I asked a very intelligent friend who works in the same company as I, what she thought the answer to the question I posed in the post directly below this is. As a refresher, the question was:
Why are we (the United States) supposed to differentiate between Iraqis, Syrians, Hammas, Hizb Allah, the PLO, the PLFP, Al Quaeda, the Taliban, Iranians, and any number of extremist groups that have America - and OUR children - finely sighted in their rifle scopes, when the terrorists do not?
Her answer was immediate and short: "Because then we'd be like Bin Laden".
I though about that for hours and hours, running the potential this and that scenario's through my head. A book most military men and women are quite familiar with is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", written over 2,500 years ago, and widely recognized as the world's oldest military treatise. In the book, Sun Tzu says the following:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
Heavy stuff from a guy who's been dead for 2 and a half millennia. Who knew he would still be pertinent and spot-on today? I believe the average American has little or no comprehension of our enemy, nor does the average person in our nation understand the true danger posed by that enemy.
"Then we'd be like Bin Laden". Yes, in some respects we would. In February of 1945, the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Corps spent 2 days fire-bombing Dresden, Germany...an extremely controversial attack even within the standards of that time. 3,900 tons of bombs were dropped between Feb 13th and Feb 15th. 12,000 buildings were totally destroyed, many of them part of a large German military industrial complex. Currently, historians list the death toll at between 25,000 and 30,000 military and civilians.
Controversial then...controversial now...the fact remains that the will to fight was sucked out of most of the German people and a large percentage of their highest military commanders. Was the attack immoral? Well, killing itself is somewhat immoral, even in war. Was the attack the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany? Yes, it was.
The question then remains: In the interest of self-preservation and national sovereignty, is adopting an equally brutal tactic necessarily a bad thing?
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5 comments:
If a killer were trying to get inside my home I wouldn't try to reason with him- I'd try to keep him out.
If he got in and killed the dog and the cat- I'd be loading up the Glock.
I wouldn't try to reason with him, or even threaten him, when he came after me, or my wife, or my kids. I'd kill him, or die trying.
Is that brutal? Well, hell, it might be- but I'd be right.
I suppose there have been a few who tried to reason with killers- but you don't hear too many stories about that- wonder why.
hhhhmmmm
i will probably have to craft a post about this at some point, but i'm trying not to. i'm currently reading "not a good day to die" about operation anaconda. one of the things we did wrong with that operation was we didn't take artillary in. however, had we taken it in, and had we started shelling the valley, there's a possiblity we would've killed locals. had "collateral damage". we've done this numerous times in the past. should that have been a reason not to do it now?
you know. there's this "fight fair" concept that's mightly popular in movies and comic books. don't shoot an unarmed man. let the other person take the first swing. shoot to wound, not to kill. it makes us "better" than them.
fair to me is that me and mine are alive at the end of the day. i'm all for sneaky, underhanded, "unethical" behavior if it helps protect me and my loved ones. i'm listening to people bitch about the idea of strong arm information out of captured terrorists, and invoking the geneva conventions. if i'm up against a foreign military and i know that if they capture me or my buddies that we'll be treated fairly i'm going to treat any enemy soldiers that i capture fairly. but when i see videos of them sawing away at a poor bastard, trying to cut his head off...
I'll await your post. As a military man, clearly you know you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
This is a complicated issue, and I attempted to present it in my post without emotion. Somewhere down the road though, we're going to have to chose whether we want that gun or we want that knife.
Some more from Sun Tzu:
The skillful soldier does not raise a second levy, neither are his supply-wagons loaded more than twice.
Translation: Kick his ass properly the first time, for you will fail if you don't. [Yes Sean...bring the heavy guns]
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