I Rack

I am not a particularly aggressive, violent person. I have some of the genes that cause me to enjoy good action or war movies, and I am crazy about video arcade games of shooting (Time Crisis 3, anyone?) and even martial arts brawling (Soul Caliber!). But in REAL life I find violence to be, at best, a shameful necessity in the final event.

Having said all of that: LOCK AND LOAD!

It is frustrating beyond description to be the "only one" who seems to recall Vietnam in the "detail" of one who was sweating the draft, personally, and dealing with it as a subject in many classes in high school.

Iraq is similar to Vietnam in too many ways. Among those ways, the military is being used to impose a political agenda on a people who resist that agenda ... and because of this, the military is being directed (read "hamstrung") by political whims and maneuvers at home.

"In country," the military is trained and equipped to kick ass. At home the people want to see "our boys" as Boy Scouts handing chocolates to kiddies. Then we wonder why we hear about so many soldiers dying "over there" and wring our hands and want to bring them safely home and let those nasty "sand niggers" just rot. Such ingratitude from those silly, ignorant savages!

Makes me want to puke. They didn't ASK us to come over, but we went anyway, and now we're there. Vietnam is still a third world heap. Kosovo is not pacified. Korea is a divided pile of dynamite waiting for a spark ... and possibly a nuclear one. Now we have gone to bring the blessed light of Democracy! (tm) to the trodden-down Iraqis ... and they're murdering foreign civilians and soldiers in response.

In Vietnam the military was reviled for using force that injured civilians, and were given unrealistic "boundaries" as if it were some sporting event. This is happening again in Iraq.

When America was in danger of invasion, the attitude of the public was, generally, "Fight them wherever they are and use whatever means to stop them from getting to us and damaging us." "The Greatest Generation" carpet-bombed Berlin (predominantly occupied by civilians) and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in "police actions" that had nothing to do with actual, domestic security from a foreign military, we treat it like, well, a POLICE action. We want the other side to be Mirandized and our troops to make sure they don't bump their heads (to protect against later lawsuits) when they get in the squad car.

That's not what the military is for. Never was. The military purpose is to KILL anyone who tries to kill us. That sounds ugly, and it is. Losing sight of this raw reality has caused our civilian government, weighed down by civilian constituents, to try to redefine the military as cops-in-green. Sadly, the rest of the world sees the military as dangerous elements, like the fangs of a tiger or the claws of a bear, and to be avoided, or destroyed, on sight. Our twisted, television-sanitized view of the military as a Saturday morning cartoon "Peace Patrol" has caused us to send these young men and women into harms way anywhere and anytime we feel like we can afford it. Utter madness.

So, regardless of whether or not we ever SHOULD have gone over to "liberate" Iraq (at bayonet point), we ARE there now, and the military needs to be allowed and COMMANDED to do their horrible, primary and primal duty, which is to kill quickly, effectively, and unstoppably ... until resistance is over. And if we don't have the stomach for that, we have no business sending these bright young people to a foreign land in the first place.

If you send them, USE them, and use them correctly. Then bring them the hell home to recover from having been an instrument of political aims, killing others so that we might win elections, gain monopoly business contracts, and secure relatively cheap oil.

Similarly, Americans got embarrassed about the unsportsmanlike Spy Game of our CIA and decided that it was "WRONG" to sneak around and steal and murder other spies and things overseas. What right did we have to send these legalized criminals to foreign lands and "meddle" in their affairs. Why, that's the job of Presidents using the military, isn't it?

So we lost our advanced intelligence-gathering (and pre-emptive foreign operations) industry because we felt like it was immoral. NOW we need our once-superior intel community to inform our military where and when to strike, but we don't have those assets anymore.

And Americans wonder why other nations see us as dangerous clowns and babies. We dismiss the (relatively) hundreds of spies who made it impossible for others to get far enough ahead of us that they might conquer us ... then we send the tens of thousands of soldiers to take up the slack. Typical inefficiency ... using tens of thousands of soldiers to do what hundreds of agents once did. AND to tell these soldiers to "play nice."

HELL no. Kick them in the balls. Light their hair on fire. Shoot them in the kneecaps and elbows and stomachs until they tell you where the leaders are. Use bullets and knives and bombs until they no longer offer serious resistance ... THEN play nice and help them rebuild what we destroyed.

And if Americans REALLY can't handle being such "meanies" to act this way ... stop sending the military to screw with other countries. If you touch the stove, you get burned. Grow up and deal with it.