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."
Bin Laden wanted to replicate 9/11 jihad attacks, didn’t expect magnitude of US response to them
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Osama
Robert Spencer : There were gross miscalculations on both sides. Osama bin Laden thought
antiwar sentiment would be much stronger than it turned out to be, and
that the U.S. government’s response to 9/11 would be much weaker. The
U.S., meanwhile, along with the rest of the West, steadfastly refused to
face the ideological wellsprings of the attacks, and allowed those who
hold the same world view to settle in large numbers in Europe and North
America, with consequences that have yet to be fully seen.
“Osama bin Laden was ‘eager to replicate 9/11,’ plotted further atrocities against US: letters,” by Lee Brown, New York Post, April 25, 2022:
Osama bin Laden had been “very
eager to replicate the 9/11 attacks” against the US — and actively
plotted to blow up oil tankers, derail trains and use private jets as
weapons, according to a trove of seized documents. The plots were spelled out in more than 500,000 letters and files seized by the Navy SEAL team that executed the mass-murdering al Qaeda leader in 2011, according to Nelly Lahoud, an Islamic scholar who spent years carefully studying the trove.
They
show that the terrorist was “very eager to replicate the 9/11 attacks
in the United States,” Lahoud, a senior fellow in New America’s
International Security program, told “60 Minutes.” Bin
Laden was “mindful” that security had become “very difficult at
airports” after his monstrous Sept. 11 attacks — and so told his
henchmen to instead consider chartering private jets to attack the US.
Knowing that would be difficult, too, he also spelled out a detailed plan to slaughter American commuters on a train. He
wanted to have around 40 feet of track removed so that a “train could
be derailed,” said Lahoud, who first analyzed the documents for West
Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center…. The plots were detailed in
letters from 2004, according to Lahoun — who said the
“diminutive”-sounding terrorist was so scared in hiding after Sept. 11
that he did not communicate with his henchmen for three years.
In
2010, a year before his death, bin Laden plotted to target multiple
crude oil tankers and major shipping routes around the Middle East and
Africa. Bin Laden saw “the importance of oil for the industrialized economy” as “similar to blood for human beings,” Lahoud said. “So, if you cause somebody to bleed excessively, even if you don’t kill him you will at least weaken him,” she said.
“He really wanted to do to the American economy,” she said…. The
plans were never carried out, and bin Laden came across as “far from”
in control of al Qaeda, Lahoud said, stressing that the letters made
clear he was “absolutely not” calling the shots…. This was in part
down to a “huge miscalculation” in how bin Laden predicted the US would
respond to losing thousands on Sept. 11. “He thought that the
American people would take to the streets, replicate the anti-Vietnam
war protests and they would put pressure on their government to withdraw
from Muslim majority states,” she said, with the letters showing he
expected at most “a limited airstrike.”
The docs also showed that
al Qaeda had just $200,000 in its coffers in 2006 and was unable to
support its increasingly fractious jihad, the report said….
