The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Home - What If We Had Fought the Nazis the Way We Are Fighting the Taliban?

The Death of the Grown-Up | Diana West > Home - What If We Had Fought the Nazis the Way We Are Fighting the Taliban?: "In refining and repacking (for size) some of the 'How Important Is Marjeh?' material for this week's column, I came to a new definition of 'counterinsurgency' (below). It's worth emphasizing how very important our understanding of 'counterinsurgency' is. Why, just today, Charles Krauthammer points out that 'the 2009 U.S. military [is] the finest counterinsurgency force in history.'

What does that mean? I'm sorry. After watching the Pentagon at work for the last eight-plus years, I have observed that 'COIN' doesn't mean winning wars, it means 'armed social work' for 'hearts and minds,' or 'trust' of 'the people.' It doesn't lead to a VI Day or VA Day, it leads to endless, pointless, wasteful 'nation-building.' It is a big scam and Uncle Sam is the easy mark.

So much simpler (to say the least) to face the ideological facts, the legal facts, the historical facts and the religious facts that what we call 'the West' and the Islamic world exist in dangerous opposition to one another -- just as the West and Nazism and the West and Communism exist(ed) in dangerous opposition to one another. This simple realization would change our strategy, our strategic alliances, our immigration polices, our energy policy, and Western civlization would actually survive this, yes, culture clash, relatively intact.

But we won't, not yet, and maybe not ever.

Onto Afghanistan.

The column:

Barack Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, to come home again starting in 2011.

Madness."