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."
The Real Foreign-Policy Failure By Andrew C. McCarthy
Sunday, November 04, 2012
Last week, Doug Feith and Seth Cropsey co-authored a very interesting and important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal,
“A Foreign Policy Failure to Acknowledge the Obvious.” It is about
President Obama’s denial of the Islamist threat. In it, they zero in on
two “strategic misjudgments” the administration has made:
First is the refusal to accept that the terrorism threat is part of a
larger problem of Islamist extremism. And second is the belief that
terrorism is spawned not by religious fanaticism but by grievances about
social, economic, and other problems for which America bears fault.
This is largely right. If it were internalized by a Romney
administration, it would be a step in the right direction. Still, the
essay goes awry in significant ways.Let’s start with the authors’ intimation that “religious fanaticism”
causes terrorism. To be sure, that’s a better explanation than the
Left’s “blame America first” approach. Yet, it still misses the mark.
The real cause is ideology, not religion. The distinction is
worth drawing because, for the most part, Islamist terror is not fueled
by Muslim zealousness for Islam’s religious tenets — for
instance, “the oneness of Allah.” We Westerners recognize such beliefs
as belonging to the realm of religion or spirituality. To the contrary,
Islamist terror is driven by the supremacism and totalitarianism of
Middle Eastern Islam — i.e., by the perception of believers that they
are under a divine injunction to impose all of Islam’s tenets. Most of those tenets do not
concern religion or spirituality, at least not as Westerners interpret
those concepts. Instead, sharia is largely concerned with controlling
what we see as secular affairs — political, social, military, financial,
jurisprudential, penal, even hygienic matters. Of course, the fact that
we separate church and state in the West does not mean our moral sense
is without influence — indeed, profound influence — over how we conduct
secular affairs. But in the West, we reject the notion that any
religious belief system’s tenets should control those affairs. In
the United States, we reject the establishment of a state religion —
such official primacy would suffocate freedom of conscience, a bedrock
of liberty. By contrast, the foundation of Middle Eastern Islam is submission to
Allah’s law, not individual liberty. This interpretation of Islam thus
rejects a division between the secular and the spiritual. Its sharia
system contemplates totalitarian control. That makes Islamist ideology
(i.e., Islamic supremacism, or what is sometimes more elliptically
called “political Islam”) just another totalitarian ideology, albeit one
that happens to have a religious veneer. Some of my friends make the error of claiming that “Islam is not a religion.”
I understand what they mean — it is a clumsy way of making the point
that mainstream Islam aspires to control much more than spiritual life.
Still, the clumsy rhetoric is a bad mistake, driving a wedge between
what should be natural allies: those fearful of Islamic supremacism and
religious believers. The latter — for example, American Christians,
Jews, and non-Islamist Muslims — today find their core liberties under
siege by government overreach and atheist hostility. How convenient for
these aggressor forces if, by the hocus-pocus of denying an established
creed the status of religion, its adherents may be stripped of their
constitutional protections. National Review
