So raiding is like what people do when they buy up businesses, they may take a few women and property, but they don’t want to destroy the target. They lack the will or resources for that.

A full war mobilization was something else entirely.

Sometimes you would get raided, to test your defenses. Then if you were found to be weak, they would declare war and drive you out, taking your stuff.

The oldest human law wasn’t Right Makes Might from America. It was Might makes Right. Or Divine Judgment from whoever won the battle.

DonS Says:
August 13th, 2014 at 2:11 am

Tribal warfare does NOT involve sawing the heads off children. It may involve killing children but it is done quickly.

Plains indians would kill children, and not always quickly.

… and no just nomadic tribal peoples either. I think one will find comparable despicable cruel behavior among the Romans, Greeks, Mayans Aztecs, French revolutionaries, Stalinists, Nazis, Islamic jihadists, Saddam’s Iraq …

Plains indians would kill children, and not always quickly.

The key to success in Iraq … was the psychological impact of Bush’s decision to add troops. “In the teeth of ferociously negative popular opinion, in the face of a lot of well-reasoned advice to the contrary, he said he was going forward, not backward.”

Yes like General Ulysses S. Grant after the brutal battle of the Wilderness “even though Grant withdrew at the end of the battle, unlike his predecessors since 1861, Grant continued his campaign instead of retreating to the safety of Washington, D.C.” and thus Grant won the war.

Bush’s decision rocked America’s adversaries, … “The lesson they had learned from Lebanon was, ‘Stick it to the Americans, make them feel the pain, and they won’t have the stomach to stick it out.’ That assumption was challenged by the surge.”

Not Lebanon but the Tet Offensive of 1968 wherein Véµ Nguyéªn Gié¡p demonstrated that the American Left did not have the stomach to stick it out.

I have not read Richard Fernandez’s “The Three Conjectures” in many a year. It is sobering as is: “On War and Apocalypse” by Rene Girard and published by First Things in August 2009. The title refers tp Clausewitz’s “On War” and New Testament warnings about extreme escalating retaliatory violence.

I’ll quote:

Seeing Jews and Christians as falsifiers is more irremediable. It allows Muslims to eliminate all serious discussion, all comparison among the three religions. It amounts to not wanting to see what is at stake in the prophetic tradition. Why has Christian revelation been subject to the most hostile and ferocious possible criticism for centuries, but not Islam? There is an abdication of reason here. In some respects, it resembles the aporia of pacifism, which can be a strong encouragement for aggression. The Qur’an would thus benefit from being studied in the same way that Jewish and Christian texts have been studied. I think that a comparative approach would reveal that it contains no real awareness of collective murder.

Judaism has long separated itself from “the Ban” of Deuteronomy 13:15-17, Christianity from the Inquisition. We may find that Islam is unable to separate itself from Jihad and Sharia. What then? Rene Girard writes

Terrorism is a superior form of violence, and it asserts that it will win. There is no indication, however, that the work that remains to be done to free the Qur’an from its caricatures will have any influence on terrorism itself, which is both linked to Islam and different from it.

(W)e can draw the conclusion that the Qur’an contains understanding of things that secular mentality cannot fathom: that sacrifice prevents vengeance, for example. Yet, this topic has disappeared from Islam, just as it has disappeared in Western thought. The paradox that we thus have to deal with is that Islam is closer to us today than to the world of Homer. Clausewitz allowed us to glimpse this, through what we have called his warlike religion, in which we have seen the emergence of something both very new and very primitive. Islamism, likewise, is a kind of event internal to the development of technology. We have to be able to think about both Islamism and the escalation to extremes at the same time; we need to understand the complex relations between these two realities.

Excellent point. The Three Conjectures it is.

Throw into that fetid pile of twits the Democrats in congress, state houses, etc. The ones swooning at President Bush’s feet as he left the chamber after his inspiring post 9-11 speech. Senator Biden, never one to waste a national broadcast moment, planted a kiss on the president’s cheek as he moved down the aisle. Hillary…Big and Showy Support. John Boy Kerry… left saliva tracks in support. And on and on and on. Where o’ where did the moral midgets go?? Never mind.

This Bush revering Neoconservative will never ever forgive nor forget. Wouldn’t pi** on’um if they were on f***ing fire.

Because it takes a lot of allied resources to make it work. Bush didn’t have it, and neither does the US have it now.

If a moderate Muslim fears being killed by Islamic Jihad, and leads the death squads to your home, you may just kill all of them, without regard for who is “moderate” or not.

Same is true in the case of Democrats in the US when it comes to Civil War II. Does it matter? Well, does being a moderate Muslim matter to people here? If not, then why would it matter elsewhere?

If they can help us by separating themselves from the Jihadis and pointing them out to us, we could make their life safer and more peaceful.

After the US betrayed our allies in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and various other parts of the world, why should they believe in US=good?