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Confederate

July 11, 2005

Cowboys and Muslims

At some point I'm sure most of you have seen this circulating in your email:

At a small terminal in the Texas Panhandle, three strangers are awaiting their shuttle flight. One is a Native American passing through from Oklahoma. Another, a local ranch hand on his way to Ft. Worth for a stock show. The third passenger is an Arab student, newly arrived at the Texas oil patch from the Middle East.

To pass the time they strike up a conversation on recent events, and the discussion drifts to their diverse cultures. Soon the Westerners learn that the Arab is a devout Muslim. The conversation falls into an uneasy lull.

The cowpoke leans back in his chair, crosses his boots on a magazine table, tips his big sweat-stained hat forward over his face. The wind outside blows tumbleweeds and the old windsock flaps, but no plane comes.

Finally, the Native American clears his throat and softly, he speaks: 'Once my people were many, Now we are few.'

The Muslim raises an eyebrow and leans forward, 'Once my people were few,' he sneers, 'and now we are many. Why do you suppose that is?'


The Texan shifts the toothpick to one side of his mouth and from the darkness beneath his stetson says, 'That's 'cause we ain't played Cowboys and Muslims yet.'

That is the joke, but like many, it has a strong base in reality.

I read Lee Harris' excellent article "War in Pieces: The Blood Feud" this past Friday at Tech Central Station, and the case he presented regarding the apparent tribal nature of terrorist warfare made perfect sense.

But how can an enemy hoping to wage a blood feud hope to compete against a foe willing to respond with a conventional war? As Afghanistan and Iraq's rouge terrorist-supporting regimes have found out, “not too good.”

What's more, American's have been fighting—and winning—these kinds of wars for our entire history, as Arnold Kling correctly notes in his TCS article today, “Terrorism Lessons from 1870.” Kling only tracks our success in conventional warfare against feudal warfare back to 1870, but in reality, we have been fighting this kind of warfare successfully for our entire history, dating back to before the French and Indian War of the 1750s.

Americans need to know that despite the attempts of the American left to lose the War on Terror (and make no mistake, insisting on a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq is just that), this asymmetrical versus conventional warfare is the kind of combat at which Americans have consistently excelled for hundreds of years.

We can play very well at “Cowboys and Muslims,” should it come to that.

I just hope Muslim culture can reform itself before we get to the point that that would become necessary.

Posted by Confederate Yankee at July 11, 2005 06:28 PM | TrackBack
Comments

They won't. I grew up playing cowboys and indians knowing we beat them. Hardcore muslims are doomed to die because we want our life and our society, freedom from being told what to do, think, and how to live. I am a nice guy, but the only way to beat these dudes is to kill them where found, and those who support them, before they kill us. They have nothing to offer to further our dreams of going to outer space, solving all the world's problems, the whole Western thing that we know is right.

Posted by: southernwhiteboy at July 11, 2005 08:57 PM

The thing that should worry the Muslims is that if this goes on, sooner or later they will manage to pull off a megadeath attack. They seem to think that'd be a good thing for them. That is the day most of the Muslims on Earth will die.

I'm sure that some of our weak sisters and handwringers would wring their hands and cry...afterwards. The handwringers didn't stop us from leveling Dresden and Tokyo (among others) with fire bombs or Hiroshima and Nagasaki with fission bombs. Somehow I think the rest of us would loose very little sleep.

Ok, some honest questions here; why are the Moderate Muslims (I assume that they exist) not doing anything to stop this? Why is it that they so dangerously misjudge us? I for one grew up ~knowing~ that the Russkies had multiple megaton range bombs aimed at my white butt and didn't cave. WTF makes these raghead bastards think I'll bend over and submit from fear of a few homocide bombers?

Popeye the sailor man put it very eloquently, "I've stood all I can stands till I can't stands no more!" When the majority of the US comes to that point, who will have more to regret do you think?

Posted by: Jim Gwyn at July 12, 2005 10:10 PM

Most Moderate Muslims, like Moderate Christians, and like "moderate" members of all inherently aggressive religions, are sympathetic to religous war but lack the guts to fight the Kulturkampf differences between our beliefs demand.
BTW, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki treatment won't work on the distributed mass of Jihadis. To attack decentralised groups, biowarfare is required. BW can use differences between our cultural ability to respond so that the maximum damage is done to their technically backward peoples.
Passive BW:
AIDS and other existing choice-perpetuated diseases should be ignored or ineffectively responded to by the West.
Active BW:
Ideally, gradual and synergistic BW could be spread via Haj locations. Governments will never do this, but as victims from homicide bombers accumulate the right next-of-kin will have the skill to respond and poison the vermin from their lair.
We really need to think about discarding all our conventional inhibitions in the Kulturkampf, because (as the Jihadists already understand) it is a struggle to the death and consideration of our adversaries "humanity" a crippling weakness.
If this is uncomfortable, we can later rewrite history in a more flattering manner. Cowboys have that luxury.
The amusing precedents of smallpox infected blankets and Hollywood Westerns come immediately to mind.

Posted by: Hugh Jorgan at July 13, 2005 07:19 PM