The hawks and right wing war lovers pride themselves on their manhood, basing their conviction on the reasoning that an insurgent with a rifle is a coward for not standing up to a real man sitting inside an Abrahams tank, an Apache Helicopter or an F-16 figher plane.
The US military gave us a taste of this logic recently:
In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.
Robert Farley rightly notes:
Wow. Who could have predicted that? And while the challenge to Al-Qaeda’s manhood is charming in a fourteenth century kind of way, I seriously doubt that the insurgent leadership is as stupid as, say, Right Blogistan or the braintrust of the Bush administration. Indeed, the idea that fleeing superior numbers, firepower, and technology is somehow “unmanly” is rather quaint; I suspect that insurgents would be happy enough if we threw down our tanks, cruise missiles, fighter jets, and armored personal carriers and settled this dispute by Marquess of Queensbury rules.
The occupation has bombs that can level cities., planes that can level a neighborhood, and still whenever the insurgents manage a sneak attack, they bitch and moan that the other side isn’t fighting fair.…