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