Perry de Havilland raised a point that:
Bush presides over a nation which has a rather squeamish view of war, at least with regard to American casualties
Which is only true within a certain context. Americans don’t really much care to go off somewhere and die for their foreign policy. That is absolutely true. But Americans in defense of America are quite capable of sustaining terrible punishment without flinching. A documentary “The Battle of Midway” aired on the BBC last night and shows the levels of courage of our recruits and the levels of carnage that the home front will endure when we’re really pissed off.
It’s that damn libertarian streak in the country. We just won’t go marching off to die just because some damn fool has a flag and wants a parade.
That is al Qaeda’s mistake. They successfully moved their issues from the foreign policy arena (ho hum) to the personal. We took 9000 casualties (notice that no one in the media is giving casualties in the usual way, total dead and wounded?) in a matter of hours. I think you have to go back to Gettysburg to get numbers like this in a single day. They got our attention alright, but not in quite the way they had hoped for.
With 9000 casualties on our own territory, a few thousand more won’t phase us. We’re even mentally prepared for the possibility they might kill another 100,000 of us with a dirty little nuke. That would be a very bad idea on their part because then we’d REALLY be pissed off. It is not in the best interests of anyone on this planet for us to get that ticked off.
So no. We aren’t afraid of casualties when we are fighting for ourselves and for our right to live our own way in our own place. Those who have made the Japanese mistake are in for a severe lesson. When riled as a people, we are without a doubt the meanest, nastiest, hardest-assed sons of bitches on the planet, bar none.
