Rudyard Kipling"
āWhen 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 soldierā
General Douglas MacArthur"
āWe are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.ā
āIt is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.ā āOld soldiers never die; they just fade away.
āThe soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.ā
āMay God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .ā āThe object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
āNobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
āIt 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."
Obama finally demolished the claim that settlements are an obstacle to peace. By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 29, 2013
āI honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with those [Palestinian] kids, theyād say I want these kids to succeed.āā Barack Obama, in Jerusalem, March 21
Very true. But how does the other side feel about Israeli kids? Consider that the most revered parent in Palestinian society is
Mariam Farhat of Gaza. Her distinction? Three of her sons died in
various stages of trying to kill Israelis ā one in a suicide attack,
shooting up and hurling grenades in a room full of Jewish students. She gloried in her āmartyrā sons, wishing only that she had 100 boys
like her schoolroom suicide attacker to āsacrifice . . . for the sake of
God.ā And for that she was venerated as āmother of the struggle,ā
elected to parliament, and widely mourned upon her recent passing. So much for reciprocity. In the Palestinian territories, streets,
public squares, summer camps, high schools, even a kindergarten are
named after suicide bombers and other mass murderers. So much for the
notion that if only Israelis would care about Arab kids, peace would be
possible.
Israelis have forever wanted nothing more than peace and security for
all children. Thatās why they accepted the 1947 U.N. partition of
British Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Unfortunately ā
another asymmetry ā the Arabs said no. To this day, the Palestinians
have rejected every peace offer that leaves a Jewish state standing. This is not ancient history. Yasser Arafat said no at Camp David in
2000 and at Taba in 2001. And in 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
offered a Palestinian state on all of the West Bank (with territorial
swaps) with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas walked
away.
In that same speech, Obama blithely called these āmissed historic
opportunitiesā that should not prevent peace-seeking now. But these
āmissed historic opportunitiesā are not random events. They present an
unbroken, unrelenting pattern over seven decades of rejecting any final
peace with Israel.
So what was the point of Obamaās Jerusalem speech encouraging young Israelis
to make peace, a speech the media drooled over? It was mere rhetoric, a
sideshow meant to soften the impact on the Arab side of the really
important event of Obamaās trip: the major recalibration of his position
on the peace process.
Obama knows that peace talks are going nowhere. First, because there
is no way that Israel can sanely make concessions while its neighborhood
is roiling and unstable ā the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt,
rockets being fired from Gaza, Hezbollah brandishing 50,000 missiles
aimed at Israel, civil war raging in Syria with its chemical weapons and
rising jihadists, and Iran threatening openly to raze Tel Aviv and
Haifa. Second, peace is going nowhere because Abbas has shown Obama over the
last four years that he has no interest in negotiating. Obamaās message
to Abbas was blunt: Come to the table without preconditions, i.e.,
without the excuse of demanding a settlement freeze first.
Obama himself had contributed to this impasse when he imposed that
precondition ā for the first time ever in the history of Arab-Israeli
negotiations ā four years ago. And when Israel responded with an equally
unprecedented ten-month settlement freeze, Abbas didnāt show up to talk
until more than nine months in ā then walked out, never to return. In Ramallah, Obama didnāt just address this perennial Palestinian
dodge. He demolished the very claim that settlements are the obstacle to
peace. Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are āthe core
issue,ā he told Abbas. āIf we solve those two problems, the settlement
problem will be solved.ā
Finally. Presidential validation of the screamingly obvious truism:
Any peace agreement will produce a Palestinian state with not a single
Israeli settlement remaining on its territory. Any settlement on the
Palestinian side of whatever border is agreed upon will be demolished.
Thus, any peace that reconciles Palestinian statehood with Israeli
security automatically resolves the settlement issue. It disappears. Yes, Obama offered the ritual incantations about settlements being
unhelpful. Nothing new here. He could have called them illegal or
illegitimate. It wouldnāt have mattered ā because Obama officially
declared them irrelevant.
Exposing settlements as a mere excuse for the Palestinian refusal to
negotiate ā that was the news, widely overlooked, coming out of Obamaās
trip. It was a breakthrough. Will it endure? Who knows. But when an American president so
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause tells Abbas to stop obstructing
peace with that phony settlement excuse, something important has
happened. Abbas, unmasked and unhappy, knows this better than anyone. National review
