Thus the weakness of the US military and the West isn’t the grunts at the bottom killing enemies and defending democracy. The weakness is at the top, decapitate their leadership, which is what AQ may have wished for.

That was actually somewhat crude. The new and improved way to fight drone strikes and circumvent US military might, is for Islamic jihadists to go into the US, with the help of Syrian refugee asylum bullsh con artists like Hussein, and then target the families of US drone pilots and other fighters.

That is the very epitome, Ft Hood 1 wise, of targeting the soft spots in your enemy. And it is a strategy very close to the one I hypothesized about in 2007 and a few months before Ft Hood 1 happened. Asymmetrical warfare is about hitting your enemy’s weaknesses, not their strengths. And a general that’s dead, cannot command their armies effectively.

On the other hand, one cartoon that encourages me is of a couple of range hands wondering if there is any way to stop the Islamic terrorists, and one of them drawls, “Well, we ain’t played Cowboys and Muslims yet.”

(with suitable apologies to any PCists on board who feel microaggressed by references to certain Historical Incidents.)

That means if the civilians are the ones being attacked, the civilians have to stand up and defeat the terrorists. Nobody else will be in a position to, short of using military jets to blow away the planes.

The fact that those planes were in the air with the right orders, just means Bush II had a very high decision cycle speed. It doesn’t mean much for the civilization those jets are part of.

I agree that the Pentagon attack should not be forgotten, and that it often is.

But in writing “it was not a BATTLE where soldiers died,” my point was not the soldiers didn’t die, but that it was not a battle where soldiers died.

It was a sneak, terrorist attack. No one on our side had a fighting chance.

Let us all unite behind Obamunism to march into the glorious future of Socialism.

Then again maybe division is the only real choice.

Technically not quite true. The attack on the Pentagon seems largely forgotten. But members of the armed forces did die that day.

The 9/11 attackers chose their targets with care. They attacked targets that symbolized American’s military and economic might.

Not to nitpick. I just don’t think the attack on the Pentagon should be forgotten.

He articulates American exceptionalism is a unique way, here. He uses it to explain a place where Clifford Geertz claim of a “Big Ditch” or an important epistemological divide, might exist.

Or, in other words, most PoMo blather about communities that cannot communicate with outsiders are contrivances. But, in the case of American naivete about “how things are done,” and thus American interventions – for instance – fail.
And therefore, there are such instances. But not at all of the kind the PoMo’s believe.

These are cultural and experiential hurdles – larger ones for nations – but not insurmountable ones.

Gellner’s example: certain traits make

Americans, to this day,
inclined to absolutize their own culture, and to equate it with the human condition as such, and hence unconsciously to treat other cultures as perversions of the rightful human condition. Individualism, egalitarianism, freedom, sustained innovation–these traits are, in the comparative context of world history, unusual, not to say eccentric; but to Americans they are part of the air they breathe, and most of them have never experienced any other moral atmosphere.

And contrariwise, how can a God-fearing Abrahamic religion like Islam be a threat to us? How can we treat them any different than Christians and non-Christians?

Thus, maybe there is another “Big Ditch” here, today. And with the deep Denialism of the entrenched establishment Left, we see another one swerve us into certain harms way with the “Iran Deal.”

O, come now.

The Cold War was waged for some 45 years – successfully – and with bipartisan support.

The failure of 9/11 entirely rests on the failure to identify the enemy, is nature, extent, and identity.

As Americans, we are too optimistic about anything like religion. And Islam qualifies. But to do what? And wage…what?

Is it any coincidence that the resistance to the ongoing invasion of Europe by Muslims stems from realms occupied by the Muslim Ottoman Empire for some 250 years? Central Europe? I hardly think it could be otherwise.

We Americans have no such history – we blanch in denial, and since the 1990s, the Left does so aided (and incapacitated) by post-modernist moral and epistemological relatavism.

Neo, since you mention your college minor in anthropology, do have a look at the brief but lucid at the late great philosophical anthropologist (at Cambridge), Ernest Gellner’s “Post-modernism, Reason, and Religion” (1992)
POSTED ONLINE HERE
http://okhovvat.com/files/en/content/2011/6/4/351_379.pdf

His PhD thesis at London in the late ’50s was on Islam and its inability to modernize. He then joined LSE teaching scientific method, but always interested in social anthropology, and influenced by Karl Popper. (The Wiki entry on Gellner is reasonably instructive.)

Clarity – that’s what Gelner offers. His later years, in the ’90s, including a trio of posthumous works, found him celebrated as the savant of post-communist civil society: the necessity of private social connections, and the Burkean “little platoons” – if liberty is to flourish.

With FDRoosevelt, came the economic enslavement of American patriots.

You cannot be a free man or woman, when you are a serf or vassal to an aristocratic lord that pays for your job, your family, your healthcare, your education, and whatever trickle you get from your other sugar daddies.

It’s not possible. People who are not independent, in economic terms as well as abstract ones, are not free. They are merely slaves that think they are free in the system of Slavery 3.0

It’s a better more efficient and profitable form, just look at Planned Profit’s application of slavery. But it is still Slavery. The Union did not wipe out slavery as the victors propagandized. Nor did the South rebel due to wanting state rights to become more powerful than the feds. The Democrats won Reconstruction and reconstructed history to their liking. They did it again in Vietnam. They did it again in Iraq. They did it even as the Union was fighting to take Richmond after 1861.

It is not merely the Left that corrupted this country. This country has been fighting an internal disease and virus since 1820 at least, if not before. This fate was inevitable for the United States. There was no way around it. It was going to happen with or without Islam. With or without weak Republicans.

It is past your era, JJ. It is not the duty of your generation to complete the killing required to fix this Titanic journey of retards and blind scouts, panicked captains. That is for the generation closer to my own to do.

The duty of the ancestors is to pass on the torch of inheritance to the next generation, as the Viking ancestors successfully did for the Scandinavian people. If the generation that receives the torch, decides to sell it and trade it for some weed and a slave shackle, that’s the choice of those inheritors.

However, what wasn’t their choice is to sell the freedom and inheritance of all future generations to some Islamic or Leftist slave lord. That wasn’t the power they inherited. That was’t part of the package or deal.

There will be a reckoning, one way or another. That is why CW II was inevitable.