Urination-Gate

We have been thinking about the Marines relieving themselves onto the dead bodies of Taliban fighters and have had a hard time finding the right words to make my point. However, the following article got me thinking. War is Hell and those who are participants sometimes lose their way.  This is the case of these Marines.

We cannot document it, but feel secure in saying that this is not the first time in the history of man (or the United States) that a soldier has relieved himself onto a vanquished foe.  However, it might be the first time we can see the intentionally degrading event. For those who have not been in combat, it is hard for us to understand the range of emotions that course through the body when we are involved in a kill or be killed situation. We won, they lost. That has to be a really big high!

Yet taking a move of the event is, in a word, stupid and we would expect that those who did "star" would agree with that assessment.  They will pay a price and in today's politically correct world, it will be high.   

It was not like that years ago. For example, during the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, there were no enemy soldiers taken prisoner. Prisoners were taken but they did not make it to the POW camps. In the following story we read about Black Jack Pershing in the Philippines and his treatment of Muslim fighters. Seems we have forgotten that war can make men do all sorts of things they normally would not do.

We somehow expect war to be like a video game, where it is clean and only bad guys get killed. If we are unfortunate and lose our life in a game, all we have to do is reboot and we have several lives again.  Unfortunately war is not like that.

Another issue that drives me crazy is the concern for "collateral damage" both of people and buildings. Why were we not concerned when we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo in WWII?  Thousands of civilians died in both of those incidents and please remind me, who was brought up on charges? The answer none.  Yet if some unfortunate Marine fires on a crowd of people after being fired upon, he is up on charges!

This latest event, which I call Urinationgate, is the latest "feminization" of this country. We are becoming, if not already are, wimps. We fail to understand war and what happens when you go to war. It is not pretty, in fact, it is awful, and should only be the last resort for settling a dispute. However, when we use the military option, we cannot piecemeal it. We must fully engage the enemy with overwhelming force. Those enemy non-combatants must understand that their country has gone to war with us and therefore they might be part of the damage that occurs. Next time, the leaders who threaten us will think twice before taking us on.

Unless we put the manhood back in war, we will be pushed around, bullied and then taken over by our enemies.  War is hell but being defeated is worse.

Our brave Marines will be punished for their stupidity but we will be punished in much greater ways when we lose the next great battle. At that time there will be no CNN, CBS or the New York Times to report on the tragedy, we will have lost and we will be the vanquished.  

Conservative Tom

 

Murder, Mayhem and Tinkling on Terrorists

By GOPUSA Staff January 17, 2012 6:57 am

          

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The story is told of General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing fighting Islamic terrorists in the Philippines in 1911. It seems that his troops had captured a number of the enemy. Knowing of the Muslim fear of even coming in contact with pigs, the story goes that Pershing forced the prisoners to dig their own graves, then stood all but one of them up in front of a firing squad. He ordered his men to slaughter several pigs and to dip their bullets in the pig’s blood. After the terrorists were executed, their bodies were thrown into the graves and the pig blood and guts were buried with them. The terrified lone survivor was turned loose to return and tell his compatriots what he had witnessed. Rumor has it that Pershing had no further problems with the Islamic population of the Philippines. While the veracity of the story is undetermined, it strikes one as the sort of tale that should have happened even if it didn't.

Can you imagine Black Jack Pershing working for the likes of Barack Obama, Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton? Can you picture General George Patton (no relation to yours truly), the man who proclaimed that "Americans love to win and can’t stand to lose" taking orders from this crowd of wimps? Try to visualize Pershing or Patton’s response to all the feigned outrage coming out of the Obama White House, Defense and State Departments over a video of four U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of a group of Taliban terrorists they had just killed. Obama, Panetta and Clinton, the three stooges of American foreign policy have expressed their outrage at this act because the U.S. is in the midst of trying to negotiate with the Taliban.

Of course, a spokesman for the Taliban concurred with the administration’s outrage. (I know it was a spokesman because any woman who attempted to speak on behalf of these savages would be stoned to death.) At any rate, I can certainly understand Obama’s reluctance to upset the Taliban. After spending the past three years bowing before Islamic radicals and cozying up to South American tyrants on his globetrotting apology tour, the president wouldn’t want to anger the people who aided and abetted Osama bin Laden in the killing of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans. That would be wrong. In fact, in the words of liberal pundits Juan Williams and Kirsten Powers on Fox News, what these marines did was "despicable." Really? Annoying, maybe. Stupid, certainly — especially for allowing it to be videotaped in this YouTube age — but despicable isn’t even in the ballpark.

Synonyms for despicable: appalling; dreadful; contemptible; wicked; shameful; disgraceful; vile; loathsome. Sorry. This doesn't even come close. Despicable is what the Taliban and their ilk did to us. Despicable is what happened in New York City, at the Pentagon and in a field near Shanksville, PA, a decade ago. Despicable is what the Iranians are trying to do with their newfound nuclear technology. Despicable is what Kim Il Sung, his son, Kim Jung Il and grandson, Kim Jung Un, have done to North Korea and its people. Despicable is what Hugo Chavez has done to Venezuela. Despicable is what Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot did to the innocents who got in their way. Tinkling on terrorists is in another category altogether.

Like General Pershing, our military should have the authority to do whatever is necessary to win against whatever enemy we ask them to fight. Our enemies should always know that no matter what happens, when we go to war, it's not going to be pretty or dignified or sporting. As Ronald Reagan once said, the strategy should be a simple one: we win, they lose, period.

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Doug Patton describes himself as a recovering political speechwriter who agrees with himself much more often than not. Now working as a freelance writer, his weekly columns of sage political analysis are published the world over by legions of discerning bloggers, courageous webmasters and open-minded newspaper editors. Astute supporters and inane detractors alike are encouraged to e-mail him with their pithy comments at dougpatton@cox.net.