Posted on 10/08/2002 12:10:32 AM PDT by Greybird
Now I wonder if it'll last the decade. Especially since we'll be occupying the Mideast for that decade. Against protests, I offer three words as counterargument: Germany, Japan, Korea. The legions haven't come home, and at this rate, they never will -- voluntarily. Afghanistan is well on its way to joining them on the list of might-as-well-be-permanent garrisons. Next year, Iraq.
You forgot Germany and Japan.
America is only now becoming the 'empire' that our wannabe Euros to the north are talking about. Driving the stake through the heart of the UN is only a start - as is Iraq. There are going to be other temporary destinations in the War on Terrorism, some close by and others far away. China and Cuba come to mind.
Militarily, this author is obviously a Canadian. Few NATO nations make France look like a military juggernaut, either in attitude or hardware, but Canada does. The chances for a 'protracted war' in Iraq are about equal to that of the DemonRats obeying election laws. Doom and gloom using the reality challenged left as the source gives this one a 'Dry Heaves Alert'. No offense, Greybird, but I can understand your agreement with this one. Post anything positive about the US lately?
But not on this watch.
Sodom only needed to find ten righteous men in order to survive. When "America" gets to that point, when there are no longer ten righteous men left, we won't be here and we won't care that the time has come, because it won't be America any longer.
It is our duty in this time to work to prevent that.
You know, it's possible that what the founders intended is not what God intended when He brought forth this nation.
When we ordered the B-52 we ordered 600. The B-1 we had 76 and we just moth- balled half of them in the last six months. When we ordered The B-2 we where going to get 60 I believe, we cancelled half because of cost and ended up with 30. When Regan took office we had about 70 over sea military bases now I believe we are down to just 15.
We use to have an active Army for each section of the country four of them. Now we just have one active and half of it is made up of reserves. Our Navy fleet was reuduced by at least one-third in just 8 years of Clinton. I know we have good technology but most of our military planes are 30 years old and you can only recondition and update the same frames so many times.
Am I saying we are washed up, not hardly we still have the most powerful military in the world. But we are just a shadow of what we where even in the gulf war.The doctrine that we have to be able to fight two seperate wars has been done away with and while we are under a republican president.
When GW took office I expected a big build up and I think so did he. Then I heard we need to wait and do a study and then I heard we need a new type of military that is leaner ,lighter and more mobile. Sure we need to modernize but what I also afraid it means is we can no longer afford a large one. How can we when 2 of those B-2's cost us more than all 600 of the B-52's?
Bullshit. Wallerstein is a socialist, through and through - apparently having a new spin on socialism is enough to make you an independent-minded centrist in the eyes of the Globe and Mail. Which is, in turn, enough to reveal the worthlessness of this article - if the only people who can be found discussing the downfall of the US are the same people who have been (incorrectly) predicting it since the early 1970's, there's no particular reason to believe they're correct now, is there?
Wallerstein ought to title his next work "Still Wrong After All These Years"...
Sodom couldn't have had a population of more than a few thousand, if that. The US has what now? 350,000,000? I don't think there's any particular significance to the number ten other than in the specific case. Not ten righteous out of 350,000,000? Don't be silly.
I also don't think we're under any special protection as a country in the first place. More a question of actions having consequences.
He's just jealous. Somebody give him some Kleenex.
Britain thought that General Kitchener's use of the Maxim machine gun to slaughter the Sudanese put them on top, as well. That and a host of other innovations, such as in shipbuilding, were still not enough to preserve its empire.
One item that the article I posted doesn't mention is the worldwide transparency of scientific discovery. Almost none of that U.S.-financed military research is under absolute wraps, without discussion of basic science supporting it and much of the technology that results. (The last such notably successful example of secrecy, I'd say, was the A-bomb's Manhattan Project.)
What the controversy over Clinton's disgraceful leaking of U.S.-taxpayer-funded research to the Chinese ignored was that this accelerated what would have happened eventually. That certainly doesn't excuse it -- but the U.S. government wouldn't be the first world power to underestimate the power of the diffusion of research through the worldwide scientific community. Britain certainly did.
Every decent man, as Mencken said, is ashamed of the government he lives under. I extend that in equal opportunity to both halves of the statists whom we allow to rule us. Disgusting spectacles such as today's California gubernatorial debate -- Davis's slimy tyranny versus Simon's earnest tyranny-lite -- don't give me any reason to stop.
That figures ... and then it slithered over here.
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