The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 5 of 7)

p>Still, it's a rousing swashbuckler, a great sea story, even if it isn't quite a Patrick O'Brian sea story. Just on a visual and entertainment level, it rewards seeing on the big screen. br> -- Richard McEnroe /p> p> WITHOUT BLINDERS br> Re: Jed Babbin's Cordon and Search : /p> p>Jed Babbin is right. Trying to win hearts and minds in the Middle East is a Wilsonian wet dream -- a fool's errand only liberals and compassionate conservatives would go to the wall for. Hearts in that region are as fickle as the desert wind, and most of their minds are rats' nests, no more orderly than a teenager's bedroom and as shallow as an Episcopal bishop. These folks almost always align themselves not with the most compassionate kid on the block, but the toughest. (To win in the Middle Eat you have to pitch inside.) Best we should return to the philosophy of the early, lapsed Chuck Colson, to wit: When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. So lets just be sure that Saddam is belly up, then turn the country and the oil wells back over to the locals and go home, leaving behind the unambiguous message that the next time Iraq, or any of its ratbag neighbors, gets crosswise to American security interests we'll be back to bust some chops again. If we follow this course, we likely would have to UPS a carload of smelling salts to the State Department, and Barbra Streisand might pass on from acute vapors, but I'm willing to take the chance. br> -- Larry Thornberry br> Tampa, Florida /p>

topics:
Business, Islam, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Oil