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Reader Mail
An Ordinary Mailbag
(Page 3 of 3)
I thought Justice Souter showed a certain amount of disloyalty,
retiring when he did. If he hated life in Washington as much as
is claimed, couldn't he have resigned during the previous --
Republican -- administration?
-- Robert Nowall
Cape Coral, Florida
PEACEFUL IS AS PEACEFUL DOES
Re: Roger
Scruton's Free
Speech in Europe:
A few observations concerning Mr. Scruton's article and his remarks about the book of Joshua and the Koran:
A point Mr. Scruton overlooks is that the book of Joshua has not inspired war by Jews against the goyim all over the world. Also, the actions described in Joshua took place in a defined time and place. So our concerns with Joshua are of rather a different sort than those created by the Koran and Islam.
On the other hand, the Koran has inspired more than 1300 years of war against the infidel by Islam's adherents. Mr. Scruton is surely aware of the observation by Bernard Lewis that Islam has bloody borders. There is no reason to doubt that it always will.
I suppose killings inspired by the Koran could be considered a form of human sacrifice; certainly such killing is considered to be pleasing to Allah, and a fulfillment of a believer's religious duty.
People who've studied the Koran maintain that its theology is a
jumble of Christian, Jewish, and pagan traditions and teachings.
If that's so, Mr. Scruton probably does recognize "a heartfelt
invocation of the pious life" in some parts of it. I suggest that
Mr. Scruton, and the rest of us, would be wise to give more
weight to 1300 years of war and massacre than to elements of
piety borrowed from other religions by a hugely successful
Arabian version of Jim Jones.
-- Touhey
TIME FOR A NEW SUBSCRIPTIOn
Re: Bill Murchison's Killing
Time:
I stopped reading Time in June '67, folloing the Six-Day
War. I lived in an Arab country -- the Time version was
so out of line (I am not pro-Arab), that the reporting did not
fit what I hear from my Jewish and Arab friends. End of
Time.
-- Stan
Sugar Land, Texas
A BASELESS PROPOSAL
Re: Ira Kessel's letter (under "Tip-NATO-ing Out of the
Alliance") in Reader Mail's
Judged in Advance:
Ira Kessel makes several valid points about the usefulness of NATO today but misses a few downsides that can not simply be discounted.
We have a fraction of the forces left in Europe we had during the height of the Cold War and in partner with NATO. We did not bring home the forces we used to have to bolster our defenses here -- we disbanded them completely. We've cut our deployable combat unit in half as a result. We've sold off excess hardware to so-called "allies" or simply cannibalized them for parts. We've closed numerous bases and facilities where such units would have to be based. It does not have to happen that way, but trust me on this, the cost to move our last remaining forces out of Europe and relocate them here would be enormous and my money is on that they would be disbanded to save that cost just as all the other forces "brought home" were. Same for South Korea.
Without the bases and facilities we access through NATO we would have to stage every mission from the Continental US. Aside from the shear logistical cost, the extra 4,000 miles or so of transport time each way would require a significantly larger logistical base of transport equipment and supplies. Our bases in Europe are a critical stage point for movement to and from the Middle East, and nothing is going to change our need to go there in the remainder of my life time.
If we withdraw out of NATO we will essentially withdraw from the world as far as military capability is concerned. If we have no "skin" in what goes on in Europe then Europe will not allow us to use their land as a stage. Military bases are always legitimate targets in warfare. We aren't there to protect Europe any longer.
Ira's points are valid in the political sense but from not from a
military point of view. Like it or not, NATO is a sideshow as a
military force. It's our capability to deal with larger fish that
keeps us in the game.
-- Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia
Comments
Leave a Comment
SLG| 5.11.09 @ 7:08AM
Sorry, Thom, but I read somewhere fairly recently that, just like the UN, NATO's become a supercilious "debating society" of sorts. It’s neither equipped nor organized to cooperate and fight. Germany, Italy and Spain, among others, have reached a state that can only be called unilateral disarmament.
NATO fight against terrorism? Doubtful -- unless the EU members are willing to multiply their defense expenditures by a factor of ten (twenty? Thirty? To the nth power?) and sustain them at that level for at least a decade, NATO is nothing more than a hollow shell. Wasting our money - as usual.
Noted that the 2,000 soldiers who constitute the Italian detachment in Afghanistan seem to be using the “kinder, gentler approach; they’re barred by their government from actually fighting (so why are they called soldiers?) in combat – so they “listen to residents’ problems, offer food and medical care,“ ad nauseum. We’ve already heard plenty about fat Germans…
Then -- I recall reading where France, under De Gaulle, pulled out of NATO as a gesture of gratitude, after we had saved-their-bacon once again - - and our United States (innocent to the last) hung in. Until, finally, the Berlin Wall came down and we were, truly, not needed any longer. NATO was irrelevant -- a mere social club that existed as an excuse to maintain a headquarters and conduct lavish conferences. This point was most emphatically driven home when a genocidal conflict erupted on Europe's flank, Kosovo, and NATO -- Europe -- couldn't manage a response….
And not even the painless, proverbial “lip-service” in regard to Iran, North Korea or anyplace else!
Let’s split that sick effort-in-futility. To do otherwise is sheer stupidity, ultra-dumbness!
Yet, to think that our troops would be placed on our own borders? Or utilized with any semblance of common sense? With the Marxist Obama agenda? Laughable. Almost.
Thom| 5.11.09 @ 6:44PM
SLG, I’m not sure what you are “sorry” about or where we disagree. As I said, NATO is a (worthless) “sideshow” but our membership in the Club gets us use of the Club house facilities and that is far more valuable to our interest than the illusion that we are actually protecting Europe any longer or that NATO forces actually have any ability to project any force outside of their home countries. The evidence of NATO’s lack of relevance in the scheme of things is rather blatant for all to see. My salient point is that logistics have a great deal to do with the Clubs we pay admission to and both NATO and our force structure and positions in the Pacific are based on the same realities. For all the claims of some in the Pentagon we really can’t project effective conventional military power much beyond the Continental US or a few hundred miles away from one of our Carrier Battle groups without the use of large well supported land bases for both ground and air units. NATO is the price of admission to the Middle East Operation area.