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."
Erdogan’s Agenda : Turkey was once a staunch ally of the West and a reasonably free country. No longer. By Michael Rubin
Friday, May 17, 2013
Later
today, President Barack Obama will sit down with Turkish prime minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Oval Office. It will be a friendly reunion.
Obama has said
Erdogan is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed
“friendships and the bonds of trust.” Speaking to the Turkish parliament
four years ago, on his first trip abroad as president, Obama declared,
“Turkey is a critical ally. Turkey is an important part of Europe. And
Turkey and the United States must stand together — and work together —
to overcome the challenges of our time.” These challenges are many —
among them, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While
Turkey and America partnered for the greater good throughout the Cold
War, no amount of White House praise can hide the fact that Turkey today
is less a bridge between the West and the Islamic world and,
increasingly, a force undermining trust and cooperation. Erdogan,
who is now in his second decade of power and quite openly plotting for
his third, has transformed Turkey from an imperfect democracy based on
rule of law into an increasingly dictatorial state rooted in religion.
By tweaking university admission formulas, he privileged students from religious high schools,
who had long been denied acceptance because they lacked a solid
liberal-arts foundation. In order to help these unqualified graduates
enter the civil service, Erdogan imposed a new interview process,
transforming a meritorious civil service into a mechanism for political —
and religious — patronage. The Turkish military, once the envy of the Middle East, is now a
shadow of its former self. Despite the recent peace accord with the
leaders of the Kurdish insurgency, the Turkish military has trouble
controlling large swaths of the southeast. And the Turkish air force
continues to lose planes — the latest earlier this week — along the
Syrian border when, in contrast, Israel has run high-risk missions
without any casualties. The reason is simple: Like Josef Stalin, who
gutted the Soviet military in the years prior to the Nazi invasion, or
Ayatollah Khomeini, who did likewise to the Iranian military in the
months before the Iraqi invasion, Erdogan has done his best to destroy
his country’s military. One in five Turkish generals rots in prison, many on dubious charges and most without even a court date. American
diplomats initially cheered the reforms that excised the military’s
role in politics — after all, ending military influence over politics is
a noble goal. But since Erdogan’s government did not construct any
alternative system of checks and balances, excising the military allowed
him to pursue his agenda without regard for rule of law. He and his
aides were not shy about seizing the opportunity. In response to
judicial vetoes of the prime minister’s religious and social
initiatives, Bulent Arinc, then speaker of the parliament and now
Erdogan’s chief deputy, threatened to dissolve
the constitutional court if it continued to find the ruling party’s
legislation unconstitutional. More recently, in a fit of pique, Erdogan told parliament, “We want to raise a religious youth.” Women and minorities have suffered disproportionately. Erdogan has forced Turkey’s minority Alevis to attend Sunni religious classes, and he has flushed women from top levels of the state bureaucracy, advising them that instead of pursuing a career they should have at least three babies
and ideally more. And Turkish women today find not just their careers
at risk, but their lives. In 2011, Turkey’s justice minister reported to
parliament that, between 2002 and 2009, the number of women murdered
each year had increased 1,400 percent.
Some of that is the result of better reporting, but the bulk appears to
be due to a sharp rise in the number of honor killings: Would-be
perpetrators are no longer deterred by fear of prosecution, as the
increasingly conservative police forces sympathize with the Islamist
notion of honor. Obama once quipped that he had turned to Erdogan for advice on raising teen daughters. Perhaps for the sake of his two girls, he had better find a new role model. In
most democracies, the press holds the government accountable. That is
no longer so in Turkey. Erdogan’s security forces arrest journalists
with impunity; in ten years, according to Reporters without Frontiers,
Erdogan has transformed his country into “the world’s biggest prison for journalists.” After first stacking
once-independent banking boards with functionaries trained exclusively
in Saudi Arabia, Erdogan has used their financial pronouncements to
justify seizure of opposition newspapers. Turkey now ranks below even Russia, Palestine, and Venezuela in press freedom. When career American diplomats like Daniel Fried describe
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party as “a kind of Muslim version of
a Christian Democratic Party,” they appear so wrapped in the bubble of
political correctness that they have become detached from reality. American
policymakers might shrug off Turkey’s domestic turn away from rule of
law if it did not presage a transformation of Turkish foreign policy.
Erdogan’s agenda has more to do with the promotion of Islamic solidarity
than a fight against terrorism or dictatorship. The days of Turkey’s
being “a vital and strategic partner of the United States,” as
Condoleezza Rice once described it, are over. Pages 1 2 Next ›National Review
