You are reckless and wrong and you need to reconsider your worldview
Monday, 30 January 2006 | 109 readers so far
So you are anti-war. You think we invaded Iraq “illegally.” You think we’re over here slaughtering innocents and trying to extend an American empire into the heart of the Middle East. You’ve protested. You want to impeach Bush. You believe America is headed down the wrong path. And you’re completely wrong about all of it. If you’re still willing to listen I’ll explain why…
Ideal World: I sit on my hill in rural Georgia, minding my own business and living peacefully, content in knowing my neighbors and I can pursue completely different lives right next to each without any conflict and that bliss extends outward around the world.
Real World: My ideas and lifestyle are unacceptable to certain fundamentalist groups of human beings who wish to either convert me to their way of thinking or wipe me from existence. Hence, I find myself voluntarily transported halfway around the world to a messy place where people die daily in the battle to determine whose has the superior set of ideas and memes.
This isn’t about Iraq. It isn’t about America. It isn’t about Saddam Hussein and it’s certainly not about George W. Bush.
What is it about? Let me try to explain.
This is about the world shrinking. This is about a clash of cultures that started long before I was born in 1971 and will continue until one of them either annihalates the other or until they can learn to coexist. This is about a new world where isolationism and neutrality are recipes for the destruction of your way of life.
Are you still reading? Good.
Here is how the world works today. In less than 24 hours, someone can move from any point on the globe to your front door and kill you because they disagree with something you believe, something you espoused or something you did. First, you must accept that ideas are viral, and that people are willing to kill over disagreements about these ideas. Second, you must understand that there are entire cultures who espouse killing every other culture wholesale over disagreements about whose viral ideas are superior. Having accepted these two facts, you have to reconsider your anti-war stance. Because if you don’t, you will, sooner or later, be wiped from existence. To survive in this modern world, you must exhibit a will to exist. You must be willing to fight for your ideas because the world is shrinking.
If you can’t, don’t or won’t defend and protect your own culture and society, men who believe their ideas are superior to yours will be coming by shortly with some new ideas which they will happily enforce upon you and those who you hold dear…
Ask anyone who lived in Iraq under Saddam. Ask anyone who lived in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Ask someone from Lebanon, Syria or Iran whose ideas were different in any way from those of the people in charge. If you are still anti-war you are probably a fool, a stubborn jackass or both. You should be repeatedly forced to watch movies of people having their heads sawed off for having the wrong ideas.
Feel free to disagree with me - I come from a culture and society where you are allowed to do so, up to and until you start encouraging others to kill me over our disagreements. When that happens, I’m willing to fight for my right to exist on my own terms.
1 January 30th, 2006 at 10:59 am
EXDemocrat says:
Good post. Thank you.
2 January 30th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
FVK says:
Well put! You’re absolutely correct and and see the world with 30/20 vision.
3 January 30th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Chris Short says:
Excellent piece.
4 January 30th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
Mudville Gazette says:
[...] You are reckless and wrong and you need to reconsider your worldview — [The Will to Exist - in Iraq] So you are anti-war. You think we invaded Iraq “illegally.†You think we’re over here slaughtering innocents and trying to extend an American empire into the heart of the Middle East. You’ve protested. You want to impeach Bush. You believe America is headed down the wrong path. And you’re completely wrong about all of it. If you’re still willing to listen I’ll explain why… [...]
5 January 30th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
Salminio says:
Yeah ok gomer, so if its so desperate and important why don’t we have MORE TROOPS in Iraq to get the job done?
6 January 30th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
skip says:
And so we see the thoughtless left’s knee jerk response to a very thoughtful blog post.
thank you Salminio for once again reminding us of just exactly how intellectually bankrupt the left has become
7 January 30th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
The Military Outpost says:
[...] Read more… Permalink [...]
8 January 30th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Salminio says:
Same to ya Skip, but try answering the question.
I guess you would just rather blame everybody else for your FAILURE to complete the President’s mission.
We don’t have forever you know.
9 January 30th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
Rocket says:
Salminio,
Throwing more of our own troops on the ground here is not the answer. This is not occupied France. We are handing over at least one Forward Operating Base per week to the IRAQI ARMY. They are the ones who will finish the job. Our mission to train the iraqis to take back their government was never given a timeline to complete - thus not setting us up for failure to begin with as the left has suggested. Now let me ask you a question. Do you want us to succeed? Or would it make you feel better if we failed so you could laugh at the administration. Be honest.
10 January 30th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Rocket says:
Trevor,
Just playing devil’s advocate. So since the world is shrinking, we have to go to their country first to wipe their way of thinking off the face of the earth and replace it with ours before they can do it to us? I thought so. That’s good cause their way of thinking sucks and I have a will to exist.
11 January 31st, 2006 at 2:00 am
Dan Cameron Rodill says:
Good post. Still, I wonder if the (now multy-culty-trained) West has much of a grasp of what’s coming at it, even aside from the demographic time bomb. Even the obvious may be incomprehensible to many. America has been struck in a way that even Hitler or Stalin never managed, yet most of the world and media “wonders” why the U.S. military is now seriously in the MIddle East. “Hey, dude, dontcha know Saddam was a friggin’ secularist?”(This is due in part to Bush’s limitations as a communicator) And who can even come to grips with Religious War in a pc world? Who would even dare? You know, it’s just sooooooo medeival, no? It ain’t what’s happening, right? Or what’s gonna happen? Hey, this is Starbucks’ epoch. Who can sip that mocha-coca-tutti-frutti-crema and fathom what it even means to have your own god or no god and not someone else’s? Submit? What? Submit? You mean to their god, presented as THE god, the only one that counts? Submit. Submit or else? Hey, what you talkin’?
…Well, maybe it’s not so obvious right now. Still time to sip away. Maybe even years. Hmmmm. Where’s that menu?
dcr From Vietnam to Iraq (now it can be blogged?)
12 January 31st, 2006 at 2:16 am
GunnNutt says:
In a short conversation with a moonbat recently, I learned:
a. The people of the middle east have been killing each other for centuries.
b. We shouldn’t even try to stop them.
c. Israel is evil, Palestine is good.
d. The moonbats have no idea how to stop terrorism other than to impeach Bush.
Your post is brilliant as usual, Trevor. I just wish the American moonbats weren’t just as intractably insane as the terrorists.
13 January 31st, 2006 at 8:44 am
Salminio says:
Rocket…….
Well I’ve thought of the go all out and kill’em all concept. Thats where I was 9/11. But we didn’t do it.
So I’m here saying use more troops.
I “think” you are saying, turn all over to the Iraqi Army and leave. At one FOB per week….should be out by what June?
Hey, fine with me.
14 January 31st, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Radaractive says:
something important to say
15 January 31st, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Alex says:
Salminio:
If the left wasnt so against the war perhaps more soldiers would be on the ground and perhaps the war would be more decisively tilting in our favor (I believe its actually going in the right direction and we are winning). But people with your mind set that want to impeach Bush and want us to pull out and declare defeat have impaired our ability to project a cohesive and solid front. THe undermining of the US mission in Iraq by nay sayers is a big part of the problem. I believe in freedom of speach I just wish the population and the left would get there arms around the real issues instead of wishing the chads had hung differently in the first Bush election in FLorida. Stop worrying about our differences and start worrying about the differences between us and the Islamofascists.
16 January 31st, 2006 at 8:50 pm
Remy says:
Trevor,
Excellent piece, we are on the same page.
I started to send this to my sister who has taken the anti-war, anti-Bush stance, to further try and convince her she is blind to the real threat we are facing. But then I realized I’ve said it all before using different words. Same argument that the terrorist want to kill you, me, and every non-muslim we know simply because we are non-muslim. That is their stated goal. How do you deal with that? How do you rationalize with such an insane position. She is decidedly stuck in the 60s where the solution to anyone’s aggression is to stick flowers in the ends of their guns.
She also typifies the arrogant left, just as Salminio does with snide name calling and condescension. It’s ironic, but not surprising, how the left claims to be the stalwarts of understanding and finding value in discussing opposing points of view when, if you disagree with their stance, all semblance of civility or useful discourse go flying right out the window.
Alas, she is still my sister and I care for her deeply, if I didn’t I wouldn’t even bother.
God Bless
17 February 1st, 2006 at 4:14 am
Stephen VanDyke says:
Pardon me for taking a non-nationalistic, twenty thousand foot view:
In light of your commentary on this being a clash of cultures and that our enemies’ end goal is converting us to their ideals by force…
…I fail to see how going over to their country and forcefully converting them to *our* ideals is not richly ironic and hypocritical.
I’m all for retaliating against Al Qaida and eradicating them, but expanding this into some ephemeral clash of civilizations is about as loony as the guys who think 9/11 was an inside job.
18 February 1st, 2006 at 5:41 am
Trevor says:
With all due respect, no one is forcefully converting anyone to our ideas, other than to insist on a relatively representative government in comparision to the cult of personality/murderous tyrant they used to have.
We’re not making Iraqi children take Prozac. We’re not putting puppet leaders in power. I think you missed my statement that this isn’t about Iraq.
I don’t think we’re fighting Iraq. We’re fighting a segment of the population that comes from all over the Middle East and that hates Western culture and wants it destroyed. To be fair and honest, some of these people just want us out of Iraq, but most of them want much more - the destruction of all non-Muslim states.
Ephemeral was a nice two dollar word, by the way
19 February 1st, 2006 at 7:36 am
EXDemocrat says:
converting them to *our* ideals?
If you believe that freeing people from torturous, murdering, regimes who only care about themselves is coverting them to our ideals, them I am all for it.
What the hell is your problem?
20 February 2nd, 2006 at 5:04 am
The Gunn Nutt says:
[...] This contest has its genesis in the idea that this war will be won or lost based not on weapons or troop strength but based on public perception. Without the support of the American public, Iraq will not become free.Trevor’s written plenty of posts that could easily be entries in his own contest. Today’s piece, You are reckless and wrong and you need to reconsider your worldview is a perfect example. [...]
21 February 3rd, 2006 at 3:58 am
tyree says:
This war has been going on for a very long time. Centuries ago even a small sail powered navy could keep the hate filled Islamists from our shores. They will not stop if we negociate because their religion teaches that truces are a time to rebuild for the next Jihad. They will not stop if we sign a treaty, because their religion says they do not have to tell us the truth. We have to do what we did to the last group of fanatics we fought, kill them until the survivors change their ways. We did it before, we can do it again.
22 February 12th, 2006 at 4:14 am
blogrunner: The New York Times - Armor Virtual Weblog says:
[...] [...]