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."
One
common theme emerges from the hearings over the Benghazi disaster: The
Obama administration is intent on downplaying the Islamic roots of
terrorists who harbor an existential hatred of the West. The
killing of Osama bin Laden was supposed to have cut the hideous head
off a mutant snake. His death officially destroyed the ācoreā of the
aberrant al-Qaeda. The removal from power of the outlier Qaddafi was
likewise to have put an end to the artificial obstacle to the natural
evolution toward democracy in Libya. In those regards, an
al-Qaedaāinspired, pre-planned hit on the American consulate, resulting
perhaps in a full-fledged Mogadishu-like shootout, just was not in the
administrationās pre-election cards. No one was disposed either to beef
up security in the face of escalating threats, or to send in teams in extremis to save the besieged Americans, or to give an honest appraisal afterward of what had transpired.
Meanwhile,
the opportunity to blame the entire mess on an easily caricatured
right-wing Christian Islamophobe crackpot was too tempting ā as Susan
Rice, Hillary Clinton, and the president himself found as they serially
damned the suddenly-to-be-imprisoned Mr. Nakoula. He was a con artist,
but not the provocateur of the Benghazi violence ā and yet he proved a
perfect vehicle for showcasing the administrationās multicultural bona
fides. In terms of explaining away the lapses in Benghazi, the challenge
arose of how many ways top officials could damn the unfortunate Mr.
Nakoula ā as if each denunciation made it unnecessary to utter the word
āterrorismā or āal-Qaeda.ā
The fantasy that prior American
policy was insensitive to Muslims and did not differentiate sufficiently
between Islam and al-Qaeda has been an article of faith of this
administration. Go back and review the initial Obama interview with
al-Arabiya or the loud professions of CIA director John Brennan, who was Obamaās chief counterterrorism adviser at the time of the Benghazi attack. The
corollary of this fantasy was also natural: The greater worry is
anti-Islamic bigotry and prejudice, not heightened awareness of the
propensity for certain people to commit terrorism in the supposed
service to Islam. This odd mindset explains both the Orwellian
euphemisms (overseas contingency operations, man-caused disasters,
workplace violence, violent extremism, etc.) and the collective madness
of some career-minded bureaucrats competing with one another in the
public arena with their politically correct nonsense (cf. the Muslim
Brotherhood as āsecular,ā NASAās āforemostā mission as Muslim outreach,
or jihad as a āholy struggleā). That groupthink was based on the flawed
idea that the more we deny an Islamic catalyst to terrorism, the more
there will be none.
The problem was not just that elites seeking to
ingratiate themselves with the Obama administration routinely indulged
in such willful blindness, but that these absurdities filtered down to
the day-by-day protocols of our intelligence and law-enforcement
bureaus. In almost every major recent terrorist incident in which Americans
have been attacked, the question is not whether, but on how many
occasions, American intelligence agencies knew of, and had good cause to
detain, the eventual perpetrators, whether Anwar al-Awlaki, Nidal Malik
Hasan, or Carlos Bledsoe. Those on the ground in Benghazi had warned
their State Department superiors that American facilities were in danger
from attacks by Islamic radicals. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was visited by the
FBI and known to the CIA for his overt jihadist sloganeering. In each instance, the warning signs were ignored. These omissions raise the question: Why?
The
anti-Bush narrative from 2003 to 2008 (spawned by the unexpected luxury
of no further 9/11-like terrorism) was largely that reactionaries and
bigots had cooked up a war on terror against nonexistent enemies. Or
maybe these paranoid sorts had even goaded otherwise moderate Muslims
into terrorism by their counterproductive anti-terrorism protocols: Take
away the Guantanamo Bay ārecruiting toolā or Iraq as a āprovocation,ā
and, presto, Islamic-inspired terrorism itself wanes. In near religious
fashion, almost every time Barack Obama traveled abroad in his first
three years as president, he evoked Guantanamo. It became a sort of
verbal tic, intended to denigrate his predecessor and showcase his own
multicultural brand. Alas, for all the obsequiousness and cash, U.S.
popularity in the Middle East is as low as it was under Bush.
Yet
privately, Obama and his supporters hedged somewhat, in fear that the
odious Bush might have been onto something about radical Islam. Thus,
rather quietly, President Obama immediately embraced almost all the
Bush-Cheney anti-terrorsim policies and even expanded some of them, with
the full knowledge that his own base would prove quite flexible now
that he was president. Pages 1 2 Next āŗ National Review
