Church went to hell three or four centuries ago. It was homosexual …
“Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no … You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: these are the enemiesof strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us.”
The reason for this thirty-nine-year war, in other words, is that President Richard Nixon believed that he was facing a “Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope” conspiracy, as
Washington Post
writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in 2002. But that is just plain wrong. As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-
Latino
conspiracy.
7.
TERRORISM I
You will note that I have some difficulty in curbing my contempt for most of the discussions of the “terrorist threat” that have been inflicted on us in the past few years. This is because I remember a time when the military, at least, understood that terrorism is a political strategy, not just “mindless violence,” and that the biggest mistake you can possibly make is to overreact. Doing so is falling into the trap they have laid for you
.
Once upon a time, all of the professional armed forces of the Western world understood that, because they spent the fifties, sixties and seventies fighting various revolutionary movements in the Third World that used terrorism extensively as a tool in their struggle. By the seventies, indeed, all the military staff colleges, where they trained the next generation of senior officers, devoted a large part of the curriculum to guerrilla wars and terrorism. But that generation is gone from the armies now, and so are most of the insights that came at a very high price
.
September 2, 2004
VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERROR
“With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win,” said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in Tennessee on August 31. “The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable,” repeated his vice-presidential running mate, Senator John Edwards. That is utter drivel, and they must privately know it, but truth generally loses to calculated lies in politics.
This outburst of bravado was prompted by President George W. Bush’s brief brush with the truth about terrorism the previous weekend, when he told an interviewer that he did not really think you can win the war on terror, but that conditions could be changed in ways that would make terrorists less acceptable in certain parts of the world. For a moment there, you glimpsed a functioning intellect at work. Such honesty rarely goes unpunished in politics.
This heroic attempt to grapple with reality was a welcome departure from Mr. Bush’s usual style—“I have a clear vision of how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world,” he had claimed as recently as August 30—and his opponents pounced on it at once. “What if President Reagan had said that it may be difficult to win the war against Communism?” asked John Edwards, in one of the least credible displays of indignation in American history.
Mr. Bush promptly fled back to the safe terrain of hypocrisy and patriotic lies. “We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win,” he told a veterans’ conference in Nashville on September 1. But it is not “a time of war” for the United States, and it cannot “win.”
Some 140,000 young American soldiers are trapped in a neo-colonial war in Iraq—where there were no terrorists until the U.S. invasion—and their casualties are typical of colonial wars: fewer than 1 percent killed per year. As for the three hundred million Americans at home, exactly as many of them have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 as have been killed by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the same period. None.
The rhetoric of a “war on terror” has been
“Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no … You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: these are the enemiesof strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us.”
The reason for this thirty-nine-year war, in other words, is that President Richard Nixon believed that he was facing a “Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope” conspiracy, as
Washington Post
writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in 2002. But that is just plain wrong. As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-
Latino
conspiracy.
7.
TERRORISM I
You will note that I have some difficulty in curbing my contempt for most of the discussions of the “terrorist threat” that have been inflicted on us in the past few years. This is because I remember a time when the military, at least, understood that terrorism is a political strategy, not just “mindless violence,” and that the biggest mistake you can possibly make is to overreact. Doing so is falling into the trap they have laid for you
.
Once upon a time, all of the professional armed forces of the Western world understood that, because they spent the fifties, sixties and seventies fighting various revolutionary movements in the Third World that used terrorism extensively as a tool in their struggle. By the seventies, indeed, all the military staff colleges, where they trained the next generation of senior officers, devoted a large part of the curriculum to guerrilla wars and terrorism. But that generation is gone from the armies now, and so are most of the insights that came at a very high price
.
September 2, 2004
VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERROR
“With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win,” said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in Tennessee on August 31. “The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable,” repeated his vice-presidential running mate, Senator John Edwards. That is utter drivel, and they must privately know it, but truth generally loses to calculated lies in politics.
This outburst of bravado was prompted by President George W. Bush’s brief brush with the truth about terrorism the previous weekend, when he told an interviewer that he did not really think you can win the war on terror, but that conditions could be changed in ways that would make terrorists less acceptable in certain parts of the world. For a moment there, you glimpsed a functioning intellect at work. Such honesty rarely goes unpunished in politics.
This heroic attempt to grapple with reality was a welcome departure from Mr. Bush’s usual style—“I have a clear vision of how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world,” he had claimed as recently as August 30—and his opponents pounced on it at once. “What if President Reagan had said that it may be difficult to win the war against Communism?” asked John Edwards, in one of the least credible displays of indignation in American history.
Mr. Bush promptly fled back to the safe terrain of hypocrisy and patriotic lies. “We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win,” he told a veterans’ conference in Nashville on September 1. But it is not “a time of war” for the United States, and it cannot “win.”
Some 140,000 young American soldiers are trapped in a neo-colonial war in Iraq—where there were no terrorists until the U.S. invasion—and their casualties are typical of colonial wars: fewer than 1 percent killed per year. As for the three hundred million Americans at home, exactly as many of them have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 as have been killed by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the same period. None.
The rhetoric of a “war on terror” has been
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