Hunkered Between Santorum and Paul Lies Peace Through Total War
“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a multitude of imams and Islamist fanatics disagree. They don’t value life as Western civilization does.” is as wrong as wrong can be. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the imams value their lives as much as anybody in the West, what they don’t value are the lives of their citizens. The turmoil in the Middle East, and the rest of the world, isn’t about Islam, it’s never been about Islam. It’s about power, it’s always about power. Islam is simply the tool of choice used by the imams to acquire and hold power. Remember that the “terror movement” was orchestrated by the Soviet Union as a proxy war against the West.
Before you tell me that I’m wrong, consider the two national religions of the United States: The Pro-Choice Religion and the Pro-Life Religion. The high priests of each religion are politicians who promise to do various things if only you grant them power. You grant them power and nothing happens. Well, they say, you just need to give them more power. You give them more power and nothing happens. The secret is that nothing is intended to happen except that they, the high priests of both religions, get all of the power. You’ll also note that some high priests change their “deeply held religious views” as often as they change their socks.
The same holds true for Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba and all of the other totalitarian states. They each have, or had, a national “religion” that concentrates power in the hands of a few high priests. It’s foolhardy to appeal to the “hearts and minds” because the only ones that matter are those at the top and they’re focused on acquiring more power. The minions are just fools, they may well be dangerous fools, but it’s still a useless exercise to engage in humanitarian outreach because the fools aren’t making the decisions.
If you want to change the dynamic then you have to change those at the top and you do that it two ways. First, you can remove the high priests. Either kill them or buy them off. Recall that Gaddafi stopped when he understood that *his* life was in danger. Second, you can kill enough of the foot soldiers that the population removes those at the top themselves. But half-baked “containment plans”, “surgical strikes” and “proportional responses” won’t get the job done. You need WWII-era carpet bombing with the attendant mass destruction and mass casualties. If you’re not willing to attack the true threat to the realm then you shouldn’t engage, if you’re too “civilized” to destroy the horde of human shields then just surrender the Sudetenland and call it a day. And, frankly, if you don’t understand that it’s foolish in the extreme to value the lives of those who are seeking to do you harm more than their leaders do then you shouldn’t be allowed to hold power.
It’s difficult to view the WOT as (a) anything but an abject failure and (b) a very successful exercise by the high priests to grab more power. When you’re stealing liberty and suppressing freedom then mutually exclusive objectives aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
