I loved the Martin Sheen/Rob Lowe ensemble show The West Wing. It was, in spite of the overall hard left lean of it, a superbly written and performed program. The third episode, "A Proportional Response" has this:
Bartlet: What's the virtue of the proportional response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: I'm sorry?
Bartlet: What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why's it good? They hit an airplane, so we hit a transmitter, right? That's a proportional response. They hit a barracks, so we hit two transmitters.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Yes, that's roughly it, sir.
Bartlet: This is what we do. I mean, this is what we do.
Leo: Yes sir, it's what we do. It's what we've always done.
Bartlet: Well, if it's what we do, if it's what we've always done, don't they know we're going to do it? I ask again, what is the virtue of a Proportional Response?
Admiral Fitzwallace: It isn't virtuous, Mr. President. It's all there is, sir.
Bartlet: It is not all there is.
Admiral Fitzwallace: Just what else is there?
Bartlet: The disproportional response. Let the word ring forth, from this time and this place, gentlemen, you kill an American, any American, we don't come back with a proportional response. We come back with total disaster! [He bangs the table]
General: Are you suggesting that we carpet-bomb Damascus?
Bartlet: I am suggesting, General, that you, and Admiral Fitzwallace, and Secretary Hutchinson, and the rest of the National Security Team take the next sixty minutes and put together an American response scenario that doesn't make me think we're just docking somebody's damn allowance!
It is just a damn shame they only get it when it is fictional.
What do we see in Israel and Gaza right now? This! The Disproportional Response in full effect. Shock and Awe be damned, this is how to fight a war.
Everyone knows Patton's speech to the Third Army, George C. Scott FURTHER immortalized it in film.
A tiny bit of Patton, a tad profane, but, heartfelt and damn it, exactly the spirit needed to fight those who would see us dead:
We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have.(((Transpose the word TERRORIST(s) for Germans and Hun))) We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living *******ed guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-****ing-basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!"
"I don't want to get any messages saying, "I am holding my position." We are not holding a *******ed thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!"
"From time to time there will be some complaints that we are pushing our people too hard. I don't give a good ******* about such complaints. I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder WE push, the more Germans we will kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that."
Long dead Prussian General Karl Von Clausewitz is known as a military philosopher, a few of his better quotes:
There is only one decisive victory: the last Beating terrorist silly in Iraq or Afghanistan really doesn't matter, in the great scheme of things, UNLESS, of course, we continue to harry them wherever we find them!
One the Spanish government should have considered before their cowardly capitulation a couple of years ago, and one Mr Obama would do well to take to heart:
The conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our country unopposed.
The Islamist Terrorists would like nothing more than for us to give up, give in and turn the whole world into a caliphate, where Islam and Sharia were the law and anything and anyone in opposition was doomed.
