The double bind that Britain is being offered: the British should admit that they had violated Iranian space and their sailors will be released. You can have peace but only on condition of violating your perception of reality. The upshot of that is though that you have now acceded to the mullahs as they who specify what is real. This is a painful spot for cultural relativists, non "racists" in common speak, who here go from respect for others to collapse of their own ego/autonomy. The solution in the West so far has been to bend our perceptions without acknowledging that we have done so except perhaps in displacement. Muslims appear as earnest students and then fly planes into buildings killing 3000, and our chant becomes 'Bush lied; people died.' Newt Gingrich suggests a gasoline blockade and damaging Iran's only gas refinery pending the release of the sailors.
There is a stunning difference in good sense between the articles in the journal Commentary, Jewish I believe, and Commonweal, Catholic, over the issue of Iraq. The article in Commentary is here, from the WSJ free site Opinion Journal.
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So the commentary article suggests we copy the french in algeria -- who utterly lost. No, not copy the french, copy the story that a frenchman made up about how he'd almost completely won before the french government snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.
Why follow his plan? Why not follow one of the american plans? One of the US plans that had almost completely won vietnam before the US government snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory?
We can tell stories about how we almost completely won as well as the french can.
However, the US public is probably not going to believe that we're winning. The US military has been telling them that we're winning for 4 straight years. After at least three and a half years of straight lying, why would they believe it now?
They're going to see that the new strategy has high US casualty rates, and they're going to think it isn't working. They won't see that arab casualty rates are 50 times ours. They won't see us doing airstrikes in cities, ensuring arab casualties as high as we want. They'll only see that we're losing soldiers at a higher rate than ever, higher than during the war against Saddam that we won in a few weeks.
I would prefer to weep for our troops, the Berber and Muslim allies of the French, and those Iraqis and Vietnamese who give and gave for a greater nobility.
I would prefer to weep for our troops, the Berber and Muslim allies of the French, and those Iraqis and Vietnamese who give and gave for a greater nobility.
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