"Emmanuel.Gustin" wrote:
sddso wrote:

: At the national/grand strategy level, Western
nations are
: quintessentially unwarlike, willfully unengaged
until ire
: is aroused.

So what is the problem with that? Warfare is
inherently
extremely costly, uncertain in outcome, and
destructive.
To be 'quintessentially unwarlike' until it
becomes
unavoidable to defend you essential interests
seems,
IMHO, a sound and rational policy. Even the
great
empires of the past preferred to pick and choose

their expansive wars carefully.

: First, the Red Army did most of the gruntwork
of destroying Nazi
: Germany's armed forces. It's no great chore
to argue that if the USSR
: had not become involved, the Third Reich might
still be in existence.

It is -- of course it was a serious error to
attack the
USSR, but the Reich would have lost the war
even without
it.

: a great chunk of Imperial Japanese forces)
more fully developed and
: exploited radar, and worked to huge advantage
in exploiting
: cryptanalysis and COMINT breakthroughs. Hardly
any doubt remains that
: that atomic bombs ended the War, but radar
won it.

And this, incidentally, illustrates a vital
advantage
enjoyed by the Western democracies. Both in
the USSR
and in Germany scientific and technological
development
was greatly handicapped by stupid decisions
and politically
inspired doctrines. And the prosecution of politically
or
racially 'challenged' scientist and engineers.
This lead
to such aberrations of the mind as 'Aryan Physics'
and
the communist approval of the non-evolutionary
biology
of what-was-his-name...

German neglect to develop centimetric radars,
for example,
was in no small part caused by authoritarian

bone-headedness. It had been declared on good
authority
that it would never work, so nobody dared to
put out his
neck and try it. In sharp contrast to the style
of British
laboratories, where productive chaos was happily
tolerated.

: Argument by dismissal is the tactic of losers.

Life is too short to waste time on dissecting

convoluted semi-lunatic rants.

: Any effort by antiwar groups in nations targeted
by the terrorists are
: also aimed at the morale of civil populations.
Thus, no difference
: exists between the terrorists and the antiwar
groups, so it's quite
: proper to consider the antiwar groups as treasonous.


Ridiculous. This reaches the intellectual level
of
'to save democracy, we have to destroy it first.'

Emmanuel Gustin

The mainstream antiwar groups-i.e those opposed to war on religious or
moral grounds are one thing: those who are opposed for political reasons-Ramsey
Clark and his WWP crowd come to mind are something else. Clark has been an
apologist for some really nasty people-Saddam and Milosevic, Noriega, Khadafy,
the Mullahs in Iran, Kim-Il Sung and his wacky son, the Sandinistas, the
PRC for Tianamen, even the Taliban after ENDURING FREEDOM got started. Openly
supporting the enemy could be prosecuted for giving aid and comfort to the
enemy, at best, and at most, treason. I'd toss Clark and his crowd of unreconstructed
Stalinists into Federal Prison on multiple charges: giving aid and comfort
to the enemy, treason, obstructing the national defense, violating the embargoes
against Iraq, Libya, N. Korea, and Cuba, and that's for starters.

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