Cascajun

Thomas Paine, the author of “Common Sense,” returns to modern times to plea for a second revolution to take back America, Now!

The historic focus on the Translatlantic slave trade has fostered ignorance of the other ones.

It’s one of history’s supreme ironies that the Moro Campaigns were in part caused by the need to suppress the slave trade in South East Asia. Mindanao was the Darfur of it’s day. The difference was the UN didn’t exist yet. Of course today, not only Americans but most Filipinos are ignorant of this history of human trafficking, and we’re talking the early 1900s.

Slavery did mean Simon Legree and all that. But even today there are dozens of ruins of Spanish fortifications lining the Philippine coast which are mute testimony to the need to defend against the slavers. You can visit them if so inclined.

Following recent comments by Sen. Barbara Boxer that an average daily loss of three military people in Iraq is unacceptable, Dr. Philip R. O’Connor poses a question to the new congressional leadership in Washington: “What price in American lives are we prepared to pay for our national security policies?”

O’Connor then gives that casualty rate some perspective:

In the full sweep of U.S history, from the commencement of the Revolution on Lexington Green in April 1775, until the sunny morning of September 11, 2001, our average daily sacrifice has been between 14 and 15 military fatalities (1,217,000 fatalities/83,461 days = 14.6/day). Since 9/11, the average daily sacrifice has been 1.7 per day (3200/1900=1.68).

Human life is precious, period. Yet we can’t ignore the fact that security comes with a price. While gruesome to boil it down to math, it’s fair to pose the question if our leaders can flatly state that 3 military fatalities per day is too high.

O’Conner takes the analysis further, considering what’s been achieved at the expense of our fallen heroes in the military:

As things stand, the conflict with Islamic radicalism involves the lowest average daily military fatality rate of any long run national security era. It may worsen, it may improve. If Congress had been asked on September 12, 2001, to endorse a national defense posture against Islamic radicalism that traded up to 2 military fatalities per day over the subsequent five years in return for no additional homeland attacks, the deposing of terror friendly regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ending of Libya’s nuclear program, what would they have done? Would Congress accept that bargain today?

What price? If the US is to have a foreign policy that includes supporting freedom and democracy abroad, backed up with the implicit threat of military intervention, then this question must be considered.

SouthComm comments on, and links to, a recent Fresh Air with Terry Gross program, noting that it’s value “is the window it provides into the cookie-cutter liberal mindset with which Terry Gross approaches the world.”

I suppose “cookie-cutter” is one way to describe the mindset. Frighteningly obtuse would be another.

The program, titled A Conservative Perspective on U.S.-Iran Relations, is an interview with Michael Ledeen. I don’t have copies of transcripts, but the following is an accurate summary of one segment that illustrates my point.

Ledeen has long held the opinion that Iran has been at war with the United States ever since the Iranian Isamic Revolution of 1979. Gross challenged that assertion and Ledeen responded that there was a 27-year history of Iranian attacks against the US to support it.

Gross probed further. What attacks are you referring to? The recent attacks on US soil were not committed by Iran. What attacks in the last 27-years?

Ledeen promptly began listing:

• the 1979 hostage taking in Tehran;
• the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut (63 deaths);
• the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut (305 deaths);
• the 1996 bombing of the Kobar Towars in Saudi Arabia (20 deaths).

Gross quickly interrupted, “But that’s just 4 attacks, none on US soil.” Ledeen correctly stated that there were many more attacks to be listed. However, I was quite astounded at Terry’s obtuse remark, as if the number of attacks has anything to do with the issue at hand.

Only 4 attacks and none on US soil?

So what! Each of those attacks alone was an act of war carried out by an Iranian sponsored proxy. Each resulted in the deaths of both American and foreign citizens and military personnel. That’s an act of war.

It would be interesting to hear Terry explain to the relatives of those dead American military personnel why any one of those attacks, much less all of them, are not illustrative of the state of war that exists between the US and the clerical facist regime presently ruling in Iran.

Mark Steyn writes in Events at Haditha don’t change need for victory -

Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something. And, in the scales of history, it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.

Indeed. Allied forces deliberately fire bombed Tokyo and Dresden during WWII, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. How would that have been reported by today’s press? I find the complete lack of context and perspective offered by the media utterly amazing.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.