A Quote by Dave Eggers
WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers.
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Liberals are hopping mad because Rush Limbaugh referred to phony soldiers as "phony soldiers." They claim he was accusing all Democrats in the military of being "phony." True, all Democrats in the military are not phony soldiers, but all phony soldiers seem to be Democrats.
I first of all have a problem with the term 'avant-garde'. Because it is a military term, it means the guard that runs before the rest of the soldiers. And if I want to see myself presented in military terms, I don't want to be part of that. I want to be one of the deserters. I want to be in the woods, maybe.
The military mind has one aim, and that is to make soldiers react as mechanically as possible. They want the same predictability in a man as they do in a telephone or a machine gun, and they train their soldiers to act as a unit, not as individuals.
The thing is, we have to let go of all blame, all attacking, all judging, to free our inner selves to attract what we say we want. Until we do, we are hamsters in a cage chasing our own tails and wondering why we aren't getting the results we seek.
If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things. To some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you're getting bad press articles and bad search results, don't blame Google or Facebook or Twitter. Consider blaming yourself.
Do you realize how many people of this country have been educated, have grown up, who have been taught that, yeah, we're at risk and there's a lot of people that want to blow us up and don't like us. But we are to blame. That's what they've been taught. We are to blame, 'cause there was slavery, because we've stolen all these goods and resources from other countries. We have imposed our way of life on them! We've sent our military around, and we've conducted wars on their territory and so forth.
Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army's strength is the foot soldiers.
I'm very, very so-called conservative on the military. I want a very, very strong military. I want to build up - you know, our military is totally depleted. We're going to care of our vets as part of that whole situation because our vets are not taken care of properly.
When we think of war, the tendency is to picture young soldiers only in their military roles. To a large extent this dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier for society to commit them to combat.
Whatever we focus our attention on is what will dominate our thoughts (Proverbs 23:7). If our thoughts are dominated by the things of this world then we are going to get worldly results in our lives. We need to focus on God to get godly results.
Two things are to blame for our predicament, one a corollary of the other. The first reason is that we did not have enough troops in Samarra. The skill and courage of 150 American soldiers prevented chaos, but was never enough to fully secure a city of 120,000 people or maintain the rule of law [...] Second, because of a lack of troops, American military leaders are forced to make a choice between mission objectives and self-preservation.
One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.
Under the Barack Obama rules, if you wanted to help the military, if you wanted a pay raise for the soldiers, if you wanted to buy new airplanes and new ships and more munitions, a dollar for that, you had to have a dollar domestic spending. We just broke that parity. That's the biggest victory we could have had: $25 billion year over year for our military, to begin to rebuild our military, without that kind of corresponding increase in domestic discretionary spending.
You ask yourself what is it you want? You want results or to show you are such a great fighter? For me I would rather make sure I get good results.
Now, when North Korea rears its head, we send our ships, we send our planes, we get ready, we got our 28,000 soldiers on the border, that's a seriously dangerous border by the way, they've got their million and a half man army and we have 28,000 soldiers. But here we are, doing this, protecting, and I am saying to myself, we don't even get money; we don't get anything for doing this.
What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.
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