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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
When Total War is Not an Option
The New Sisyphus has a fascinating post titled When Total War is Not an Option
A group of Palestinian children were sent towards the Gaza Strip border fence holding toy guns on Thursday in order to test the vigilance of the soldiers on duty.
It covers quite a bit of ground.  There is a great discussion about how we go out of our way to avoid civilian casualties and the terrorists go out of their way to cause them.  He also talks about how we've handled similar situations in the past.
In case you've been to college lately and think that the Japanese were treated thusly only because they have different color skin and look different, consider our similar treatment of the European, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Christian Germans: we firebombed their cities and killed them where ever we could find them, if they fought from bunkers or pillboxes we burned them alive inside with flamethrowers, we bombed their cities into rubble as a matter of strategy, and-again, listen up because this is important-when they hid snipers, troops or supplies in Christian churches we utterly destroyed them, even when they were ancient and culturally priceless cathedrals. And when we were done, we divided the country into four zones, occupied our portion of it, ruled it directly, hung their former leaders, determined on our own who would be allowed to take part in German public life from that point forward and warned the public that more death and destruction would be forthcoming if they dared heed the calls of the last Nazi holdouts to fight a guerrilla war. There was a small German insurgency even so; it was ruthlessly suppressed within two years.
It talks about "Jacksonian" war and how we're fighting.  Definitely worth a read to get you thinking.

posted @ Wednesday, June 07, 2006 10:51 PM | Feedback (0)
Catching Up
There are a number of items I've been wanting to link to and I'm not going to do them all justice.  So here they are:
The other thing I think is funny is all the articles you don't read on the booming economy.  We've been doing well now for thirty-four months in a row.  Most of these are PowerLine posts.  I'm finding a lot of interesting information through those folks.
posted @ Wednesday, June 07, 2006 10:45 PM | Feedback (0)