down as we may be and as hopeless as it may seem(key word there, seem).
!
You are a sad, strange little man. Must be depressing to be you if you beleive all that BS.
"A lot of us feel like we have our hands tied behind our back," says Cpl. Peter Mattice, of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. "In Fallujah, [insurgents] know our [rules of engagement] - they know when to stop, just before we engage."
It's Vietnam, all over again. The war is being lost by a politically correct new breed of Robert McNamaras back here, in the rear with the gear, at the Pentagon and the White House. What a sickening disgrace.
What crap!
It's depressing to be me when my spelling is that bad! ARGH!
beleive = believe
Agree. But the fact remains that we have felt despair and we have all felt beaten down at one time or another. I say today we cut B-Chan some slack and share with him some of our hope.
I only have three questions:
Who are you?
Why should I care what you think about anything?
Do you know what a rhetorical question is?
Boots on the ground say otherwise.Another self important know nothing media whore continues to blather on.
I could try to be more substantive, but what is one to do with those who want to revert to philosopher kings? Bill Buckley said it best. He said he would rather be ruled by a random assortment of folks picked out of the Boston area telephone book than the Harvard faculty. I agree with Buckley, not because I hate of disrespect Harvard, which I don't, but because, it really does not represent the fruited plain. It has its own passions and concerns, and they are not wholly shared by the folks in Fall River, Mass, much less in Provo, Utah, or Tulsa, Oklahoma, or York, Pennsylvania, or Midland Texas, to pick a few towns at random. The loci of wisdom are diffused. It takes a robust pluralism with rancorous and loud lawyer types having at each other, to sort it out. :)
I don't require others to join me but I come around here as much as I do to be reminded that I am NOT alone.
Thanks
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