Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Obama’s Betrayal of Islamic Democracy - The mishandling of Benghazi undermined a prominent Muslim moderate. By Andrew C. McCarthy
Friday, May 10, 2013
A
significant point made in riveting testimony by Gregory Hicks, the
State Department’s former deputy chief of mission in Libya, has largely
been missed in the coverage of Wenesday’s Benghazi hearing. It is worth
highlighting, not least because doing so illuminates the depth of the
Obama administration’s depravity. In its assiduous effort
to defraud the American people, for 2012-campaign purposes, into
believing that the Benghazi massacre was provoked by an anti-Islamic
Internet video — rather than having been a coordinated jihadist attack
that undermined President Obama’s claim to have decimated al-Qaeda — the
administration betrayed its self-proclaimed commitment to establishing
democracy in Islamic countries.
It
has been widely reported that, during the hearing, Mr. Hicks was asked
to respond to the infamously cynical, transparently rehearsed rant —
“What difference, at this point, does it make?” — by former Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton during her long-delayed congressional testimony
about Benghazi back in January. Hicks first observed that the real
question was, “What difference did it make?” (his emphasis),
then proceeded to explain that the difference was enormous . . . and
enormously damaging. The reason has to do with Mohammed Magariaf, the
president of Libya’s new, post-Qaddafi General National Congress.
In a pleasant surprise during the dark days after the Benghazi
massacre, President Magariaf forcefully condemned the attack as the work
of Islamic terrorists.
For career State Department officials such as
him, Hicks elaborated, this was a major coup. Now, to say Hicks was a
compelling witness is an understatement. On this point, though, he did
not flesh out what he meant. That is why it has not gotten the attention
it deserves. As readers who follow our discussions here know, I
am not a fan of Islamic-democracy promotion — at least, not the way our
government has done it for the last 20 years, which is more a matter of
forcing “democracy” to accommodate anti-democratic sharia law than of
instilling the principles of Western liberty. For present purposes,
however, the point is not to rehash this debate.
Like most of our
best foreign-service officers, Gregory Hicks is a true believer in
helping Islamic countries achieve what he called their “dream of
democracy.” This was a goal the Bush and Clinton administration set
themselves to. It is, moreover, what the Obama administration claims is
its top imperative in the Middle East — the reason why Obama has
insisted, for example, on starting an unprovoked war to topple Qaddafi,
on giving billions in aid and sophisticated weaponry to Egypt’s Muslim
Brotherhood government, and on supporting the “rebels” in Syria despite
their ties to the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda.
What officials like
Hicks realize but have difficulty explaining — for to explain it is to
admit the gargantuan uncertainty of the task — is that democratization
calls for authentic Muslim moderates to separate themselves from violent
jihadists (and, I would add, from sharia chauvinists posing as
moderates). If they are unwilling or unable to do so, there can be no
real democracy. There can be only the law of the jihadist jungle or, at
best, a milder sharia totalitarianism that, though we may refer to it as
“democracy,” is not democracy in any real sense.
As we have seen
time and again, however, this is a very hard thing for moderates to do.
Again, my point here is not to repeat what I’ve said a million times
about how foolish we are not to study Islamic-supremacist ideology. But
the unyielding fact is that this ideology is prevalent throughout the
Middle East — it is not just the stuff of fringe terrorists. And it
teaches that those who sow discord in the ummah — by, for
example, condemning fellow Muslims or endorsing Western standards over
sharia subjugation — should be ostracized or even killed.
It takes
a great deal of bravery for a Muslim to make a stand against this. He
is sure to be vilified as an apostate for doing so. Sharia’s penalty for
apostasy is death, and the so-called Muslim Street is well known to
take such matters into its own hands. This is why President Magariaf’s
acknowledgment that the atrocity in Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and
his forceful condemnation of the jihadists who carried it out, was such
a coup in the eyes of Hicks. Pages 1 2 Next › From the National Review
