I read “Strategy for Defeat” many years ago, back in the days in Newport, RI, while studying such issues, and not promted by any reading list.

The book, written from the viewpoint of the admiral who was CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific), so he was well breifed in as to the “goings on” of the time.

I am working from recall, but Adm Sharp’s premise is the “doves” were the ones who caused the prolonging of the war and therefore the bloodshed, on all sides, and the “hawks” would have had the war come to a much faster conclusion. As a result, his contention was the hawks were actually the ones who would have saved lives.

His thesis was supported, in one chapter, by the story of a major sea port, aerial mines and “peace” talks…..

He said in 1968, he had forwarded a battle plan to mine Haiphong Harbor. The plan was rejected, because Washington felt Soviet ships (that were delivering war materials to the North Vietnamese) might become victims of the functional blockade and therefore a major international incident would be caused.

When the plan was finally executed in 1972, the North Vietnamese were at the Paris Peace Talks and actually talking, as their logistical “tail” had been strangled. This is more important in the light of the conflict between China and Russia as to who was “more senior” in the Communist world, and China was denying the Soviets the use of Chinese railways to send material to Vietnam. Being forced to get their major resupply by sea, and the major seport, with the capacity to offload the items, was cut off. The North Vietnamese quickly become more argeeable in figuring out how to back away from the conflict.

This is a lesson in strategy (recall who were the presidents in the two years listed above), and a show of force (or not when the capability existed), which managed to clearly and consisely communicate to our enemy we meant business. If you think about the metod used, there didn’t even have to be casualties, as the mines become “guards” on the sea ways, and would kill and maim the enemy only when the beligerent chose to cross the area.

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In Part III, I discussed how, if you have an understanding of organized sports, then you can use that understanding to look at the cultural, strategic and tactical issues we currently face.

As I have thought about this series more, I see something about sports we come to accept that provides more of the “governor” on our actions. This is the concept of “rules.” One of the things we do do well is translate our set of rules from the stadium to the field of actual conflict. We have a clear concept of some “authority” that contains the conflict to morally acceptable boundaries. In this same mold, we have, for a very long time in history, understood the “enemy” would be bound by the same rules. Not that sometimes there wasn’t a foul or penalty, but until the widespread introduction of guerrilla warfare in the post Korean War era, we could count on some gentlemanly (as difficult as it is to associate that adjective to this situation) acceptance and we went on with our wars.

So, here we have a governor on our actions and we are baffled when the other side completely disregards the rules. More amazingly, we have been in the state of shock since sometime in the 1960’s, and, our enemies have caught on to our befuddled state and then begin the pull tension on the cable, and we have long been hearing the ratchet click, all the while, wondering what “that clicking noise” is.

Now, toss into the mix that the referees and umpires, which we acknowledge their authority, have decided any action we take in the battle is certainly unacceptable, yet the activity of the enemy is accepted, as it is our use of force from decades gone by (disregarding much of it has been in response to aggression against us) calls for atonement now, and breaking the rules is the remedy.

In various sporting events, we have been know to wonder out loud(ly) if the refs are on the payroll of the other team. We are certainly in that situation, and not even having to wonder about one ref, the United Nations administration that accepted kickbacks in the Oil for Food scam. No wonder we can’t get a reasonable “call.”

Our feet are stuck in the sand (maybe concrete, hopefully not dry yet), awaiting the arrival of a fair umpiring staff to arrive, and it’s not looking good. While we know the calls are bad, we still stick to the rules we believe are acceptable. Not to imply we shouldn’t, it’s just that the rest of the world has thrown out the Laws of War and the Geneva Conventions, which took many millenina to make for humanity in thge first place.

But, I merely state the obvious.

This very week (how nice of them to comply with my blogging schedule), the Iraq Studies Group (ISG) will approach the President and make an attempt to open the hood and adjust the governor down below where it already is, further limiting our ability to continue in the conflict. I take issue with the composition of that body, for it appears only Chuck Robb has any combat experience, and he wasn’t a career military officer, able to gain significant hands on experience in the management of large scale battles that might help formulate a reasonable and achievable course of action. Certainly the inclusion of those with high level State Department and White House Cabinet level jobs on their resumes is good, but I’m not sure what Supreme Court Justices can bring to the table other than a legalistic set of blinders.

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Another opportunity to place your blogging in the eyeballs of my few readers…..Take a shot, who knows, you might get famous!

Sea stories….A short one. It’s about people, but it’s about signs.

Ships, quite necessarily, have bulkheads and doors and hatches for the purposes of preventing the spread of fire and flooding. Modern day warships also have a wonderful thing called “air conditioning.’ Basically, while the average reader understands “AC” as a creature comfort, yet aboard ship, that machinery is there primarily to keep the electronics cool, so the operating life is long. If you are able to gain some creature comfort as a result of being where the AC is, then it’s a bonus. Modify that with the ships built in the post-Vietnam era allowed for the crew living spaces to be air conditioned, to be nice to the crews.

Toss in that the AC you encounter in such spaces as Radio Central, the data processing center, transmitter rooms, and Combat Information Centers (CIC) is set to almost arctic condition levels, because the “twidget” maintainers believe the colder it is, the longer the equipment lives, and ergo, it’s longer between casualties, which then requires lots of work to fix the finicky items. If you read persona accounts of life on ships in the modern era, you will most likely come across accounts of sailors, while deployed to such wonderful vacation spots as the Persian Gulf and the equatorial Indian Ocean regions will add a top layer of a “Pea Coat” or a foul weather jacket on top of their dungarees to go and stand/sit their watch in Radio, SONAR, or CIC related spaces.

So, to the story. In order to “save” the cool, you need to maintain the “Air Conditioning boundaries,” where there are doors and hatches to the outside world, or the below decks engineering spaces. When ships are built, or overhauled, there are usually engraved bakelite plaques, mounted at eye level stating “Air Conditioning boundary – Keep Closed” (or words to that effect). Of course, some of the doors are on well traveled paths within the ship and in many cases, it makes sense, like loading stores, or bringing the stuff back from the SERVMART run, to hook or prop the doors open while carrying boxes, etc through the passageway.

Curious how this ends? Click here —> Read the rest of this entry »

Part II left you wondering what the answer is to the condition, where the Islamofascists are turning the crank, gleefully listening to each metallic *CLICK!* and the pawl first backs off, and then engages, one notch higher. The cable being pulled along is growing every tighter, symbolizing our emotional condition in regard to the GWoT.

I postulated before, that the carnage will grow worse. It is. It will, certainly through the installation of the newly elected Congress persons come mid January. “They” (the enemy of all that is western in nature) will continue to turn the crank to make sure we are not turning our gaze away from the humanity being sacrificed for the sake of a few who desire to stay in power…in positions so they may trade in human currency, much cheapened from anything we value it at, here in the civilized world. It is time for “them” to sprint to the finish line, which will be a few months into the Democrats control of both chambers of Congress, long enough to force a showdown (and in their mind a victory over) with the President by the Pelosi/Murtha/Rangel raging idiocy, which calls for more troops, while calling as loudly for the end.

The 21st Century is seeing but the leading edge of the Killing Fields, not witnessed since the mid-70s. Maybe we have forgotten what genocide is. Maybe “we” can turn a blind eye (no, we can’t we’re rubber-necking at the horrific nature of this equivalent of a bad car wreck on the Interstate) to what is more properly termed fratricide – the killing of your own. Mark my words. Short of the President stepping forward and emulating the vision and compassion of John F. Kennedy in the name of freedom, the death of many Iraqis is closer at hand than we care to accept.

We, particularly as an American culture, know exactly how to fathom and manage all of this. We practice it almost daily, some might say religiously, and accept it wholeheartedly for adults. For children, we have paved a road for future mediocrity in the same arena, at the hands of the Liberals and their “touchy feely” mindset.

So, what is it we know? Sports. We know it, we love it, we live it and breathe it. What is there in this analogy that can help us:

• A tough as nails coach is to be revered, for we know the outcome. The results are not today, or tomorrow, but across a lifetime;
• Strength is required. No excuses, get it or crawl to the sideline/bench in tears and get out of our way;
• Endurance is mandatory. Who likes a team who does great for the first period, and then looks like they got run over by a train for the rest of the game?
• Courage. Another ingredient, not in the same vein as in a war, but the desire to take risks when you see an opportunity;
• Refs make bad calls. Shout a few bad words and deal with it. Then, get back in the game, and re-double your efforts;
• We.Love.Winners. We don’t recall the losers, because it’s about winning;
• The “12th Man” can save your butt on a bad day. The fans, wearing your jerseys, the band, the cheer leading squad, the water boys, the managers and the groundskeepers all have a hand in your victory.
• We want to be around winners. We disregard our “personal space” to crowd our bodies together for a glimpse of them, and reach out to get their autographs;
• Entire media outlets, let alone time slots are dedicated to these pursuits. We strain to hear over “those rude people, who don’t get it” to hear the highlights of the game and the latest stats;
• We have people emulate entire league sports in a fantasy world, and use performance statistics (you know, TRUTH!) to estimate the outcome of the teams played in a virtual sense;

Need I say more? From this list, a thinking person could work through it and see where we are not doing that in this war, which, unlike sports, does have an effect on our ability to be able to put this amount of energy into the past-time of sports for a major portion of the population.

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The lead in post is here….

Look at our pattern of waging since we have twice used miniature suns on our enemies:

Korea – Took the attack, got rolled back, finally got into the battle, rolled over the enemy, right up to the far end of their country, when we let them. joined by their allies, push us back and a long term armistice has been in place ever since, the Korean War having nver reached “closure.”

Vietnam – Took over from our allies, brought a conventional military, in terms of equipment and mindset, designed for a fight against an armor heavy military, into triple canopy jungles, initially to fight against an un-uniformed militia. While we dominated on the battlefields, even with our historical mindset and equipment limitations, world political opinion was picked up by our own governmental authorities, and we declared victory and departed, promising support for our allied forces. Strategically, we lost the war and the cause of world communism enslaved the people of South Vietnam, when too many loud voices said we couldn’t stomach the carnage anymore. In this war, we faced an enemy who wanted us out our their country, which, was definable by internationally recognized lines on maps.

Gulf War I – A defined mission to liberate Kuwait was handily achieved, using tactics requiring entry into a second nation (Iraq). While the military sought to not only push the aggressors out of Kuwait, they began to neutralize, by elimination, the forces of Saddam Hussein. With his paper tiger military was trapped on the “Highway of Death” while leaving Kuwait, our public opinion lost it’s stomach once more and demanded the end of the carnage, which was actually the strategic destruction of enemy armed forces, and was not engaging civilians. Once again, we fought against a country, one that we could identify on a map. We pushed them back within their borders.

The Global War on Terror – We have used far fewer troops to control two foreign nation far from our shores than any nation has used before in a “war.” We have been exceedingly “delicate” in the application of force, which has left mostly infrastructure intact, compared to the carpet bombing in WWII. We now are hamstrung by an enemy that knows no national boundaries, flies no flag, and wears civilian clothing, operating freely in all nations of the world. The stated goal of the enemy is not for us to leave “their land,” for “their land” is the entire planet. As a result, they are demanding the conquest of all lands of the world. We may leave Afghanistan and Iraq, but that will not be the end of the conflict. At best, it will provide a time to breathe, but no more.

This discussion is about our “governor,” metaphor being the control imposed, short of being able to reach full power on a piece of machinery, a limiting device. I would contend, with each conflict after WWII, we went in and adjusted the governor each time to a lower level than before, while at the same time, we were engineering more and greater military might and technical ability to attack anyone who attacks us.

Why? That is the main question.

You can understand the nations of the rest of the world, our allies, our enemies, and those who are still trying to decide who to stand with in the future, is looking at our much publicized debate and hoping they have correctly ascertained a trend in our policy and actions. The hope of the enemy is we will, lose our lunch and and, maybe, unlike Vietnam, not have the politicians declare victory and then bring the troops home (More like force the withdrawal by cutting off the appropriations money), but this time, following the trend line established, declare we are defeated in our effort to attack a root cause of aggression not only against us, but against all peoples who do not declare Islam as their guiding principle, and tell the rest of the world, from the mouths of our most senior elected officials, we should be ashamed of having sent out troops to their doorstep, to barge in and rape their daughters and kill their sons and fathers, and then cut off the funding, causing a “redeployment” all the way back to their stateside bases.

So, we are coming to a crossroad in our history. Do we, with the most powerful weaponry, the most militarily effective, yet compassionate people every to step forward in the defense of our nation, allow people, who are now well over 30, yet proclaimed “Don’t trust anyone over 30!” while they are young, to emasculate the military, so they may bow before any other country who does not “like” what we do?

It is clear. The projection of the ability to back up your statements, showing your strength, is what the world respects, unless you are the strong one. It is a particular human condition to try to tear down the ones who have risen to the top. We see it in the business world, as software companies went to Congress to try to break up Microsoft. We see the liberals attacking Wal-Mart, and we have the Islamofascists telling the world we need to be conquered. The enemy, respects the strength of our military, and like the Soviets, realize they cannot beat us on the battlefield. They can, as proven in Vietnam, in Central America, and to a lesser extent, in Gulf War I, defeat us by turning the stomachs of those in Congress and a few widely respected media outlets.

We have the answer and it also shows the degree of schizophrenia that has come to be accepted within our society. That will be the topic of Part III of this serial posting.

Batteries Released! Put your links here!

Dateline: Just before Independence Day, 1973, Charleston Naval Base, Charleston, SC, aboard USS CONE (DD-881).

The ship has been to sea for two weeks, playing “Orange Force” (polite way during the Cold War of not offending our enemy by calling our seaborne aggressor units, something other than “red forces.”) surface units, catching up on their Naval Gunfire Support (NGFS) qualifications by sending round after round of 5″/38 cal (54 lb projectiles) at the Carribbean isle of Culebra.

The long weekend was coming, there were 6 third class (“3/c”) midshipmen aboard, the crew had recently returned from a year off the coast of Vietnam, providing real world NGFS services for the Army and Marines, and the stacks needed a good going over with haze gray and the Ship’s company deserved some “R&R” after a hectic operating schedule.

I certainly wasn’t privy to the discussion, being a guy wearing dungarees for 6 weeks, as my first hands on educational experience as a one day to be Naval Officer, but I know this: Someone up the chain of command had the brilliant idea of letting the crew take off early for the really long weekend (Wednesday was the 4th that year), and deemed that the 3rd Class Middies, already with some practical experience handling painting implements in the fire rooms and the interior of the ARSOC launcher, as well as on the Signal Bridge, would be tasked to remain behind and be supervised by the duty section.

So, there we hung in Bos’n’s chairs from the fore and aft stacks, armed with brushes and rollers and prodigious amounts of haze gray, on the morning of the 3rd of July, we went about getting either the Engineer Officer’s of the 1st Lt’s “to do’s” knocked out.

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(disclaimer: may not be in the exact chronological order, and will not list each and every act of terror, but a good list is linked here)

*click!*
The Olympics in the 70s.
*click!*
The US Embassy in Iran.
*click!*
Marine Barracks, Beruit
*click!*
Leo Klingenhoffer on the Achilles Lauro
*click!*
Lockerbee, Scotland.
*click!*
Discos in Germany where US Service members congregate
*click*
Bombing of embassies in Africa,
Swarming over the “Mog”
USS COLE
9/11
Madrid
7/7
*Click!*
*CLICK!*
*CLICKKKK!*
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Yesterday, I drafted a piece “Iraq: The Democrats 21st Century Cambodia?” I cross posted the piece at Third World County andI received a comment that linked to an editorial by Gordon Dillow in the Orange County Register from April 2005, which was written 30 years to the month after the final US pullout from South Vietnam.

Don’t take my word for this coming human rights disaster (funny how the Democrats hold themselves up as the champions of this issue, isn’t it?), read about a man and his father in the following editorial, then consider the human wreckage to have and to hold, when we pull out of Iraq, thinking it will stop the Islamofacsists from demanding more and more, until we are nothing left…

This month will mark the 30th anniversary of a shameful chapter in our nation’s history. Thirty years ago we abandoned a longtime ally, the Republic of (South) Vietnam.

And with it, along with millions of others, we abandoned Quang X. Pham’s dad.

Quang is an old friend of mine, a 40-year-old Mission Viejo businessman who came to the U.S. as a boy refugee from Vietnam and later served as a U.S. Marine helicopter pilot in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His father, Pham Van Hoa, now deceased, was a U.S.-trained South Vietnamese Air Force pilot who spent 12 years in a communist “re-education” camp because he refused to leave his country when the North Vietnamese army swept through South Vietnam in April 1975 – this while America, after investing 58,000 of its own sons’ lives, stood by and washed its hands of the entire bloody and tragic affair.

And even though he became an American who loved his country and served it courageously in uniform, for many years that abandonment rankled Quang’s heart. It rankled mine, too.

Quang has written a new book about his father, and about his own experiences as a refugee who became an American Marine. It’s called “A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey,” published by Ballantine Books (you can get more information at www.asenseofduty.com), and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand what the Vietnam War meant to some of the people who suffered the most because of it – that is, the people of South Vietnam. It’s powerful, and moving, and in it Quang tries to dispel a myth about Vietnam that still persists.

The myth is that guys like his dad didn’t fight for their country.

“I just want to see South Vietnamese (military men) like my father acknowledged,” Quang told me. “Not made into heroes or anything, but just acknowledged for what they did. I wanted to set the record straight.”

Certainly the casualty numbers tell a story that’s far different from the myth. The South Vietnamese armed forces lost a total of about 250,000 men killed in the war – a number that, as a percentage of national population, was about 50 times greater than American deaths.

And the numbers of the maimed were even greater. Ten years ago, as a reporter for the Register, I went back to Vietnam to cover the 20th anniversary of the end of the war, and everywhere I went I would meet aging former ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers who were missing arms or legs or eyes, many of them reduced to beggary because the communist government offered no pensions or even menial jobs for former ARVNs. When they found out I’d been an American soldier in the war they would often break out yellowed, crumbling, long-hidden South Vietnamese military ID cards and tell me, “I was with you, I was with you.”

And they were.

Now, I know some of my fellow American Vietnam veterans will disagree with me on this subject. They’ll call me up and tell me bitter tales about “Marvin the ARVN,” about South Vietnamese M-16s that were in perfect condition because “they’d never been fired, and were only dropped once,” about South Vietnamese corruption and incompetence and cowardice. Certainly there was no shortage of such things, particularly in the ARVN’s politicized upper ranks.

But don’t tell me – or Quang X. Pham – that 250,000 guys died with no brave men among them. Don’t try to tell guys who got their arms or legs blown off that they didn’t fight hard enough. Don’t think that a lot of guys like Quang’s father didn’t have a sense of duty and honor, even as they lost their war, and their country, and languished in brutal communist prison camps for years and years and years.

In the coming weeks you’ll probably see and hear a lot of retrospectives about the Vietnam War, some of them truthful, many of them media myths perpetuated by people who were never even there – the same sort of myths that even now are being created about the Iraq war and the Americans who’ve been fighting it. More on that in a future column.

But if you think that the Vietnam War was strictly an American war, if you think that the people of South Vietnam weren’t worth fighting for, or with, then I have a suggestion.

Talk to a guy like Quang X. Pham.

And ask him about his dad.

Read the book. See history throught the eyes of one who has been there and project into the future as to what might be as a result of taking counsel of our fears.

Update 11/17/2206:

From John of Castle Arrgghhh!, an email of an Army Officer, who has had mulitple tour in Iraq. He sees something over there and it says we’re about to do what this post is about, in the minds of the Iraqis, friend and foe alike, from David J. Baer, CPT(P), IN, 3/2/6 IA MiTT Team Chief:

By all means send my note on to his family. Before I got this job on the MiTT, I was a mechanized infantry company commander in southeast Baghdad and I lost two soldiers so I know what it’s like to write letters of condolence and what kind of loss his family must be feeling. You always hear certain people in Congress talk about leaving Iraq because of the horrible casualties we are taking and whatnot. However, they never seem to be the ones with family over here doing the grunt work. And as for casualties, each loss is a blow, but overall we have been extremely lucky to have as few deaths as we have had since 2003. No one in D.C. ever seems to ask guys like me what we think because they know that we would tell them that we have to stay until the job is done. If you want to win in Iraq, you have to take the gloves off like we did in OIF I and OIF II. We were aggressive and violently kinetic. It worked and the bad guys were deathly afraid of us and the people of Iraq respected us. Now we use kid gloves and the bad guys walk all over us and the people of Iraq don’t think they should support us because we may pack up and leave and then they would be the object of reprisals. It’s the hard right (lots of offensive action and firepower and not afraid to use it in a city) or the easy wrong (the kinder, gentler approach to dealing with terrorists to try and avoid casualties). I know which one works and which one doesn’t. I know which one will solve this “problem”. It will break a few eggs, but in the end we will have an omelet that will be passably good and tasty.

How about them apples? Act strong, be respected. Act weak and suffer attacks.

H/T: Third World County reader DC

Trackbacked at: CAstle ARRGGHHH!!!

Recently, the discussion was about the Tet Offensive and how the events of February, 1968 related to current day situations was posted on this blog here and here.

Possibly now, it is the moment to get ahead of the power curve and discuss the big picture that happened 30 years ago, and see if it may relate to what happens next….

So, Richard Nixon was President. The Democrats had control of the Congress. The President, as he promised in his election campaign was pulling our troops out of ground combat positions, yet left the promise of support for the South Vietnamese Army, using the strategy of “Vietnamization,” a process of turning the war over to the ARVNs, as they were able to handle it.

Effectively, in 1972, our ground combat forces were out, safe advisers left the ARVNs. While the president is the Commander-in-Chief, Congress controls the money (you’d think people would quit accusing the presidents, of any time, of what goes on with the budget, but, once more, I digress). So Congress cut off the funding for the supporting arms and the supplies from America going to South Vietnam. Now, the study of history over the ages shows the winner of wars is the country who has the best logistics and can out-produce the adversary in the fight. When “we” (the Democratic Congress) pulled appropriations from the war support effort for our allies, they sentenced them to loss of the war, and, in many cases, death in a very literal sense.

So in 1975, the NVA rolled into Saigon and raised the North Vietnamese flag in that city. It was over. What next? The Communist rebels in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot now had nothing to fear and a totalitarian government came into power and the killing fields became a part of life, as about 1/2 of the population of Cambodia was killed it’s own.

Why did the conquest of South Vietnam and the mass murders happen across the border? There was no nation with the power to let them know this wasn’t acceptable.

What does this mean today?

We already know there is simmering hate in Iraq between the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds. We have not yet been able to help them understand there’s a better way to solve issues than to murder 75 people a day, using very brutal means.

Add to this, there is at least one neighboring country, Iran, already stirring the pot, for for us to have an ally, let alone a foothold in the region, keeps them in check, unable to carry out their desires to control much of the region. Syria is a player, too, but seem to at least be keeping their head down and themselves out of the media coverage.

So, the time may come, if the Democrats can strong arm their agenda to withdraw, whether by getting the President to acquiesce to this via the “bi-partisan” Iraq Working Committee, or by the pulling of appropriations for any support of our troops. The Department of Defense will end up with no choice to bring the troops hone, or at least out of the battle zone of Iraq.

My prediction: The Sunnis, having been in power for so many years, used to being able to, even as a minority, rape the other cultural groups of the country, literally and figuratively, feeling they have some right to murder and torture as they feel. So, the Sunnis will come back with a vengance at the Kurds and Shiites. Bloodshed…and much of it.

Add to this the military power to the East, the Iranians. They, with their affinity for the Shiites, the majority culture, will now roll across the border and become directly engaged with the Sunnis. Bloodshed.

The Kurds, who have rebuilt much of the infrastructure to the north, and are already prospering from the oil flowing, will most likely get attacked by the Sunnis and Shiites, and the Iranians, as they have valuable resources and are using them.

If we thought we stepped into a hornet’s nest in 2003, we haven’t seen anything that will be like this. The locals of the area will feel empowered to kill and plunder in even more horrific manners and scales than they have, for they now see “we” (and I substantially contribute this to the Democrats and the Liberals) don’t have the stomach for it. Much like asking someone to be an EMT and all they can do at any car accident is to stand by, while people bleed to death, throwing up. Those people, politically, are the Democrats and they, in this scenario, would decide it’s better to legislate against people having car accidents, rather than finding those who can take care of such messy conditions, and wait until things are safe to toss their cookies.

More and more, I am coming to see the Democrats in modern times are the party of death and destruction, with pools of blood running from their hands. They do this, not because it’s the best course of action for the rest of the world, or the country, but so they can ascend to positions of power, where they can rent the Lincoln bedroom out to friends to raise money, so they can buy their way back into power.

I can only figure their deep dissatisfaction with the War on Terror, is they see the revenues of President Bush’s tax cuts flowing towards Iraq, and not into their hands, to bribe the voters of the next election with their largess.

The Democrats and Liberals have never acknowledged they had a part in approximately 3M deaths in SE Asia after 1972. They cannot, for they would have to face their part in mass murder.

They stand on the edge of history and are prepared, with a complete disregard for history, their own, and that of world events, ready to loose the executioners in the Middle East, first, and later in Africa and Europe. They will then turn their face from the horror and go back to their fund raisers, not even consciously aware of their shameful part in the deaths.

My gallows humor would be to think maybe they are thinking of this outcome as a help for the environment, for after all, it’s people and the demands they place on industry, that cause greenhouse gasses and causes desertification and the now, the acidification of the oceans. If we have a few less million of us to cause pollution, let alone perpetuate the species, then we’ll not have to worry about running the air conditioners quite so long at the homes and offices of liberals.

Update 14 Nov 2006: See this follow up post, too!

Cross posted at:

Third World County

Trackbacked at:

Eagle Speak

Poster from Murdroc Online

H/T: A commenter on Littel Green Footballs of a CNN Report:

Marine to receive Medal of Honor for Iraq heroism

November 10, 2006

President Bush on Friday will announce that the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, will be awarded posthumously to Marine Cpl. Jason Dunham.

In April 2004, Dunham was leading a patrol in an Iraqi town near the Syrian border when the patrol stopped a convoy of cars leaving the scene of an attack on a Marine convoy, according to military and media accounts of the action.

An occupant of one of the cars attacked Dunham and the two fought hand to hand. As they fought, Dunham yelled to fellow Marines, “No, no watch his hand.” The attacker then dropped a grenade on which Dunham threw himself.

Dunham was critically wounded in the explosion and died eight days later at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington.

“His was a selfless act of courage to save his fellow Marines,” Sgt. Maj. Daniel A. Huff of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, was quoted as saying in Marine Corps News that April.

“He new what he was doing,” Lance Cpl. Jason A. Sanders, 21, of McAllester, Oklahoma, who was in Dunham’s company, was quoted as saying by Marine Corps News. “He wanted to save Marines’ lives from that grenade.”

In various media accounts, fellow Marines told how Dunham had extended his enlistment shortly before he died so he could help his comrades.

“We told him he was crazy for coming out here,” Lance Cpl. Mark E. Dean, 22, from Owasso, Oklahoma, said in Marine Corps News. “He decided to come out here and fight with us. All he wanted was to make sure his boys made it back home.”

The Scio, New York, native would have been 25 years old on Friday.

Dunham’s story was told in the book “The Gift of Valor,” written by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Phillips.

Dunham will be the second American to receive the Medal of Honor from service in Iraq.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith was the other, honored for action near Baghdad International Airport in April 2003, in which he killed as many as 50 enemy combatants while helping wounded comrades to safety. Smith was the only U.S. soldier killed in the battle.