{"id":4190,"date":"2005-07-09T10:43:36","date_gmt":"2005-07-09T16:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sgtstryker.com\/index.php\/archives\/memo-london-calling\/"},"modified":"2005-07-09T12:47:16","modified_gmt":"2005-07-09T18:47:16","slug":"memo-london-calling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/memo-london-calling\/","title":{"rendered":"Memo: London Calling"},"content":{"rendered":"

To<\/strong>: Osama bin Laden & Company, Presumably
\n Somewhere On the Pak-Afghan Border
\nFrom:<\/strong> Sgt Mom
\nRe: Your Plans for a \u201dRevived Caliphate\u201d<\/p>\n

1. Not going all that swimmingly for you, are they, oh \u201cNoble and Esteemed One\u201d? The recent outrage in the city of London has all of your organizations\u2019 hallmarks, so wiser and more experienced heads than mine are assuming this is the handiwork of the organization of which you are— if not the head, at least the spiritual and financial inspiration. If it turns out that explosions in three Underground trains and a double-decker bus are in fact, the work of some other party— rabid 7th Day Adventists, or perhaps fanatical Lutherans (those Missouri Synod types bear watching, I tell you!)— I shall promptly withdraw this memo, with \u201cprofound\u201d apologies. As tragic as the personal losses are, and will continue to be, and as horrifying as the prospect of merely showing up at ones\u2019 workplace in a timely fashion becoming a sentence of death at the caprice of your collection of grotty little 8th century religious misfits is for many of us, logic impels me to note that the events of 7\/7 are somewhat short of your usual terrifying standard. No wonder you are not all that fast off the mark in claiming responsibility. Good help must be as hard to find for a terrorist mastermind as it is for anyone else.<\/p>\n

2. It may be that we are\u2026 sad as it is to say\u2026 becoming all to used to this war. We wake up in the morning, turn on the radio\u2026 and there is the somber-voiced announcer, reading the headlines. A car bomb here, a hijacked plane there, a kidnapped reporter, diplomat, or contract employee beheaded there\u2026 well, after a while, we get the point\u2026 and the cost of making it all go away is just too much for many of us to stomach. Y\u2019all want us either dead or on our knees, bowing in the direction of Mecca, either that, or paying the jizaya tax to leave us alone, to bag a couple of centuries of compromise between what is due to Caesar and what is due to God, and revert back to the 12th century, when everything was fair, and perfect, Mohammed was in his paradise and all was right with the world. We got that, loud and clear. It\u2019s — as they say in France— your idea fixee. <\/p>\n

3. It ain\u2019t gonna happen, as we say in Texas. Generally, we are getting less and less enchanted by militant Islam, the longer that this whole thing goes on. When you are reduced to killing people who don\u2019t agree with you on a wholesale and retail basis, it\u2019s kind of an admission that your side has lost the argument. It will probably take a little longer to sink in for you, if ever. Is there an Arabic version of the adage about catching a tiger by the tail? Do you have any idea of just who you pissed off on Thursday? Do you think they are f**king impressed? Bin Laden, old sport, these are Londoners! They are the descendents, and in some cases, the survivors of the Blitz! Better men than you had a go at blowing up large chunks of London on a nightly basis, for over five years! Old and unfit men, middle-aged women and invalids unfit for military service defended their city against firebombs and high explosives with stirrup-pumps and buckets of sand! This is a city that has been bombed in two world wars, burned to the ground at least twice over, decimated by the Plague, built and rebuilt after war and riot, just for the hell of it! And— if you have been paying attention to history, other than that of your own peculiar prophet and grievances— you should know that this the capitol of people who made a quarter of the globe imperial scarlet and then gave up the most part of it of their own free will. But before they did, such marvelous and heart-stopping deeds were performed; through a mistaken order, a unit of cavalry were sent down a gauntlet of artillery. An army of volunteers advanced into no-man\u2019s-land on the 1st of July, 1916. And the sons and husbands of those who so bravely defended their city in 1940 from bombs and fire, saw to the demolition of Berlin, Dresden and much of the rest of industrial Germany with grim resolution, and being human, very probably a certain amount of satisfaction . Payback, is the word we use in Texas; payback which takes the form of what you have dished out, returned with interest and several times over, of which the saying is that \u201cpayback is\u2026.umm, an uncooperative and hostile woman\u201d. I rather doubt there would be an Arabic version of that axiom; perhaps you could work on this.<\/p>\n

4. Do not be deluded by lickspittles and toadies such as a George Galloway, a Michael Moore, a Noam Chomsky; in another era there were the likes of Lord Haw-Haw, Lillian Hellman, and Ezra Pound, rushing to prostrate themselves at the boots of a potential conqueror. There are always those who adore the powerful destructors, who have their own reasons and resentments, as they relish the destruction of all that has nurtured and rewarded them, and look on the deaths of their own countrymen with complacent disregard. They are a few, a passing evil; like the poor, always with us, but unlike the poor, able to command the nearest spotlight. Meanwhile, in the shadows, the ordinary citizens toil on, burying the dead, and mourning their losses, and carrying on with grim resolve, knowing in their hearts that it is nearly always better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees.<\/p>\n

5. And remember always, in your hide-out in the border mountains, Americans were Britons, once— where did you think we learned it from, hey?<\/p>\n

6. As always, the quote marks are not \u201cscare\u201d quote marks, they are \u201cviciously skeptical\u201d quote marks.<\/p>\n

Sincerely
\nSgt Mom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To: Osama bin Laden & Company, Presumably Somewhere On the Pak-Afghan Border From: Sgt Mom Re: Your Plans for a \u201dRevived Caliphate\u201d 1. Not going all that swimmingly for you, are they, oh \u201cNoble and Esteemed One\u201d? The recent outrage in the city of London has all of your organizations\u2019 hallmarks, so wiser and more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-gwot","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}