John Hawkins at RWN interviewed him and he’s as direct as ever:

Rumsfeld on the rules of engagement: I remember being one time with a commander out, way out in the fringes near the border in Iraq, and he was giving me a report. He told me that his people had been attacked from the Syrian border and then he very proudly said that he responded proportionately. I remember going back and talking the General Casey in Baghdad and saying George, here’s a man who thinks that he’s doing the right thing by responding proportionately. Now what’s that mean? That if you are on the Iraq side of the border and there are some people on the other side of the border firing at you with mortars, rockets, automatic weapons, RPGs, you name it – and he thinks his job is to respond proportionately? That means eventually, some of our people are going to get killed. The people shooting are already in a defensive position. So if you respond proportionately, they fire three things, you fire three things back. Does that make any sense? It makes no sense to me. You ought to kill them.

I love that – it’s so obvious, and yet it’s just the sort of statement to make liberal heads explode, especially because we’re all so conditioned to think that a “proportionate response” is appropriate. It’s a ludicrous concept – Winston Churchill would laugh out loud at the idea. Proportionate responses are what you do when you want to prolong a war; Israel is proof enough of that. If you want to end a war, you surrender. When you want to win a war, you don’t respond proportionately. You respond by killing the enemy and breaking his will to fight. Rumsfeld’s directness and common sense are a breath of fresh air. Read the rest of the interview here; I may have exaggerated a bit when with the post title “hilarity ensues” but it’s still an enjoyable interview.

“She is not very intelligent or practical and is lacking in shrewdness and cunning,” he wrote on Jan. 26, 1944. “She has a bad memory, is inaccurate, and scatterbrained.” He went on to describe her as a “very feminine and immature” person who was too inexperienced for deployment.

Maybe there was a shortage of women spies in WWII, or maybe she impressed someone else a bit more, because she was sent out in spite of the bad review.  And then Eileen Kearn collected data, transmitted it without detection, and helped coordinate munitions and resistance forces in France until she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo.  She was 23 years old.

She revealed no information, and was sent to Ravensbruck detention camp in Germany – from which she escaped with two others. Then she met up with the liberating American troops – who detained her with the Nazis until an English officer turned up and confirmed her story.

After all that… she lived quietly according to the secrecy agreement she had signed, telling no one of her amazing exploits. Only after her death was her story revealed. (Video here.)

President Obama added,

The Taliban preys on civilians – killing, raping, and mutilating the people of the middle east; stealing and brutalizing their children; and displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Its leadership, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, has no agenda and no purpose other than its own survival. It fills its ranks of fighters with the young boys and girls it abducts. By any measure, its actions are an affront to human dignity.

Okay, I totally made that up. It was really the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament Act that he signed. The Taliban, he’s looking to cut a deal with.

Crossposted.

Best known for: Leading an Army team that developed and fielded state-of-the-art medical evacuation equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan, allowing medics to more safely and efficiently transport injured patients from the battlefield to hospitals. This has significantly increased the survival rate of those wounded by makeshift roadside bombs known as improvised explosive devices.

This means a lot to me, especially because my son in law in currently serving in Iraq as a gunner, escorting convoys targeted by IEDs.

What West said, if you don’t want to watch the video:

“The first thing you’ve got to do is study and understand what we’re up against. You must realize that this is not a religion that you’re fighting against.   You’re fighting against a theo-political belief system and construct.  You’re fighting against something that’s been doing this thing since 622 AD – 7th century – 1388 years.   You want to dig up Charles Martel and ask him why he was fighting the Muslim army at the battle of Tours in 732?  You want to ask the Venetian fleet at LePonto why they were fighting a Muslim fleet in 1571?  You want to ask the Christian – I mean the Germanic and Austrian – knights why they were fighting at the gates of Vienna in 1683?  You want to ask people what happened at Constantinople and why today it’s called Istanbul because they lost that fight in 1543?   You need to get into the Quran, you need to understand their precepts, you need to read the Sura, you need to read the Hadiths and then you can really understand this is not a perversion.   They are doing exactly what this book says.  I want to close by saying this, and I think we’ve have said this all through this morning so far: until we get principled leadership in the United States that is willing to say that, we will continue to chase our tail because we will never clearly define who this enemy is and then understand their goals and objectives which is on any jihadist website and then come up with the right and proper goals and objectives to not only secure our republic but to secure western civilization.”

Both of those posts – and the video, as well – reminded me of Dan Simmon’s very hard-hitting short story about the Time Traveler and the century war with Islam.  (Go read it now.  I’ll wait….)  One of the reasons I love that story so much is Simmon’s forthright treatment of a problem that Lt. Col. West summed up in about a minute and a half but our politically correct postmodern leadership can’t seem to grasp:

“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,” said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”

It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college” to be able to concentrate fully.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”

I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”

The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”

God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.

“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .”

I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.

The War on Terror, radical extremists, man-caused disasters… the terminology gets sillier every year… as the attacks escalate and Iran moves closer to getting nuclear weapons and continues to fight a proxy war against us in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting insurgencies.  As I wrote back in 2006 in 101st Fighting Keyboardists, Chairborne Division and Chickenhawk Christians, I do wholeheartedly support defending ourselves in Islam’s war against us.  And that’s what it is, although our erstwhile leaders can’t bring themselves to admit it.  They pretend that history started on 9/11/2001, and somehow 1998, 1996, 1988, 1983, and 1979 have been magically erased from the history books… not to mention the lengthy list provided by Lt. Col. West.  This mosque at Ground Zero is as much a memorial to the terrorists as the Islamic crescent memorial at the Flight 93 crash site. Both are disgraceful.  We continue to march into dhimmitude, with Comedy Central at the head of the parade.

Are we at war with all Muslims?  No.  Just the, ahem, tiny percentage of those who are at war with western civilization because they believe what the Quran and Hadiths say on the topics of sharia, dhimmis, jizya, taqiyya and hudud.

Back in 2006 when the cartoons were published and the death threats against the cartoonists began, CNN issued a report with this statement:

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam.

It seems Matt Stone and Trey Parke are more equal than the cartoonists who published their work in Jyllands-Posten. But kudos to Anderson Cooper for finally showing the MoToons and for drawing attention to the fact that fatwas and death threats are a frequent response by radical Muslims to insults to their faith.

“I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler … Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
–J.R.R. Tolkien

Added: alternate qotd because I love it; this is something I’d do now that I’ve learned who Tina Fey is (that Sarah Palin impersonator):

What lame counter-protestors!

Group of Emerson College kids with a sign “Tina Fey Did It Better.” I said, “Who’s Tina Fey?” These dumb kids actually tried to explain to me: “She’s a famous comedian on SNL.” I said, “SNL is still on the air? I thought they died after Belushi!” “Oh no,” they assured me, “This is their 35th season!” Then I couldn’t resist! I asked, “What night is it on?” They actually answered me seriously, “Oh it’s on Saturday nights …” Then they realized I was mocking them and they got really pissed off.

You can't handle the truth!

A French Quarter armed robber can’t handle the truth:

Roy Lee Gant, a Lucky Dog vendor in the French Quarter, may look like an easy mark for an armed robber.

He wears a candy-cane-striped button-up shirt. He wheels around sausage and condiments to sell in a 1,200-pound cart shaped like a ballpark wiener, opting to make ends meet in the manner of Ignatius J. Reilly in “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

None of that oozes toughness. But Gant is a former U.S. Marine, trained in hand-to-hand combat. And a 42-year-old man accused of attempting to rob Gant at knifepoint the night of Dec. 5 found that out too late, New Orleans police say.

He’ll have a few years to think about the fact that things aren’t always what they seem.

Along the lines of messing with the wrong people, Blackfive has a story about a local school board unfit to shine the shoes of the man whose career they’re trying to destroy over a lousy school uniform dispute.  Is there anything more obnoxious than a low level bureaucrat?  Go read the story and see how you can help a military family whose savings is now wiped out and who needs to hire a lawyer, have a better Christmas.  Even if you can only Paypal them $5, $10, or $20 bucks it’s worth doing to show you support them.