There are a few things in my life that I am proud of. I’m proud of my kids and grandkids; I’m proud of my 32-year, happy, contented marriage. I’m proud of my success in the various career ventures I’ve undertaken in my life. And I’m proud beyond description that I was once a soldier, and I consider the soldier’s oath that I took to be binding for life.
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But I have and will continue to advise any young people today, including my grandkids, to avoid military service. It’s not the military I served in during the last years of the Cold War. On Saturday, the United States Central Command, in a statement that just screams weakness and indecision, confirmed that attitude in their statement regarding Israel’s rescue of four hostages from Gaza.
The tweet continues:
An area south of the facility was used by the Israelis to safely return the hostages to Israel. Any such claim to the contrary is false. The temporary pier on the coast of Gaza was put in place for one purpose only, to help move additional, urgently needed lifesaving assistance into Gaza.
This seems an awful lot like an attempt to appease, or at least not anger, Hamas.
Previously on RedState: The Press Reactions to Israel Rescuing the Hostages Will Make Your Blood Boil
What did CENTCOM have to make by making this shameful statement?
It’s important to note that some of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th were Americans, and Hamas still holds Americans as captives . Shamefully, there seems to have been little done to try to extract our people from the clutches of what we can only describe as barbarians, and now this, from a major United States military command responsible for operations in this area.
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We’re Americans. If we get in trouble overseas, especially as is the case with these citizens, through no wrongdoing of our own, we should be able to expect our country to come for us. Israeli citizens should have the same assurance, and now we see that their expectation is justified; it’s important to note that these captives were held by Gazan families, not necessarily directly by Hamas fighters, in another disgusting display of how Hamas will place Gazan civilians in the line of fire, then shed crocodile tears and run wailing to the international press when those civilians are injured or killed.
Now CENTCOM is apparently trying to appease these people.
My 1990-1991 deployment to the Middle East for Operation Desert Shield/Storm was under the auspices of CENTCOM. That operation was carried out under the command of one of America’s last great attacking generals, Norman Schwarzkopf, who conceived and executed a “hold them by the nose, kick them in the butt” plan that George Patton would have approved of. What would Stormin’ Norman have to say about CENTCOM today? Nothing good, we can be sure.
The Israel-Hamas war doesn’t require us to deploy troops. It’s Israel’s fight, and they seem to be doing it well enough. But there’s no reason not to provide logistical support to America’s primary ally in the region, to the only country with a freely elected Parliament in the Middle East, who are engaged with Bronze Age barbarians in a battle for national survival. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have let them use that dock, and if Hamas had objected, we should have had a general like Norman Schwarzkopf (or George Patton) to stare them down and say, “Yes, and?”
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But we don’t have generals like that anymore. We don’t have a CENTCOM that sees the American military’s mission as “finding bad guys and putting warheads on foreheads” anymore. We have a CENTCOM that sees the need to appease barbarians and leave our allies twisting in the breeze. That’s shameful. It’s embarrassing. And that’s why I will advise my grandsons to avoid military service at all costs.