Alternate Reality

Have I awakened in an alternate reality where everything is backwards?



LGF calls my attention to this interview.



Jimmy Carter: Evil or merely Insane?



MATTHEWS: Let me ask you the question about—this is going to cause some trouble with people—but as an historian now and studying the Revolutionary War as it was fought out in the South in those last years of the War, insurgency against a powerful British force, do you see any parallels between the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today?



CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.



Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial‘s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.
Let's start with the simple things wrong with that statement. The Revolutionary war was the "most bloody" war we've fought "until recently"?!? What kind of "historian" is he to make such a stupid remark?



The Revolution was one of our smallest wars in terms of deaths: only about 4,400. Only the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War had fewer.



The Mexican War of 1846 was 3 times worse.



The Civil War, which is more remote from us than it was from the Revolution, was 200 times worse.



Then after suggesting our Revolution was unnecessary (a ridiculous statement, as in some sense, if you go far enough into fantasyland, all war can be found avoidable), Carter goes on to casually state that "tens of thousands" of Iraqi civilians have been killed, which is just plain nuts. There's no evidence for that whatsoever.



And he seems to be suggesting that greater sensitivity, rather than force of arms, is what's needed.



Riiiiight.



It continues:

CARTER: I don‘t think it‘s ever been proven to be accurate as a premise that you can go into an alien society, win with force of arms, destroying a major portion of that country and killing their people to make them adopt a new form of government and to accept new rulers.



Obviously, the only way out of this quagmire that we have formed in Iraq now is to have some guarantee of withdrawal of American troops and turning their premises of the Iraqis over to them politically and to the international community to help on an equal basis and a shared basis with many allies both in economic and military concerns in the future.
In other words, he's already declared defeat. The U.S. just can't do anything without the mighty French.



Whose military budget is 1/10 of ours.



And hmmm, let's see, ignoring that the crack about "destroying a major portion of that country" just isn't true -- it's been the least destructive war in history, President Doofus -- gee, I think we pretty radically changed the Japanese government by force of arms and mass destruction. And that was a rather "alien" society that worshipped its Emperor as a god.



And let's see, Afghanistan just successfully held elections for the first time ever, with women voting as well in vast numbers, and they are a rather "alien" society, no? At least not less so than Jimmy thinks Iraq is?



He's obviously one of these "violence never solved anything" types, even though decisive force has created more lasting change than anything else.



Jimmy Carter is America's worst ex-President ever. Indeed, he's one of the most disgusting Americans of all time.



Why isn't this great "historian" and "humanitarian" concerned about the new mass grave full of infants recently found in Iraq, which the Europeans are staying away from out of high-minded "principles":

Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick." Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said. "I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," he said.



Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part. The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death.
Because, no, we couldn't have that!



Anything but that!



Heaven forbid Hussein might get the death penalty!



Far better to ignore the Killing Field.



Far better to let the murdered children's bones stay mute and forgotten.



Far better to not lend any help to rebuilding a civil society.



These are the miserable excuses for human beings that Kerry and Carter want to be allied with?