The Laughing Wolf

Serendipity Works In Mysterious Ways

Not five minutes after I posted Never Forget, over on her site Ith pointed me towards a wooly thinker who wants us to photoblog on 9-11 to help promote understanding, and to show that not all Americans are evil warmongers who bomb countries back to the stone age and do no good what-so-ever anywhere in the world. Ye gods and little fishes.

Ifni, give me patience and give it to me now. I have responded to some of his comments over on Michele’s site (which has just been added to the blog roll, I might ad) and Iths, and it never ceases to amaze me the fuzzy thing that some call thinking.

This person claimed that “…bombing two countries back to the stone age (say what you will, but the ***collateral*** damage in Afganastan and Iraq has been estimated at over 10,000 people).” Maybe it was, if you count all enemy combatants as civilians. As I pointed out in my response there, even the worst case estimates by people who don’t like us only put casualties at around 3,000 in Iraq, and there is debate over that figure since it may include FS “troops” in it.

This would be very bad, except that Saddam was killing more than 5,000 of his own people each year. There are no accurate figures that I have for the mass murders in Afghanistan under the taliban but I am willing to entertain bets that it was more than a few.

As for the stone age: where exactly? Tora Bora? Already there guy, all we did was clean out some caves and provide new building material (and hopefully some fertilizer).

Someone comes into your home, attacks you, kills members of your family, and is stopped from doing worse by something unexpected (grounding the planes anyone? Remember what was found on some planes that were grounded?), and swears to come back and finish the job later. What do you do?

Apparently, we need to all understand them, and show them and the rest of the world that we are good people and that they should not hate us (just our leaders).

Tell you what, you go do it. Go to Iran, go to Iraq, go to Indonesia, go to any country where they hate us and there have been problems. Go over there, preach, and try to convert. Show them we are good people. Let’s see how far you get, and how much fun it is given the lack of freedoms in those places. Afghanistan and Iran were not exactly garden spots before we went in, and at least now the demonstrators and their families won’t be killed simply for demonstrating, only when they attack us. Or when they screw up in bomb making class in the local mosque.

I have been around the world a bit, and one thing it does do is make me appreciate so very much the freedoms we have here. The opportunity, the ability to take initiative, and so much more. I was also incredibly lucky on 9-11 in that the people I knew in New York, including one who was supposed to be in the Towers, were not there and did survive. So many others were not so fortunate.

You don’t have the first frelling clue. We worked damned hard to MINIMIZE the casualties, they did not and do not. We did not deliberately target civilians, they did and still do. We have undertaken a massive effort to improve, educate, and uplift, they worked hard at tearing down so that they lived well while their populations lived in conditions I doubt you could take for five minutes, much less a lifetime. Go look at some verifiable, certifiable facts; get educated. Then talk.

For Now, Understand This: They have sworn to kill us as a nation, as an ideology, and as individuals. What else do we need to understand? This is war, they declared it, we will finish it.

I will reaffirm life on 9-11, and if Ifni smiles on me it will be in the most basic and fun way possible. I will remember those who died, what happened, and why it happened. Then, I will continue to do all I can to fight those who attacked me and mine. They want war to the finish, so they shall have it. What they have sown, they shall reap.

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