Captain's Quarters -

Germany excepted? My God, even the SS were not as crazy as the Jap fanatics. Come on, Captain, get in the game!

The images of the man being dragged through the streets were reminiscent of photos of lynchings in the old South.

Japan is Western?

We went into Iraq in large part because the Iraqi people were being brutally repressed by Saddam, et al.

It now appears that they enjoy being brutally repressed, and I'm not about to send American soldiers in to free "brutally repressed" Iranians, too.

The only military action I want to see taken with Iran is a nice long-distance mushroom cloud. Or three.

Seems that Rosie O'Donnell and Michael Moore's minutemen like to beat men and women. Wonder what they do with Gays and Big Fat Stupid White Men. I am sure that they give them television shows where they can voice their opinions and make movies showing Iran/Iraq as the Great Satan.

Interesting...

Years ago, we learned after the Reagan Presidency, the Reagan Administration empowered covert operations to undermine the Soviets.

I remember one case, allowing the KGB to grab onto some computer software which actually was corrupted, and set them back quite a bit with a sincere mess.

Have to wonder what efforts the Bush Administration has engaged upon in secret in the GWOT, especially with Iran.

We might not know the details for decades, but it will be interesting to review.

Certainly, the Iranians have felt the pinch after Saddam fell, with the USA in their backyard.

Hi Ed,

You write: "They aren't interested in peaceful co-existence, but instead in global domination in the name of their radical version of Islam."

It would appear they have a long way to go.

Iran's GDP is about as big as Greece's.

Its land combat power, as assessed by James Dunnigan in "How to Make War (4th ed, 2003)" is about a third that of Israel's, and about 1/20th of the US.

It is pursuing an atomic program which has aroused suspicion in many countries. That said, it is currently a non nuclear power, while India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia and the United States all are official or unofficial members of the nuclear club. It's a rough neighborhood.

Its social and domestic policies are one thing. Its pursuit of "global domination" is quite another.

"That's been our experience in ending war between Western powers, Germany excepted, over the last 130 years or so,"

Ehhm? Huh? It has? When was this? Wars don't start by accident between good intentioned people, you know.

Good point Cap'n. Wars very often begin long before the bullets and bombs start flying, when powerful groups start talking past each other instead of to each other. And America has a long history of projecting an image of corruption and cowardice and venality that goes back as far as you want to look.

The Pacific half of World War 2 is a perfect example of two countries with two distinctly different cultures seeing each other through lenses completely distorted by racial stereotypes. The Japanese saw our movies and read our newspapers and concluded that we would never be able to take heavy casualties so they adopted a strategy of grabbing Asia and the Pacific Islands and then maximizing the cost we would have to pay to take them all back. They were absolutely convinced that we were more concerned with Europe and that once we saw the huge casualties, we'd negotiate a peace that left them in possession of Asia and the Pacific.

At the same time, Americans looked at Japanese as odd little near-sighted men trying to fake modernity and hopelessly inept and essentially imitative. We knew that we were economically and racially and culturally superior and we just couldn't imagine these little yellow pretenders being stupid enough to attack us. We were not only convinced of our niceness and our power, but we blindly assumed that they shared that opinion as well. In other words, we projected our thinking patterns onto them and then assumed that they must inevitably come to the same conclusions that we did when we thought about the situation in the Pacific.

When you look at the situation with Iran, and maybe even Islam itself, we seem to be going through an updated version of the same process. We are constantly frustrated by the refusal of our enemies to think like us. We think of dominance in terms of economic and military power, and can't imagine how they could think about world domination in any other terms. We broadcast our popular culture of corruption and debauchery into traditional societies and we can't imagine why they loath what we've done with our liberty.

We're once again talking past our enemies, and mistaking the echo of our own voices for a real response.

The Iraqis enjoy being brutally repressed?

Is that why they're fighting alongside our troops, turning against al Qaeda, contacting U.S. military chaplains and asking how to separate church from state, marching against violence, creating "freedom art," and executing members of the former dictatorship?

It took us 13 years to get our act together after we declared our independence from Britain. It took the West Germans 10 years. The Russians are still struggling after 15 years.

The Iraqis are fighting not only terrorists but also the combined efforts of two evil and vicious neighboring regimes, as well as thousands of years of tribalism, thirty years of dictatorship, and profound religious schisms.

To expect Iraq to be Belgium by now is just childish.

As for "stoking the fires of war" with Iran: The Iranians are killing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's an act of war. We need to retaliate in such a way that the Iranians will stop.

We sank half their navy in 1988, and it only took one afternoon. We should give ourselves a week to see how much damage we can to with today's weapons systems.

It didn't have to be this way, but the Iranians want a war. I think we should show them the wisdom of the saying "Beware what you wish for."

For Lew: Great job and good thinking! BAF or Blame America First is always a great default position. Of course the Japanese weren't racist, only us. And the guys on the 4 planes for that Islamic 9/11 treat? Lew, shouldn't we just let the UN take care of things? Envision world peace and treat things like the EU does, right? Again Lew, good, no great job!

Cap'n Ed:

Iran has been at war with us since before the Carter Administration and they have been serious about it. It is little known, because the MSM have not reported it, that jihadists killed around 800 Americans worldwide prior to 9-11. It took 9-11 to wake us up to the point of realizing that there were indeed people who were fighting a war with us and that the Atlantic and Pacific (to say nothing of the Rio Grande) were no longer sufficient protection.

Some may pooh-pooh the overall military power of Iran, or claim that North Korea's missle tests have been, for the most part failures, but this is faulty logic. Iran does indeed see their ultimate goal as global domination and has been working steadily toward that goal for decades. That they cannot prevail against our military in a one-on-one, set piece battle is a given, but it makes them no less dangerous, particularly if we are stupid enough to allow them to complete the construction of nuclear weapons. When they say, clearly and unambiguously that they intend to wipe Israel from the map and that they envision a future without the Great Satan, we are fools not to take them at their word and act accordingly right now. After all, it is true that North Korea's missle shots, for example, aren't very successful or accurate, but when an enemy is shooting at you, or practicing shooting at you, it's sheer idiocy to relax because their marksmanship, at the moment, isn't particularly sharp. The focus should be on the fact they they intend to shoot at us as soon as they can, and that they are practicing to do just that.

Diplomacy should be used with this kind of enemy for one purpose only, to deliver ultimatums and terms for unconditional surrender. Negotiation, you see, requires that each party to the negotiation has similar goals and is willing to make concessions. We want peace, Iran wants to kill or enslave us all. We value the lives of ever individual American and Iranian. They don't. It's rather hard to see the compromise between those positions.

I believe that we will eventually rise up and take the necessary military action, but by then, millions more will have died, and far more will die in the ensuing conflict than if we had the courage for foresight to destroy the rattlesnake nest under the front porch before the babies become large enough to cause real damage.

The mad mullahs who run Iran - no matter who their latest TV spokesmodel is, or how many "reformers" are allowed into parliament - are bloodthirsty barbarian savages devoted to a bizarre death cult with a yearning to turn back the clock by 1000 years.

You can't "negotiate" with such people. They aren't rational in the least.

The overwhelming majority of the Iranian people are not their followers, though. They are remarkably sophisticated and pro-western, but have been suppressed by the theocracy. In time, they will do the job on their own.

Our problem is we may not have enough time to let nature take its course. Some are cheerfully willing to allow Iran into the nuclear "club," without the slightest clue what that might entail. If only the potential damage could be confined to such enablers, it might be a reasonable risk.

Over at ModernConservative.com, we have developed an explanation for why the left seems to get so outraged about some conflicts and forms of oppression, while remaining oddly silent on others.

How the left's agenda trumps genuine concern for human suffering

"name of their radical version of Islam"

I haven't met a version of Islam that ISN'T radical. C'mon Ed, enough of the PC-speak; call a spade a spade.

Are the images of public be-headings and stoning of women in Saudi-Arabia shown in the U.S.