And those of us who are just dirty heathens. (I've got an excuse, I just spent two nights with a PSK and a waterbottle. Normally I'm a clean heathen.)
The reason why this report is important is becuase in the end, it's a moral issue. Not a morale issue, but morals. Ethics. Being a better human being. You can tell a lot about a culture by how thier treat thier sick, thier young and thier enemies. I'm not saying they need five star hotels, hell no, but treating them as you would like to be treated if you were thier "guest" (to use Iran's term). They want prayer rugs and the gaurds to wack the doors to tell them when the appointed times are, fine, and while you are at it, don't break thier dietary rules. Then make sure the world knows it. And that they know how your people are treated when captured.
People seem to be ignoring a critical lesson of "asymetric" warfare. If they can pull us down to thier level, they've won, becuase we've made all the propaganda they come up with true. Once there are enough of the enemy, they breed and feed on your own willingness to dehumanize them. At that point, you can't kill them with bombs, and you can't stop them all even if you go door to door (which usually makes more of them).
You have to make thier support base shun them, you have to seige them in economically, logistically and socially. You make them look bad, by being the better person (although the West has been failing that abysmally since before any of our great grand parent's were born). You have to sever thier external support lines. And you prove thier mortality by going after the operational cells (which you quietly make go away without all the media frenzy and political posturing, unless you can put someone who had a crisis of faith in front of the cameras or have to take them down on the street corner) and by neutralizing thier leadership and mouth pieces (and if you can make it look like a dietal act, or internal disorder within thier structure, so much the better becuase then you're clean).
These aren't military, or even political strategies, but social. And you have to be able to play using thier perspective and your rules. In America, we think that a hundred years is history, three hundred is ancient history. I bet the Europeans on this list laugh at us, or at least think us slighlty retarded, for that. Remember, we are talking about an enemy that draws it's grunts from a collection of cultures (there really is more than one) were to be a man, you have to know by heart who begat whom and what the bride prices were and thier swords' and horses' names and what grudges and debts were outstanding when he died and so on and so forth. Going back three hundred years, or more. The ability to think in terms of centuries is somethign we in the US have to learn RTFN, or we won't be done with this for another thousand years.
Either that, or we can sterilize the planet, nuke it down to the mantel, and assuming any water or air remain, what comes around in a few hundred million years can see about repeating our mistakes. From a certain point of view, it would be victory, and from far enough away, it would be civilized.
I'd like to think that the people here are civilized.
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-IronRaven
When a man dare not speak without malice for fear of giving insult, that is when truth starts to die. Truth is the truest freedom.