Israel is running a prison, and no prison ever existed without keeping the prisoners in fear of their lives all the time. This is impossible to maintain without senseless killing and violence.

There’s no truth without truth in it. You just can’t take one subject and forget everything that happened around it. Can’t take one evidence and say this proves something regardless of any other facts, with fake but accurate.

WWII was a problem of technology and basic human resources. We have better resources, which is one of the reasons we can afford to be humane, in the sense that if the WWII Allies were humane, they would have gotten their ass kicked in short time. Because it really didn’t matter if they were or were not humane, they didn’t have the people or the technology to do it, so it didn’t really matter. To be humane was not to be on the attack, to be not on the attack meant losing.

Once High Command could tolerate thousands of collateral dammage after a few bomb strikes, it is very easy to raise the threshold higher based upon the justification that the sooner the war ends, the less people have to die.

America’s current magnanimity does prolong the war, although it is not a surefire ticket to victory for the terroists. It may simply get more people killed, but it isn’t a propaganda victory. Though it is a morale booster for the enemy, since it makes us out to be weak in their eyes.

A lot of things have changed since the WWII generation, and most of the changes are unnoticed. Yet they are fundamental to the war being conducted now.

Such things as JDAMs and GPS and laser guided missiles and self-guided munitions make humane warfare possible. Therefore the temptation in WWII to wrack up more kills to end the war and break the enemy’s will to fight, although politically impossible given how Hitler was still alive, made logical sense given the technology and military inefficiency of those days. Those days were about speed and numbers. Our war suffers from the same temptation, but a temptation to lower the casualties given our technology. We face such needs as accuracy instead of speed, intelligence instead of numbers.

Those things set the tone for warfare. Yet it also sets up the gaps in the defensive perimeter that can be exploited by the enemy. The greater point is that just as Goering can exploit via propaganda the Allies destruction of civilians, the terroists can also exploit the Coalition’s humane treatment.

Hitler was Germany’s center of gravity and weakness, the question most people don’t know to ask is what is Al-Qaedas.

If we are wrong, if Al-Qaeda’s center of gravity is not the Middle East and the people’s support, then we might still win the war. Just as the Allies’ mistook Germany’s will to fight as residing in their people, and yet still won.

America did not mistake the center of gravity of Japan, which is why we got Japan to surrender. We knew the center of gravity was the Emperor and we won that gamble.

Whoever was in charge of the German campaign, lost his. Probably it suffered from too much vengeance and rage. As with Versailles, it clouded people’s judgements. Curiously, it did not cloud America’s judgement for the most part.

For a nation that works spectacularly well alone, it is downright weird that it wants others to butt in.

Their pensions are apparently supplemented by Saudi money.

As one Saudi said, when you take care of your friends when they’re retired, you’ll have more friends who aren’t retired.

And journos are sort of like CNN and Eason Jordan. Either cowards or above the unseemly Americanism of Americans.

I’m not apologizing and I’m going to buy Danish shortly. Ham, maybe.
Since I don’t drink anything that costs more than my aftershave, it would have to be food.

Well, apology or not, this could have been a test to see if Muslims would act like civilized people or like fanatics.

Thanks for responding to our little survey, guys.

Morgenthau would have killed half the Germans, more or less, by starvation/default.

The point is that, by the time of WW II, people were really, really pissed. Really pissed off. Insanely angry. I use Morgenthau to demonstrate it, not to promote his plan.

No reason not to be insanely angry.

We have an interesting situation today, in which most of the fighting men are either regulars who have some roots in the post towns in the States, or Guard and Reserve troops who come from damn’ near a neigborhood.
That means a bad day for a particular company, even if the rest of the forces are taking it easy, is a very bad day for a particular town.

It hasn’t happened to us much since the Civil War, but once in a while circumstances conspire.
There’s a town in southern Wisconsin whose WW I monument lists a surprising number of dead, considering our casualties in the war and the size of the town–small. I think it’s Burlington, but I haven’t been there in thirty years. If every town were like that in the entire country and the same bastards started up again….

Kipling wrote a poem about the Witches of En-dor. It apparently warned against the swarms of seances or whatever it was going on after WW I as women tried to talk to their men.
I don’t know if Kipling actually thought something might come if called from the vasty deep or if he simply knew this was a losing effort when he said the end is ruin and death (in some metaphorical fashion).
Missing from his anthologies are some stories about the war–called “hysterical”–but, then, he’d had to pull strings to get his son past a physical, only to see him killed fighting with the Irish Guards in 1915. Leaving three more years.

Missing from discussions of the operations in WW II is the fact that the decision makers on the Allied side were all adults during–if they did not fight in–WW I. They saw the horror and they saw the result of letting the bastards back up.
THAT was sure as hell not going to happen again.
You ever hear of the Morgenthau Plan?
Nope. Never again.