… are we also obliged to feed, house, and re-educate our sworn enemies …

Obliged by whom? By what?

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The cold fact of reality is that a 7 year old wearing a bomb vest is just as lethal as a 30 year old wearing the same device. And one might have to kill either to save oneself or others whom one is responsible to protect.

The moral responsibility for that child’s death would lie with the monsters that strapped on the bomb.

Saving and educating that child is a luxury that one might or might not wish to indulge in, or even be able to afford if desired.

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Taking on oneself the responsibility for educating the entire world is at best like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, and at worst suicidal.

There is an endless and constantly renewed supply of ignorance and error in the world. There is no way for a single person, community or even nation to keep up.

Minds can only be changed one at a time, and only by their possessor. To think otherwise is to engage in fantasies of omnipotence.

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A nation might occasionally decide to engage in a sort of Marshall Plan. But only if that nation is willing to undertake unbreakable imperial control of the subject nation, with all the brutality that such a course is likely to require.

We’ve done an amazing, but nonetheless rather half-assed job in Iraq and Afghanistan, where sharia law is still enshrined in their constitutions, meaning that the injustices of sharia theocracy can raise their heads again at any moment. We just didn’t want to undertake the rough task of crushing their traditional culture. The next generation after us will have to deal with the results.

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So far as the teenage Somali pirates are concerned, it is worth bearing in mind that through most of human history, roving bands of male “teenagers” have been responsible for much if not most of the murder and mayhem. Even in our own culture, we bring boys into the army at 18. I wouldn’t get too moist and sentimental about the innocence of 15 year old bandits. They can be damned dangerous, cold as steel and as serious as cancer.

We may consider them children (see The Death of the Grown-Up – Diana West) but by most of the world and by the standards of most of human history they are just young men. And to the extent that they have been mentally neglected or twisted by their home cultures, well the moral responsibility lies with their home cultures, not us. They are not pets. They are men. Dangerous men.

And they will leave a trail of weeping widows in their wake if they are not forcefully dealt with.

Our #1 responsibility is the defense of our own interests and civilization. Anything after that is luxury, possibly dangerous luxury.

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Bottom line: We must defeat them, in that we have no choice. We cannot save them all, even if we want to.

We are not gods.

Doing more than that should depend on the group or nation posing the threat. Iraq posed a significant threat, in my opinion, and had a lot of potential for becoming friendly or neutral, like Kuwait. Its location gives it high strategic importance.

Less developed areas and nations like Somalia and Afghanistan are questionable, debatable. (The two cauldrons of hate produced by the Palestinians are especially so.)

As adults go, so will children. While I sadly agree that it is morally permissible to defend yourself against a child posing imminent threat, it is morally wrong to condemn all small children who have been taught to hate. (I do not think I could kill a child in self-defense, and I hope never to find out.)

So our efforts should be to militarily defeat enemy adults and teenagers, support friendly adults and teenagers, and let them turn the children around or deal with them if they turn into criminals or terrorists. I am sad to include teenagers with adults, but remember, teens used to be considered young adults and still are in the majority of cultures in the world.

Norman

Given what I know about teenagers, when I hear about teenage Muslim boys chewing khat and waving AK-47s around, I don’t think, ‘pooor darlings’, I think – “Loose cannon”.

I have read a bit about ‘child soldiers’, not only those recruited and brainwashed for Jihad (I recall the Janissaries of old), but those trained by Pol Pot, for example, or the children Mao used to destroy China in the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, the younger they are when seized and ‘trained’, the more dangerous they are; for a 5 year old or 7 year old has even less ability they have to withstand brainwashing or to question or disobey an evil order. They are subjected to extreme abuse expressly designed to *destroy* their moral sense, *destroy* what we might call their sense of ‘boundaries’, for those who make and use them want them to be robots who will do anything, absolutely anything, up to and including killing their parents if the order is given.

When one meets such zombified ‘children’ on the battlefield, there is nothing to be done but to stop them, as fast as one can, by all means necessary. I applaud the three brilliant head shots that took out the three jihad gang members and rescued the American captain. I do not condemn, at all, the Israeli border policemen who shot that 16 year old Beduin girl jihadist who was trying to kill them; she might have been wired up to explode.

But I think the deepest, hottest place in hell is surely reserved for the evil people who take children and teenagers and kill their souls and turn them into assassins.

Whether the young assassins themselves, if captured alive, can be deprogrammed – perhaps the term ‘exorcism’ is appropriate here, or ‘raising the dead’ – I do not know. I don’t think anyone has seriously made the experiment.

To let the left or the right continue determine foreign policy is to cut our own throats. Only the hated neo cons and repub feminists got it right. Condi Rice got it right. 8 regional women’s centers in Afghanistan, economic development projects, women’s hospitals and schools, legal and media training for women, constitutional rights…

If our society, as a whole, wants to survive, the left, in its entirety, must be rejected.

The Left considers anyone who opposes America to be “oppressed”. Trust me, if we were to go into those countries, give everybody money, schools, aid, try to re-educate them, the Left would immediately start screaming that we’re bloody imperialists, destroying their wonderful indigenous culture, which is so much more wonderful than our own allegedly soulless, materialistic one.

And I hope people do realize that many of our sailors and soldiers are in their late teens, not much older than those “oppressed” and “abused” young pirates.

Of course this would be a change in foreign policy from the filth we do now. Too bad we don’t have a sec of state with real power.