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."
According to Reuters,
“the United States has given the remains of Islamic State leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi a burial at sea and afforded him religious rites
according to Islamic custom after he was killed in a U.S. commando raid
in Syria on Saturday.” This information came from “three officials,” all
of whom “spoke on condition of anonymity,” but there is no reason to
doubt it. There is ample reason, however, to wonder why it was done,
since virtually everyone of influence in both parties have agreed that
the Islamic State has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam.
Establishment Republican strategist Karl Rove said it on Fox News
Monday: the Islamic State (ISIS) has “hijacked a great religion” and
“stand in opposition to the vast majority of Muslims around the world.”
Rove added that “they want to pervert a great religion.”
Rove was simply parroting the conventional wisdom. All through the
Obama administration, the main concern of the President and his
underlings was not to counter the Islamic State’s advance, but to deny
that it had anything to do with Islam.
On August 20, 2014, speaking a
day after the Islamic State beheaded American journalist James Foley, Obama declared
that “ISIL [his preferred acronym for the Islamic State] speaks for no
religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches
people to massacre innocents. No just god would stand for what they did
yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any
value to human beings.
Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out
of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West,
but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing
but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any
definition of civilized behavior.”
This became administration policy: “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion,” said
Obama State Department spokesperson Marie Harf not long after that.
“The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can
underscore that, the better.” But if the State Department realizes that al-Baghdadi was indeed a Muslim, as this decision to bury him with Islamic rites indicates, then everything Bush, Obama, and a host of others have told us all these years is false. And indeed it is.
The UK’s Daily Mail reported Monday that Mohammed Ali Sajet, “one of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s closest confidants” who “is related to Baghdadi via marriage and has been an ISIS member since 2015, described al-Baghdadi’s hideout this way: “He was in an 8-meter-long underground tunnel with a width of 5 to 6 meters. It had a library, religious books and the Quran and things of sort.”
