Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Disgrace in Benghazi - A dying superpower’s blundering response.
Saturday, September 15, 2012
So,
on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and
drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the
president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say;
that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland,
or Des Moines.
The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls
screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand this
is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No,
no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober,
middle-aged midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and
respectful. The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared
remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a
government that spends more money than any government in the history of
the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a
speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to
consider what might be fitting for the occasion. So instead he sloughs
off the words, bloodless and unfelt: “And obviously our hearts are
broken . . . ” Yeah, it’s totally obvious. And he’s even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his
slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched
by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign
bobbysoxers. No, no, says the Broadway director; that’s too crude, too
ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he’s the
president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he’s the
greatest orator of his generation, so he’s thought about what he’s going
to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that
they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there’s complete
silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand
the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the
world. But no, that would be an
utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too
busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national
debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop
radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.” In the real State
Department, the U.S. embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no
ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service
officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace
(including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some
reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so
insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all
religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob
is pouring through the gates. When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally
wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and
incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in
Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the
level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia
would have. This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are
made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever
rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities
Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day in Yemen, which is a
permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the
day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at
Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody
else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian consulate. As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to
the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and
General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary
of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly
disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’
telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease
up on the old Islamophobia. Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton
and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with
anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear
or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong
assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a
spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and
executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton
and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American
people when they suggest otherwise.
One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya.
The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the
consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did
that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a
“safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that
happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for
ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt
Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court
eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these
fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting
on an American story to the foreign press. Mark Steyn in The National Review
