A pro-war Email I recieved (quoting a 4star general) and my response

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I was just writing a draft reply, and was going to edit and tweak and include links - but I just got carried away, and clicked "reply all" after the first draft. I could have been more concise, more biting - had more impact, I'm sure, but I got so worked up writing this, I just had to send it right away (wish I'd have included some differing thoughts from another four-star general). I cannot believe I just recieved this (along with probably about 50 others, in this particular mailing) now - seems more like pre-invasion bs.

Anyway, here's the original - and my reply - fwiw.

Its long.

The email:

This Air Force General should have been a Soldier. What a magnificent and
insightful view of what this war on terrorism is actually about.
General Hawley, is a newly retired USAF 4 star general. He commanded the Air
Combat Command at Langley AFB, VA. He
is now retired and no longer required
to be politically correct.
"Since the attack <9-11>, I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such
surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.
Here they are:

1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative." Listen
carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative. Say it with me now
and free yourselves. You see, folks, saying, "We're good" doesn't mean,
"We're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is the bearded Guy on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The plain fact is that our country has, with
all our mistakes and blunders, always been and always will be the greatest
beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity, and affection in history. If you
need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens.

2) "Violence only leads to more violence." This one is so stupid you usually
have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the
truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective,
unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half measures lead
to more violence. However, complete, fully thought through, professional,
well executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see,
afterwards, the other guys are all dead. That's right, dead. Not "on trial,"
not "reeducated," not "nurtured back into the bosom of love." Dead.

3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community have failed us." For
25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and
now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us.
Starting in the late seventies, under Carter appointee Stansfield Turner,
the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided that the best way to
gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites. "After all,
(they reasoned,) you can see a license plate from 200 miles away." This is
very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately, we
were attacked by humans. Finding humans is not possible with satellites. You
have to use other humans. When we bought all our satellites, we fired all
our humans, and here's the really stupid part. It takes years, decades to
infiltrate new humans into the worst places of the world. You can't just
have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop
himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say, "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure
would like to meet that bin Laden fella." Well, you can, but all you'd be
doing is giving the bad guys a story they'll be telling for years.

4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us."
Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry
for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and,
ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see,
are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohammed
Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing
grounds is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this, too. In the
sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were
upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to
get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. It's the same
today.

5) "Any profiling is racial profiling." Who's killing us here, the
Norwegians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article
saying dozens of extended members of the gazillionaire bin Laden family
living in America were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to
return to studying at Harvard and using too much Drakkar. I'm crushed.
Please come back. Let's all stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and
think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a
plane four seconds away from hitting Mt.Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the
guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them."

SO HERE'S what I resolve for the New Year: Never to forget our murdered
brothers and sisters. Never to let the relativists get away with their
immoral thinking. After all, no matter what your daughter's political
science professor says, we didn't start this. Have you seen that bumper
sticker that says, "No More Hiroshimas"? I wish I had one that says, "No
More Pearl Harbors."

=====

Offered for your thoughtful & prayerful consideration. Or, how reflective of
Christocentric thinking are the generals statements?


My reply:

With all due respect, this general who supposedly said these things is a sad example of what has gone horribly wrong in this nation. A link to some credible source for these quotes would have been nice, however. I ask for your thoughtful consideration of the following.


<<"Since the attack <9-11>, I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such
surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too.>>

Well, that's a nice way to start, and a common tool of the bushits (think Fox "news") - you are being told that the vague, distorted, and sensationalized accusations are about as stupid as stupid can be. In other words, if you don't agree with, and don't give undying faith to, the bush regime, then you are "stupid." Well, at least he didn't call those Americans who hold different views "Un-American" - as has been the case.

But let's look at what this general had to say:

<<1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative." Listen
carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative. Say it with me now
and free yourselves. You see, folks, saying, "We're good" doesn't mean,
"We're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is the bearded Guy on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The plain fact is that our country has, with
all our mistakes and blunders, always been and always will be the greatest
beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity, and affection in history. If you
need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens.>>

Well, the first question that springs to mind is - who are "we" and who are "they" - ? "We" I assume, means Americans. Ok, I belong to that group, and proudly so. What's really unclear is who "they" are. The terrorists? Ok, yeah, we are better than them. But the general seems to be saying, by referring to borders and countries, that "they" are to be defined as other countries - not terrorist organizations, but countries. Since this particular email came to me in 2004, I must assume we are not talking about Afghanistan - although that conflict goes on, but Iraq (and maybe all the rest of them brown people). So, let's talk about Iraq for a minute.

In 2002, bush and his gang decided we (you and me - our country, right?) would attack Iraq. Iraq had been deemed a problem for years, but no one had suggested saddam's regime was a direct threat to the US, until 2002. We The People were told by bush that Iraq possessed WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION that posed a direct and imminent threat to the US, and if they did not "disarm" we would disarm them. UN inspectors were on the ground searching for the elusive WMDs as the conflict, contained and managed up to this point, escalated at bush's doing.

The pre-emptive invasion of a nation that posed little if any threat to the US was going to happen if bush and his pals had its way. International law be damned. American law be damned. Peaceful solutions be damned. bush provoked this conflict, not Iraq - let's stick to the truth.

vp dick cheney said on national tv that Iraq had NUCLEAR weapons! rumsfeld said he knew where they were! bush said he had proof that Iraq had imported aluminum tubes and uranium from Niger. All of it was untrue, or, in other words, lies. And not the kind of lies politicians tell when promising the moon to voters before an election. No, these were lies that, so far, have resulted in the deaths of 500 US soldiers (if you believe the WMD people) and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children. I could post pics in this email of Iraqi kids with their brains blown out, with legs blown off - but I'll spare you that bit of the horror bush has caused. And we haven't even mentioned those maimed, legs gone, arms gone, faces gone, in bush's bloody invasion of Iraq. And for what?

It might surprise you what bush said in a recent interview with Diane Saywer, when asked about the WMDs that he claimed posed such a threat to the US that we must attack but yet are not there. He said, "what's the difference?"

What's the difference???!!!!

Wonder how the mom and dad who just watched their son, who was killed in Iraq as he (he believed) was protecting the US from Iraq's non-existent WMDs, was lowered into the ground would feel about that? How do you think those parents would feel about bush's "what's the difference" comment as they watch their child lowered into the ground?

But wait, you say, what about 9*11??? Would it surprise you to know that bush himself, just a few months ago, said there was NO EVIDENCE IRAQ HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH 9*11? Yep, bush said that himself. Google it.

No 9*11 link. No WMDs. Why are our kids being blown to bits over there again?

Meanwhile, osama puts out new tapes, we raise our terror alert, and planes into the US are escorted by military jets. So, two plus years into the war on terror, I ask - are we safer?


<<2) "Violence only leads to more violence." This one is so stupid you usually
have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the
truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective,
unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half measures lead
to more violence. However, complete, fully thought through, professional,
well executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see,
afterwards, the other guys are all dead. That's right, dead. Not "on trial,"
not "reeducated," not "nurtured back into the bosom of love." Dead.>>

Ah, "stupid" "university" "limp" "panicky" - who is this general talking about? "All the guys are dead" - doesn't he mean "kill 'em all" - ? Kill who all? Everyone in the Mid-East? (except the Jews of course, they're so peaceful). Ah, maybe he means just kill the brown ones. Now, before you say, ah, here's a typical liberal valuing life and peace and all that Jesus nonsense, I will say that if we know where osama and his gang is, we should hit em hard. But we evidently didn't accomplish that in all the blood we've cause to flow so far.


This general all but says, in the last sentence of this portion, "to hell with love, we want death." I ask, is that Godly. Does that sound like something Jesus would say? And again, who is this sadowy, mysterious, undefined "them" we are supposed to be slaughtering. Not Iraqi citizens, is it? Maybe Syrians, or Iranians? God hates them too, I guess.


<<3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community have failed us." For
25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and
now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us.
Starting in the late seventies, under Carter appointee Stansfield Turner,
the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided that the best way to
gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites. "After all,
(they reasoned,) you can see a license plate from 200 miles away." This is
very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate. Unfortunately, we
were attacked by humans. Finding humans is not possible with satellites. You
have to use other humans. When we bought all our satellites, we fired all
our humans, and here's the really stupid part. It takes years, decades to
infiltrate new humans into the worst places of the world. You can't just
have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop
himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say, "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure
would like to meet that bin Laden fella." Well, you can, but all you'd be
doing is giving the bad guys a story they'll be telling for years.>>

Woah. Chained our spies. Carter. please!

It is the bush misadministration that blew the cover of an undercover CIA agent last year, in obvious retalliation for her husband's, CIA agent Joe Wilson, calling bush on his Niger uranium LIE in the State of the Union address. Yes, you won't hear much about this on faux either, but Joe Wilson came out publicly and stated that he, who was sent by cheney to investigate the Niger claim, had found it to be false. bush and his boys used it anyway, and outed to robert novak the identity of Wilson's wife, and undercover CIA agent whose specialty was WMDs. An investigation is ongoing, with republicans in charge, of course. Does this not smack of hypocirsy to you? Not to mention the "protecting the 'homeland'" bs. This only helped to undermine security. Let's be honest.

<<4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us."
Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry
for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and,
ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see,
are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohammed
Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing
grounds is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this, too. In the
sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were
upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to
get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. It's the same
today.>>

Again, who are "these people" - ? I would imagine Iraqi's are angry at us because we invaded their country and took it over without justification. I'd be angry too, wouldn't you? You just saw your mother, brother, sister, and son "shocked and awed" to bloody peices - how would you feel about the people who did that?

Ah, and now we're at the protesters. "Pinheads" and "college kids" and "drinking" - "its the same today" - Sorry, that's just bs. Take a look at those who were vocal against invading Iraq - a total crossection of the public. Young and old, men and women, students and teachers, blue collar and white collar - nuns and priests. I guess the Pope is a "pinhead" - ?

<<5) "Any profiling is racial profiling." Who's killing us here, the
Norwegians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article
saying dozens of extended members of the gazillionaire bin Laden family
living in America were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to
return to studying at Harvard and using too much Drakkar. I'm crushed.
Please come back. Let's all stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and
think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a
plane four seconds away from hitting Mt.Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the
guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them.">>

Please read that again. Who is saying that? This is rush limbaugh (probably with a good buzz going) bs.

To summarize, there is only one truth. Something terrible happened on 9*11. Those responsible should be brought to justice. Instead of doing that, we, so far, have been lied into an unprovoked invasion of another country, and - after a wealth of human slaughter, the destruction of ties with our allies, the torpedoing of our economy, and the slashing away of our Constitional rights, we have finally caught the man who had nothing to do with 9*11.

And I keep asking myself, as all the self-proclaimed "Christians" fawn over bush* - What would Jesus do?


America is BETTER than this!

[Solly Mack]

1. Yeah, someone wanted me to read that fluff.

I just said "No, thank you. I'm a fan of Smedley Butler."

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

3. "No, thank you. I'm a fan of Smedley Butler."

Ha ha, exactly. I got to the "DEAD, they are all DEAD" and I decided I didn't need this horror show right now.

It's a racket...

[CShine]

2. That's a lie. That was not written by a general.

It was written by comedian Larry Miller. Here's the link.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/762dbnlm.asp

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5. Thanks

I should have known. I'm gonna send a follow up email right now.

The whole thing is, I've got a good number of people's email addys that evidently fall in with this stuff.

The whole thing was a total lie. What a bunch of morans.

Thanks again.

[jpgray]

4. LOL! This is more goofy than anything else. (nt)