Writings, Rants and Kudos

The Anti-war left and Dissent

A couple weeks ago I went for a trail run in the Pennsylvania backyard.  This run is 3 miles up and 3 miles down; my own little Currahee.  This was around the same time that Senator Edwards was attacking the GWOT as nothing more than a "bumper sticker" so my blood was allready up.  I came across an SUV in the parking lot that had a distinctly offesive anti-war bumper sticker:  "Ignorance and Arrogance is Bad Foreign Policy."  I decided that I would ask the owner why they thought that they felt that they were more qualified as an expert on Foreign Policy than a US Marine.  Here is the response that popped up in my in-box today:

________________________________________

From: Paul Simpson [mailto:pksimp@comcast.net]

Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 10:22 PM

To: mxh181@psu.edu

Subject: note left on my car

Dear Warrior,

Thank you for the invitation to expand on the sentiment conveyed by my bumper sticker. No, I didn’t notice your bumper stickers. I was out of the country at the time. The young woman who was using my car was alarmed and somewhat intimidated by your threatening actions in a remote place. I am not intimidated by your effort to keep me from expressing my opinion.

I have come to expect such behavior from those who would suppress dissent in any form. Ethical thought and behavior has nothing to do with partisan politics. This war was lost at home before it was started because it is illegitimate in its very conception. I find it sad that someone with two related degrees and 14 years as a “professional warrior” is unable to see the irrationality, immorality, and criminality of a military enterprise which involves an unprovoked attack on a country that harbored no terrorists and was no threat to us.

This attack has resulted in the destruction of a civilized society. In the process of this illegal invasion and occupation, you and your military have carried out the murder of nearly a million people and the creation of over two million refugees. In addition, torture, deliberate targeting and abuse of civilians including women and children, use of illegal weapons of mass destruction (cluster bombs, white phosphorous, depleted uranium and more) and a host of other war crimes have been committed by your brothers in arms. Did your education and fourteen years experience never inform you that all this is wrong and that by being involved you are complicit if not directly guilty in these atrocities? You seem to imply that the existence of religious extremism in the Middle East justifies these actions. Does the existence of Christian extremism in this country mean that others would be justified in carrying out such atrocities here?

It has been recognized since at least the time of the ancient Greeks that to allow warriors to control government and make policy is to invite the loss of democracy. Your place as a warrior is not to lecture civilians on foreign policy or any other policy. You have stepped outside the bounds of your duty and thereby violated your oath to this country. Your only honorable course from here would be to refuse to participate in these crimes against humanity. Are you man enough to do so? For your wife and daughters, I certainly hope so, because I fear that is the only thing that will put a stop to this insanity.

A civilian

Here is my response:

________________________________________

From: Mike Hendrickson [mailto:mxh181@psu.edu]

Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 11:20 AM

To: 'Paul Simpson'

Subject: RE: note left on my car

Dear Sir,

Thank you for responding to my note.

It is your right to express your opinion, as it is my right to express mine. I find it interesting that while you provide me with your “opinions;” I am not entitled to mine. You wear your politics on your sleeve for the world to see, but I can’t offer my opposing opinion in a private note to you?

When you put a bumper sticker on your car that undermines the very mission I am tasked to accomplish and supports the strategy of terrorists, you jeopardize the lives of every marine, soldier, sailor, airmen and coastguardsmen that are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m deeply offended by it, and you should not be surprised.

Those who fight my brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan only wage tactical engagements against us to create sensational loss of life. Their operational goals are to undermine the support for us in the US, by attacking the psyche of people like you, so that we will leave. Your bumper sticker(s) provide them with a metric that they use to measure their success. Again, you have a right to espouse your views, but you also have a responsibility to understand that your actions and opinions support my enemy’s strategy.

Simply put – “Chief incalculable in war is the human will.” Since “at least the time of the ancient Greeks” and throughout history it has been recognized that wars are won by those with the strongest will and motivation. The Peloponnesians knew it; the Athenians knew it; Sun Tzu and Clausewitz knew it. I believe that you also understand it. Whether you choose to believe it or not, you have the blood of dead Americans on your hands.

It may make you feel better to believe that my intent was to intimidate. In reality, my intent was to inform you on how frustrated those of us in the military are at people like you – people that believe nothing more than propaganda and have very little interest in performing the academic rigor necessary to really understand the enormity and potential impact of what we are attempting to do in the region. You fail to recognize that the byproduct of a stable, secure and economically viable Iraqi democracy is a lasting middle east peace that could have an incredible impact on a sustainable peace across the global community we call earth. You give absolutely no credence to the notion that sometimes peace is worth fighting for. Your argument, while seemingly well thought out, is based on nothing more than half-truths and myth – those things that you gleaned from the internet or that someone else has told you.

You can try to slap a label onto “what my brothers in arms” have done and call them war criminals – go right ahead. War sucks. War is terrible. War corrupts. There are some who cannot be trusted on the battlefield, who become consumed by the totality of war. They should be held accountable and punished. But you lump everything that has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan and everyone that has served in the CENTCOM AOR into the latter category. You choose to engage with logical fallacy as a method of argument. You are wrong to do so.

I am sure you feel good when you convince yourself that we are like the Nazis. You would like to believe that I am a monster, that the military is made of monsters – that we deliberately target civilians, resort to torture, use “weapons of mass destruction,” and “depleted uranium.” You can cling to the propaganda – but what you have no frame of realistic reference because you don’t have a clue about who I really am or what a battlefield is actually like.

You’ve seen too many movies/”documentaries” and society has convinced you that warfare can be placed neatly into a little box. You think that “surgical strikes” are actually precise, that military people cannot make a mistakes and that killing (only when absolutely necessary according to some secret scientific formula) can be done “cleanly.” You’ve never seen a 19 year old American marine risk his life to protect a family caught in the crossfire, expose himself to enemy machine guns and snipers to allow that family to escape the bullets and rocket-propelled grenades fired by men without souls. You’ve never seen one of Saddam’s mass graves. You’ve never seen the headless body of someone’s child after the real monsters have hacked a message to the people that are attempting to change their country for the better. You’ve never seen the aftermath of a suicide attack on a line of Iraqis waiting to join the Iraqi Army; never witnessed them treat the wounded, tend to their dead and then get right back into line to fight for their own country. You’ve never talked to the American media and then read your words twisted into a bull shit story about something that never actually happened.

You refuse to believe that the vast majority of Americans who are serving today in Iraq and Afghanistan do so because they deeply care for the Iraqi people and believe in the hope for a better Middle East. It makes you feel justified and “honorable” to believe we are monsters, and therefore to oppose our mission. Again, what makes this country great is that you have a right to cling to your warped sense of good and evil. But I damn sure don’t have to like it, just because you say so.

Those of us who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan do so willingly, volunteer to return for subsequent tours, risk our lives and ask our families to sacrifice their happiness because we do not want another generation of Americans to shed another drop of blood in the Middle East. We didn’t want the state of war that had existed between Iraq and the United States to become a permanent destabilizing regional paradigm like the reality of the Korean peninsula. We did not want the people of the Middle East to live under the thumb of tyranny any longer. We did not want to watch the oppression and stagnation of economic inequality corrupt the good intentions of inherently good people. We no longer want people flying planes into buildings or resorting to strapping suicide vests on their bodies and walking into crowded markets to blow innocent people up to make a point.

Iraq is the single place in the heart of the Middle East where there is a possibility of creating an alternative solution. Iraq is the only place where we can possibly unite the secular part of moderate Middle Eastern culture and bring about real, substantive and positive change in the region. For thousands of years, Iraq has always been a stabilizing structure of the Middle East. This war has little to do with oil or profiteering and nothing to do with American domestic politics. It has everything to do with the Global War On Terrorism. It has everything to do with changing the Middle East over the long term, to support stability, peace, economic prosperity and global interdependence. And that is why I am willing to risk my life and have volunteered to go to Iraq.

There is a movement in this world that opposes the active creation of a peaceful global community. You are being duped into buying into their argument of hate and isolationism. I am willing to fight them to help peace in the Middle East finally become a reality and not just a bumper sticker.

Semper Fidelis.

ON FORGETTING THE OBVIOUS by Robert D. Kaplan

 

This picture taken in the halls of the US Congress says it all.  A great read.  Kudos Mr. Sun Von Kaplan.

Here is a link to the article found at Free Republic. 

Hey John - How About These Bumper Stickers!

When I was a kid, my parents used to drag my brother and me across the country every summer.  Don’t get me wrong, it was fun, but the car ride was always a drag.  After we got bored of making all the 18-wheelers honk their horns, we’d start arguing about which truck was owned by our fantasy trucking companies, whether we had just seen Smokey and the Bear heading at high speed in the opposite direction and/or who were better drivers - the Duke Boys or CHiPs Officers Ponch and John.  Inevitably a fight would break out and my father would threaten to stop the car right then and there. 

 

One of the ways my mom used to keep my brother and me from bare knuckle boxing in the back seat (and my father from having an embolism) was to play the alphabet game.  So we’d merrily check out signs, license plates, bumper stickers and campgrounds for letters.  I always regretted never being able to stay at one of those fun looking Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park™ Campgrounds and Resorts with all the water-slides and swimming pools and RVs and campers and soda pop and candy and pop corn and girls in my grade who were also traveling with their families, who I imagined to be much like the girls in National Lampoon’s Vacation ready to play spin the bottle and…sorry, I seem to have lost my internal monologue.

 

Now that I’m 35 and attacking the crazy “bumper sticker” politics of John Edwards, all I can think about is the Jellystone Park™ campground fantasy of my youth. 

 

So when the former Senator started shooting his mouth off about the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) as nothing more than a “bumper sticker,” he managed to not only get my goat, but my mind flashed back to summer highway expeditions for literary fodder.  I couldn’t help packing my analysis without adding the flavor of liberal bumper stickers to my king size salted nut roll.  Let’s pull the family truckster over, fill her up with regular gas for around $10, ignore the dead grandmother tied to the roof and examine the left’s sticky chrome traveling political propaganda machine while we raid the candy isle (click on image for larger view):

    

Now riddle me this: What did the left intend with these bumper stickers?  Haven’t the messages always been mere political slogans intended to undermine President Bush’s legitimacy, create constitutional crisis and make the case for impeachment by simplifying complex issues into disingenuous political propaganda?  Does John Edwards really expect me to believe that he isn't still sore about the theft of the 2000 Presidential Election by a dimwitted redneck from Texas?   Say it ain’t so!

 

As I imagine my brother and me crossing the country again, I think I’d likely see John Edward’s million dollar RV parked in one of those fantasy camp grounds.  Instead of Yogi Bear beckoning us to hook-up, drain our human waste and put our feet up on the well worn picnic tables, it would be a big fat Michael Moore cut-out inviting us all to stop, rest and stuff our faces with Oscar Goebbels hot dogs .  Instead of kids laughing and playing in the pool, there would be little Iraqi kids, laughing and playing soccer with close air support diving in on their innocent existence while American soldiers and marines sing variations on Napalm Sticks to Kids during a camp wide militant American Idol try-out in the Dearborn Memorial Amphitheater.  OK, sorry.  Like, that may have been a little too over the top.

 

For John Edwards to say that the GWOT is nothing more than a bumper sticker is, quite simply, hilarious.  In case he hadn’t noticed, the liberal propaganda machine has been churning anti-Bush bumper stickers out by the thousands since their fateful November day in the double-ought year of our lord (that's 2000 for those of you that don't habla).  These bumper stickers have been the bedrock of the causal relationship between the loony left agenda and the creation of a political climate necessary for everything to turn from bad to utopia.

 

At this point, I think it might be wise to take a minute to recap the formerly honorable senator’s comments from the most recent Presidential debate:

“But what this global war on terror bumper sticker -- political slogan, that's all it is, all it's ever been -- was intended to do was for George Bush to use it to justify everything he does: the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, spying on Americans, torture. None of those things are OK. They are not the United States of America.” – The Honorable John Edwards, Former US Senator and 2008 Presidential Candidate

Now we can delve into my own outlandish analysis of the Edwards modus operandi. 

 

Evidently, John Edwards has pitched his circus tent in the Michael Moore Gelignite campground, just to the left of Interstate 51 – the national conspiracy theory highway.  Let’s examine the old boy’s examples of “everything” that George Bush "does" in office:

 

1)      The Iraq war (i.e. – that George Bush mislead the country into the unjust, illegal, pre-emptive, go it alone, stayed course of the last 4 years based on the exaggerated linkage between Saddam, UBL and Al Qaeda which gave us Abu Ghraib where Iraqi people were all tortured in the name of the GWOT);

2)      Guantanamo (i.e. – torture);

3)      Abu Ghraib (i.e. – torture);

4)      Spying on Americans (I think he means the “illegal” wire-tapping program that the congress and the judiciary have helped make “legal.”  However, this could also lead directly to incarceration in Guantanamo and therefore could also mean torture); and

5)      Torture (i.e. – the Iraq War, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Spying on Americans).

 

Here’s another great quote that clearly illustrates John Edward's analysis of the conspiratorial nature of modern American politicos:

“It's a conspiracy wrapped in a plot inside a government agenda.” – Agent Fox Mulder, Federal Bureau of Investigations, X-Files unit (a fictional character)

Could it be possible that John Edwards and his campaign staff have collectively fallen and bumped their heads?  One thing is for sure, they are definitely not "smarter than the average bear."