Yes. That's right. All the president's underlings suddenly, simultaneously, of their own initiative, stopped using the phrase "War on Terror," with the paragon of moral clarity just sort of wondering all on his own why that happened without his say-so.

Give me a break. The initial switch was focused-grouped, the switch back was a panicked result of Plan (A) being greeted with ridicule.

The only other alternative is believing the president has no control of his people.

You're witnessing control.

If Henry Stimson suddenly stopped calling World War II "World War II" and started calling it "Egg Salad Platter," would that be evidence of presidential control?

if this isn't ground for impeachment and hysteria i don't know what is. if only clinton or carter were in the white house, those terrorists would sure be singing a different tune.

Rick:

If FDR corrected him it would.

"War on Terror" is better than "struggle aganst extremism," simply because extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, but it's not good enough. You can defeat ideas, as we have done again and again, but you do so by grinding the bearers of those ideas to powder.

We should tell them, tell the enemy, tell the world, as we told the Communists, that their grandchildren will live in freedom.

Lou: Yes, but it's not a war on terror -- that would have us fighting terrorism of any kind, anywhere around the world -- the PLA, the IRA, the Palestinians, &tc. &tc., et. al. We are fighting the fanatical Islamicists. It focuses the cause to recognize the enemy.

What's scary isn't the caculated way in which Bush (and his group of higher-ups) decides what to call something. Nor that eventually we all start to call it the same thing without really thinking.

What's truly, truly scary is that everyone starts [mis]pronouncing his phrases his way.

"war on terr-uh"
"sosal securety"

I'm frightened when Wolf Blitzer and Aaron Brown say funny things like that.

Or "Respect mah authoritie!"
Heh.
Mere mispronunciations don't do much to me. Except cause a slight chuckle.

This is a to-may-to to-mah-to debate, appropriate to summer silly season.

The reality is that Islam as a culture has declared war on civilization and it is up to the forces of civilization to stomp it into a mudhole. Unfortunately, so long as we are oil dependent, that won't happen. And we'll be left with intellectual sophistry like 'War On Terror.'

bart:

You'll lose that war.

30,000 nuclear weapons vote otherwise.

The French gonna nuke themselves?

The US alone has about 30,000, not that they would even be necessary. Israel's 600 or so can more than do the job.

Rather than sending American forces hither, thither and yon, you'd throw nukes on Baghdad, Teheran, Qom, Cairo, Damascus, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Khartoum, Tripoli and perhaps Jakarta, killing perhaps 150-200 million Muslims. But since you've used an infinitesmal part of your arsenal to do this, the rest of the Islamic World will get with the program pretty quickly or you do a second round of nukes.

Then you target whatever centers of power remain for Saddam, the Ayatollahs, and Assad, followed by whatever military and civilian targets have any value in Pakistan. This may result in killing another 100 million or so people. And again, you haven't used much of your arsenal.

Bart is certainly correct about the technical procedures. One Ohio class sub has more than enough to do both phase 1 and 2 of his scenario.

The West, including Israel, has lost less than 15,000 (of the top estimate) people to terror. Kind of early to kill 200 million people.

The endangered areas and the targets though are in Paris and London.

Oops, it was his idea all along.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/08/20040806-1.html

We actually misnamed the war on terror, it ought to be the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world.
-GWB, 8/6/04

Now THAT'S control.

Bart - Islam is a religion, not a culture. Though I wouldn't expect you to be able to grasp such a simple distinction.

You know, I hate to go Godwin, but if one were to replace the words Islam and Muslim with Judaism and Jew in your posts I honestly don't think I could differentiate your views with those of the most hardcore 1930's Nazi. You are becoming more rabid everyday - are you doing this just to get on OJ's nerves? I hope so.

Thus, the war on terror.

Shelton,

When we start flying planes into office buildings, when thousands upon thousands of Jews all around the world start chanting 'Death to America', when we start suicide bombing subways in London, or commiting most of the violent felonies in Norway, or constitute something liek 25% of the American prison population, or when we start engaging in genocide everywhere from Sudan to Irian Jaya, when we are anything other than an enormous net benefit to whatever society we choose to live in, then maybe you have a point.

Bob,

It's called pre-emption. The Muslims chose to go to war and to use 'asymmetric warfare.' It is long past time for us to show that 'asymmetry' is a two-way street.

IF we killed about 200 million or so, another 200 million or so in sub-Saharan Africa would probably convert to Christianity, their attachment to Islam being pretty weak, and their practice syncretic at best.

So it's disproportionate. Who really gives a rat's derriere?

Decent people, like Americans.

Doesn't matter what you call it, it's what you do.

Bush is not leading a war on the people making war on us.

He invites them to tea.

But he won't let them come to Crawford, indicating that he understands who the real enemy is.

Bart -

Now you are really starting to sound like a true jihadist.

After all, if Al Qaeda just could kill about 100 million Americans or so the other 100 million or so would probably convert to Islam, their attachment to Christianity being pretty weak, and their practice syncretic at best. So its disproportionate, who really gives a rat's derriere?

Leaving aside your hateful disregard for human life and your complete lack of anything approaching honor, the use of nukes in the scenario you describe would lead to the end of the USA. Even we can't survive as an island.

"Pre-emption"? Bart, I believe the word you are looking for is "genocide" or "holocaust".

Imagine what Jews might have done to Germany had they not been pre-empted...

A.H.(and it's obvious what that stands for)

Win more Nobel Prizes and create more economic growth, I guess. The heart quickens at the fate of those poor Germans who had they not butchered the Jews might have had to put up with the world's most important scientific community rather than watch them flee lock, stock and barrel to the US, which then reaped the benefits.

OJ,
Americans opposed to genocide? Ask Chief Joseph or Black Elk their opinions.

Shelton,

You've already demonstrated ignorance of Islamic history, Jewish history and military strategy so now you want to add economics to the list of things about which you are completely ignorant. Is 'Everlast' perhaps stitched to your head?

Put simply, the US is not trade dependent, a simple review of our GDP figures will show that compared with every other First World economy, a smaller percentage of our GDP is connected with imports and exports. Also, what do we get from the Islamic World besides oil and a few cheap manufactured goods we could get from China or India? And since 40% of our oil is used for vehicular fuel, a decision to make gasoline from coal, which we have in abundance would eliminate the need for 40 % of our oil. Only 12.5% of our oil needs come from outside the hemisphere.

And we'd hardly be 'an island.' If Americans were cannibals who engaged in frequent human sacrifice, the rest of the world would be lining up to do business with us because we are the dominant financial, technological, military and scientific power in the world, and by a margin in all those areas that has never before been seen in world history.

Our enemies have no regard for human life why should we have regard for theirs? And honor is the stuff of bad movies not the battlefield. There is no honor in war, only winning.

The sea change in sub-Saharan African religious observance will merely be a fringe result of people seeing the impact on the world of real power. Backward, illiterate gibbering natives are easily swayed by lots of bright lights and loud noises.

Bob,

I'm not proposing doing anything General Sherman wouldn't.

G-d have mercy on them if we ever come up against an enemy that actually threatens our existence if this is how we start talking when facing an enemy with no hope of conquering us and who has, over the course of 40 years, managed to kill only, what, 5-6000 of us compared to the 100,000 or more of them we've killed.

No one would trade with us if we nuked the middle east and asia - not China, not Europe, no one. The world would be united against us once and for all, and we would deserve it.

And I'm not sure what you are on about with Jewish history, I haven't addressed it.

Though I know I have more knowledge than you of contemporary Islam in Indonesia considering that not only have I been there and experienced it firsthand, but also that my mother-in-law is an Indonesian Muslim living (right now) in Malaysia. Have you ever even met a Muslim other than the jack-chick-stereotype that lives in your head?

As for military strategy, um, if you believe that indiscriminate dissemination of nuclear warheads is good military strategy than I don't think we need to bother comparing notes.

And lastly, yes, honor does play a role in the way a moral society wages war. Collateral damage and civilian casualties can be an acceptable consequence of a moral war. Though as the proportion of civilian casualties to military casualties raises, the more morally reprehensible the act becomes. The disproportion you propose is monstrous.

For you this comes down to a fear of death, which is almost always a sign of a lack of honor. I believe that some behavior is worse than dying. That not only applies to the individual, but to a culture as well. What’s the use of the survival of Western civilization if it can no longer be differentiated from barbarism?

the world traded with saddam, mao, stalin, etc but they would draw the line at us ? what color is the sky in your world ? if we ever did fully unleash our fury, they would prostrate themselves on the ground in a puddle of their own excrement, singing to the heavens of our glory.

Well David, you say no chance of defeating us? Boniface, that Harry referred to only had to cut down a tree. I would have thought that you would have realized that more was at stake than a few lives. Matter of fact OJ says that Europe is on its back already and they haven't suffered many deaths at all.

cjm -

Had Saddam, Mao, or Stalin killed 200 million people by bombing foreign nations with nuclear weapons in an attempt at genocide it would have been the end of Iraq, China, or the USSR, respectively.

Funny that you use Saddam as an example though, since his crimes never even came close to Bart's proposed holocaust and, well, no one is trading with him now are they? Things went well for the USSR too, huh? Please tell me you see the irony in condemning the Baathists in Iraq (and Stalin and Mao) because they were mass murdering genocidal maniacs while you advocate a policy of mass murdering mania for the USA.

bart:

Yes, Indians were considered subhuman, not a different branch of Abraham's family.

h:

My grandfather was in great shape right up until the day he dropped dead.

Getting hard to tell your barts from your AHs without a program....

shelton, where did i advocate anything ? i just find it ludicrous that you think there would be any material consequences if we did anhilate one or more countries. your postings don't make much sense. between them, the communist despots of the 20th century did in fact murder over 100M people.

Shelton:

That's a false argument. If Churchill agreed to meet with Hitler and then shot him it would not make the West as bad as the Nazis.

Of course, the argument that we're at war with Islam generally is even more inane....

OJ -

I'm not really sure what you mean... maybe I haven't been arguing coherently. Bart is advocating killing hundreds of millions of innocent bystanders, not one evil despot.

cjm -

I never made a claim that fascist and communist dictators didn't kill millions of people. They did not however use nuclear warheads to kill 200 million people living 4000 miles away from their own country. If Bart were advocating policies of pogroms and gulags then you could appeal to the histories of Stalin and Pol Pot for support for your thesis. However, those men and their institutions never perpetrated the particular atrocities Bart is so eager to commit, and thus there is no associable consequence in those regime's histories for comparison.

To answer your earlier post more directly. Yes, the world would stop at us because nuking entire nations into oblivion in the matter of a few weeks is entirely different from starving to death one’s own countrymen over the course of several decades, especially in the age of modern communication and free press, especially at a time in which the other most powerful nations in the world are begging for an excuse to tear down the USA. If you can’t see why I don’t know what to tell you.

Nuking 200 million to end the Cold War, or, were it to turn out that Islam was generally infected with Islamicism, 200 million Muslims to end the current war, would not make us equivalent to the enemy. Nuclear weapons are just frowned on for fetishistic reasons, not because the quality of the killin g is any different. at least 100 million people died after WWII because we didn't use nukes to end the communist regimes.

Sheldon, Bart is not advocating anything. He's making a "what-if" prediction. Can't you tell the difference?

The number of us vs. them killed has no bearing on anything. What does have a bearing is how people respond to a threat. If you have a rattlesnake nest next door, and your child get bitten, you don't try to find the snake that did it and kill just him. You take out the entire nest---you kill them all.

Ray: Fine, kill the entire nest. Just don't tell us that your child's safety requires that every garter snake in the world be nuked.

Including the nest in your living room.

Shelton, innocent of what?

Where are the Muslims who want to live in harmony with infidels?

From Orrin's viewpoint (though not mine), Muslims are more evil than if they merely wanted to kill you, because they want to take what's even more precious, your faith.

He gets around this by the absurd claim that the two faiths are the same. He's the ultimate appeaser.

This way he gets the worst of both worlds.

Islam has already converted him, but since he doesn't display the superficial rituals, he's still eligible to be murdered as an infidel.

Harry:

D you really lose sleep about this stuff or is it all just hysterical ravings?

They came within a whisker of killing my daughter-in-law and they've promised to keep trying. I lose sleep over it.

'Nuff said.