Shock and Awe

Shock and awe as a strategy and/or battle tactic did not originate with Republican politicians in Washington with and military leaders before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. No, a curious fellow Confederate in the Civil War commented that "since most men tended to look at a battlefield with fear and revulsion, he sought to make the enemy’s initial impression of it as ‘shocking’ as he could. Rather than hold a significant force in reserve, he tried to deliver all he had in the ‘fiercest’ way possible, so as to immediately ‘overawe and demoralize.’ Then ‘with unabated fury, by a constant repetition of blows’ he could kill, capture, and drive the foe ‘with but little difficulty.’" And so it came down for America’s capture of Baghdad. So it played out for Nathan Bedford Forrest as a lieutenant colonel in the Civil War. Shock and awe, however, have been redefined as disgust and disaster when it comes to the two Democrat Presidential candidates in today’s battle for the Presidency. Disgust as Hellary Clinton, Disaster as Barack Obama. Barack would throw shock and awe into the dustbin of history and replace it with a gentler, kinder diplomacy without preconditions. Even a former Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, warned us that "no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies."