Iraq Perspective

With Memorial Day only 24 hours away (in this part of the world), I thought I'd put a wee bit up about the war in Iraq. Here's a couple of figures that the whiners seem to perpetually overlook:

• Solders killed in Iraq (5 yrs): 4,308 (3,501 in combat)

• Soldiers killed in Vietnam War (64-73): 58,200

• Soldiers killed in Persian Gulf War (90-91): 382

• Americans killed on 9/11/01: 2,986

• Americans murdered in U.S. (1 yr) (2005): 16,692

Who would have thought that the U.S. is actually more dangerous to Americans than Iraq is? I think that somebody actually compared Baghdad to Detroit...and was then embarrassed by the comparison. What a shock.

Have a nice day!

P.S. Enjoy your cookouts, but please remember what this long weekend is all about.

Guns Don't Kill People, I Do!

A car dealership in Butler, Missouri is making waves with their offer to throw in a "Free gun" with the purchase of an automobile. Max Motors' ad campaign has some fine print, but the concept remains: they're offering a gun to go with the car.

I'd like to know why this is a big deal? Why am I reading about this in the news thousands of miles away? If they offered a baseball bat with a car purchase, would that be a big deal?

It's downright shameful that guns have a bit of a negative aura about them in today's society. That's the European influence creeping in. Far too many people can't seem to remember that we left Europe for a reason: Freedom. Now, once again, the influence of Europe is eroding our freedoms. It's now not "chic" to talk about owning a gun (oooh! scary!). Laws in many states inhibit our right to own these simple tools.

Our nation is producing an alarming number of citizens that are afraid of firearms. I'm not sure why that is. They should be more afraid of their own bodies. More people are killed every year by cancer, heart disease, and diabetes than are killed by firearms in this nation. Don't even look at automobiles; they top guns in the fatality department every year too.

Those whose decision-making process is ruled by emotion would like the rest of us to believe that guns are bad. Guns are as bad as shovels, hammers, axes, trucks, or any other tool. Any of those are capable of being used as a deadly weapon. Where's the outrage when a child kills somebody with a car?

All of this hoopla about guns is getting tiresome. I wish the emotional dolts that live in ignorance would move back to their beloved Europe.

The Horror of Truth

I read an interesting article about our President being decried over the discussion of appeasement. Our President, George W. Bush, dared to tell an Israeli audience that terrorists are bad. For that, he was decried as an attacker of Obama...God forbid...

Why? Our President dared to call out those that would appease the terrorists, and laid the cards on the table:

“We have an obligation,” he continued, “to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

GW dared to compare the appeasers of terrorists to the appeasers of,GASP, Nazis! How dare he!?

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,”

I'd like to ask the same of those that compare our President to Hitler. Granted, their comparisons are based solely on emotional leaps to conclusions, but I digress. Why is Bush being bashed for comparing terrorist appeasers to Nazi appeasers?

You can read the entire article here.

Some of the professional victims, and those that enable them, have claimed that our President's words are a direct attack against Obama. What a hoot! I can see it now...a lame duck President goes to Israel to attack a lame candidate...who would have thought?

It's all a moot point, since he's right. Terrorists are bad, those that would appease them are bad, and stating that publicly has, somehow, become bad...I don't get it.

Quick Notes

Just a couple of details, if you'll allow me. My counterpart, Hans Bret, has recently deployed to Iraq, so he may be slow to post any material on here. Not that either of us have been extremely active in our posting, but you get the point. He does get occasional opportunities to check his email, and peruse the internet briefly, so if you'd like to send him some encouragement, feel free to do so.

A nifty little blog titled The Dick List pointed me toward an interesting article over at, of all places, the Huffington Post. I usually steer clear of that mess, since it's infested with whackos, but this article was actually a breath of fresh air. You can click here to see it. It addresses the absurdity of Islam, and the equal insanity of the west's response to it. I highly recommend it.

Playing Softball With Iran

The New York Times reports that Hezbollah is training terrorist insurgents in Iran, to attack U.S. troops in Iraq. I'm just shocked, shocked I tell you! You can read the article here. I'm not sure if anybody is really surprised about this, but I am wondering why we continue to play softball with Iran. We hem and haw, while they actively support the killing of our troops. We fart around while they strive to build a nuke. Am I the only one that sees this as, well, um, foolish? Perhaps we could send an even clearer sign of weakness to our enemies, but I doubt it.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Faoud Ajami has interesting things to say about this situation. He acknowledges that we've pussyfooted around for far too long:

"We tell the Iranians that the military option is "on the table." But three decades of playing cat-and-mouse with American power have emboldened Iran's rulers. We have played by their rules, and always came up second best.

Next door, in Iraq, Iranians played arsonists and firemen at the same time. They could fly under the radar, secure in the belief that the U.S., so deeply engaged there and in Afghanistan, would be reluctant to embark on another military engagement in the lands of Islam."

I love the analogy of "flying under the radar," since that's exactly what our planes should be doing when delivering their clear response (of the 2,000 pound, guided variety) to the imams in Tehran. You can read that article here.

There is no way to tap dance around the fact that Iran is actively supporting the attacks on our troops. They continue to get a pass, and it's frustrating as can be. I'm not sure why we're not hurling cruise missiles at Iran, the way we used to do so with Iraq, but I suspect that it's due to our current posture. We may not be best aligned to conduct large scale military operations against Iran at the moment.

I'm hoping that changes, and changes very soon. Enough is enough. I would like to see clear military pressure being put on Iran. I would like to see us demonstrate the only thing that the inhabitants of that country (and more to the point, their leaders) understand: military might. I don't think that we need to launch a full scale invasion of Iran, but we need to be prepared to, in order to follow up our limited air strikes.

Your thoughts?