Latest From The Patriot

As always Mark Alexander is right on the money with his latest, the first in a three part series on national security. I find myself being drawn into an ethnocentrism not of my creation but of those who would rather see me dead. I realize that not all Muslims are terrorists, it however is fact that all international terrorism is carried out by an extreme sect of Islam, even 5 % of a billion people is alot of fanatics. I will view all Muslims with a wary eye until they renounce and drive out this insidious murderous death cult before it does become a "Holy War" , they already believe that. I do not think they realize that we have the power to remove this planet from existence if we chose to, a nuclear strike here would see Iran, Syria and North Korea vanish. I pray they are not so stupid . This has nothing to do with Iraq or Afganistan and everything to do with a desert pirate's sham religion, worship my way or die. Well here is a Scots-Irishman's tilted kilt salute to ye.

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THE PATRIOT PERSPECTIVE
Top of the fold -- U.S. National Security: Imminent Threats (Part one of a three-part series)
Since the dawn of the American Republic, perilous national-security threats were symmetric, emanating from clearly defined nation-states with unambiguous political, economic and geographical interests.
Such symmetric threats are tangible, which is to say that American political leaders have been able to define them sufficiently so that the American people could generally grasp what constituted "the enemy." World Wars I and II involved symmetric threats and well-defined adversaries. Military campaigns in Korea and Vietnam, on the other hand, lost public support because the purpose of those campaigns (and "the enemy" in the case of Vietnam) was not clearly defined, and thus, American casualties in those conflicts were not tolerated.
Regarding Vietnam, not only did Kennedy and Johnson err grievously in their arguments for escalating our involvement in that "police action," but they, and Nixon after them, had to contend with a new arbiter of presidential messages -- TV news networks, and their political agendas which were, and still are (with one exception), overwhelmingly left of center. The Leftmedia can completely undermine a President's call to rally public support against a national security adversary, unless that call is clear and concise.
Having learned hard lessons from Korea and Vietnam, George Bush(41) did a far better job of both defining the enemy and defining American objectives when it came time to engage Saddam Hussein's million-strong army in Desert Storm. The result was overwhelming public support. But defining the enemy and our objectives in the second round with Iraq has been much more difficult for Bush(43), because the enemy and our objective was, and remains much larger than just "containing Saddam."

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