oj-

Great point as uaual but ...uhm..so what? The

damage may soon be coming to a thaeter near you. Why don't we try to stop it before the destruction and mayhem become unmanageable?

What damage?

3000 dead on 9/11. Three of whom were childhood friends of mine.

Schroeder should have told him to hire Palestinians to clear the minefields.

I guess that in comparison to WWII, 3000 dead on one day is just a "nuisance." I have a saying: If have your arm cut off, you must be in agony. If my hand is cut off , don't you dare tell me that your pain is greater than mine. Some things, like mass murder and the loss of a limb or a family mamber, are just not susceptible to comparitive analysis. I lost my cousin on 9/11, nameless above lost three friends. I lost a dozen great uncles to Hitler, but I do not hate the terrorists any less than him. I can only imagine, Orrin, that you lost nobody.

Sorry about the typos, I guess that I got a little hot. I like to keep my comments civil, but, if as happens sometimes, "there's many a slip 'tween the cup and the lip," I guess I got a bit of wine on my shirt with that last comment. But the idea is that I do not accept the comparison to WWII as a more grisly, and therefore superior, conflict. By that standard, WWII was nothing compared to the depredations of Ghengis Khan, and some of Richard's massacres in the Crusades were worse as well. Do you think that the collateral damage victims in Fallujah believe that their suffering is nothing compared to the innocents in Dresden?

Michael:

Less than 5,000 dead in the entire thirty year confrontation with the Middle East. That's not to minimize any of those deaths, just to minimize the scale of the conflict.

OJ, it is a threat that can potentially scale up real fast. One nuke is all it takes to make our death toll higher than in all our past wars combined.

Robert:

Not proportionately and there's pretty little risk. The point isn't that we shouldn't comtinue to root out Islamicism and Reform the Middle East, just that the opponents are pikers compared to past European foes for barbarity.

oj-

To this reader the most salient point of the 9/11 commission report was the so-called "failure of imagination"among State Department types which it cites as a reason for the inability to understand the insanity of radical Islamism. The Wahabi sect lead to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood and currently funds the establishment of mosques and imams throughout the west. The ideology it operates under is a death cult which if combined with the right weapons is capable of almost anything. What occured over the last thirty years is unimportant. Understanding this monstrous ideology and destroying it at its source is the only solution. Imagine Kamikaze pilots armed with nuclear,chemical or biological weapons. If Imperial Japan had not been defeated and reformed at the point of a gun surely the war would have eventually developed into such a conflict. The protection of innocent life is a worthy goal and innocent life is being openly threatened by a belief system so irrational and totalitarian that the choices are limited. One can hope that these cuthroats will reformfrom within but I would not bet on it. A stiff resistance in defence of the west willneed to be maintained.

Japan's best shot was Pearl and it failed miserably. They never had a prayer of winning the war and were overextended by the time it started.

Just as the Sa'uds could create Wahabism they can fund the Reformation, which is in their interest more than ours.

oj-

Your retrospective wisdom is beside the point. The atomicbomb won the war with Japan. The fact that they could never have won a more protracted conflict is obvious now but it sure as hellwasn't then. How many more Americans would have died in an invasion? What if Midway had not been as successful as it was? The war was fought with the idea that the Japanese needed to be utterly defeated and reformed from within. I see no difference with what is occurring in the Middle East today. The nature of the enemy ideology is worth understanding and I don'tbelieve you do.

tom:

why invade? Japan was done.

oj-

Either invade or drop the bomb. The goal was unconditional surrender of Japanese Imperial forces. Emperor worshipping screwballs with modern weapons and suicidal tactics should be completely defeated and reformed. I assume you can agree. Tyrannies obviously fallunder their own weight eventually, whether it's a matter of years or centuries depends on the resistance. I would prefer sooner rather than later.

"why invade? Japan was done"

As I recall similar sentiments were expressed in 1991 regarding Hussein being "done for".

Mississippi State was beaten by MAINE !! a few weeks ago. I didn't even know they played football up there. I know now they do. Let's not make the same mistake with Muslims.

Defeat of the US doesn't mean necessarily that there is excessive damage to infrastructure or loss of life, but that we will adopt the mindset of France. That looks like defeat to me.

Tom/h:

It's an island.

OK, Japan was done. So let's construct a Kerry-esque scenario: According to the Global Test enough killing has been done, and the multi-culti crown opines that we must not destroy the lovable Shinto warrior culture. We isolate the almost-defeated Japan for 15 years, and what do you expect the situation would have been in 1960? Need I say it? At the very least, our West Coast cities would be gone one day. Japan too, but what's the difference? Every other tin pot dictator in the world would look at our diminished state and join in the fun. My teenage son learned enough in high school physics to build a bomb in the garage - all he needs is a cannon barrel and 16 lbs of exotic metal. In KerryWorld the proliferation of that exotic material would be proscribed - just as it was in 1991 Iraq.

In war, the enemy must be defeated in detail, which means his war fighting will and capability must be destroyed. Anything less would make Neville Chamberlain proud. Leaving a smoldering culture of hate with enough resources to produce nuclear weapons is a formula for worldwide disaster that would make 1945 Germany look like a picnic.

Let us not try to minimize what is happening. That is what the democrats are trying to do. Pretend that the problem is no more than a nuisance that we can ignore. If we do that, what would happen to property values within line-of-sight of our container ports? Those three thousand either died to save the world from these fanatics, or they died for nothing. The sixty thousand in Dresden died for nothing, just before the side they were on lost the war. To make their sacrifice mean something, we must respond effectively, and massively. Nothing could be more important.

we left a smoldering culture of hate in our own South and things worked out okay within a hundred years. We left a smoldering culture of hate in the Soviet Union after WWI and we never had to fight them. Democracies don't defeat people in detail. They get out as fast as they can.

Tom C., supra, Has made some excellent points.

I agree that we must consider the culture of our opponents, and that study of the case of Japan is most instructive here. Japan has been tamed by an application of overwhelming force followed up by wisdom and moderation when these luxuries were available.

But it was not always so. When one stands on the cliffs in southern Okinawa--"Suicide Cliffs," they call them--and contemplates parents throwing their children to the rocks below, the need for the overwhelming force before the moderation comes home. The Japanese anthem in those days sang of corpses floating in the surf and rotting in the sand, in honor of the Emperor.

Japanese culture had been an amalgamation of primitive animistic militarism and the "all is illusion," "being and non-being are illusions" of Zen whereby Bhuddist detatchment is put in service of Shinto fanaticism. It doesn't matter if Japanese are butchering Chinese or raping Koreans--all is illusion. It took the experience of non-illusory non-being in the form of the Pika-don to put and end to this insanity.

Are the Hajjis more sane? I hope so, and I believe so, but it's close.