Islamism

Submitted by John McClain (United States), Mar 10, 2004 at 11:53

As a retired Marine, I can only say Kudos for an insightful and thought provoking column. All of the successes of the Marine Corps can be directly attributable to the ideology that has been carefully inculcated in the individual Marines who make up the Marine Corps, you could eliminate all the officers and the Marine Corps would still be there, and still be as effective, the ideology would live on, probably stronger by dint of retaliatory attitudes. There isn't much of anything French I could usefully quote outside of many of the observations Napoleon made, aside from him the French never had a military, but one of the quotes that was pounded into my brain from Private through Gunnery Sergeant was "moral is to physical as two is to one". We tried real hard to not notice Napoleon was French whenever we quoted him.

We could stop the terrorism rather quickly and effectively, however it would require us to actually follow the Laws of War as established in Geneva... Once a non-military building is used for military purposes it becomes a sanctioned legitimate target...

Unfortunately, the laws of war only impact us when we allegedly violate them, they have no standing when developing strategic plans for the prosecution of war, because "the war is over" now we're just establishing a new infrastructure. It's a damn shame the panelists decided against a "second amendment" for the new Iraqi Constitution.

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