that’s fine. the direction America is taking (seen by the November election) is a markedly improved direction. It will be a slow process, but I think by 2008 or 2010, current policies will be utterly discredited and left to history.

the issue of assassination of leaders as a military strategy has changed over the centuries. In previous times, it would have been considered rude and unbecoming a civilized soldier to assassinate a general. Generals sat back and watched the field of battle, doing their best to protect their soldiers as best they could. There was a respect for that position. George Washington, for example, was well respected by the British and he was basically to be left unharmed. If the British had employed assassins, America would never have won the Revolutionary War.

Today we get the impression that if we cut the head of the snake off, the rest of the body will somehow die off, be rudderless, leaderless. That would be true if our enemy was fighting on the sheer force of the personality of the leader, like say a Napoleon, someone that has the charisma to lead a massive group to battle that would not normally be led to battle on their own.

But this strategy has little value when your enemy is not led by a single individual, but by an ideology, a way of thought. The head of this snake, this enemy is not the guy giving orders; it is the ideology itself. In order to defeat this kind of enemy, that ideology must be thoroughly discredited, to the point where the enemy sees no reason to fight. This is the equivalent of cutting off the head of the snake.

In the case of Iran and Ahmadinejad, he’s not even the head of the snake. He’s not even close. He’s not even one of the heads of the hydra that is Iran. No. He’s an experiment. He’s a guinea pig. He’s a trial balloon sent out to distract. I’m actually wondering if the real head of Iran is getting tired of Ahmadinejad.

In any case, Iran is not our enemy. Iranians are not our enemies. I think Americans are still suffering from war fever, even though we’ve thoroughly failed Iraq, we still seek blood. We’re our worst enemies. Take Al-Qaida for example. You cannot defeat Al-Qaida through military means, because their lifeblood is not people, but the ideology, and their ideology lives and breathes on the West being belligerent towards Islam. The more we fight Islamic countries, the more we prove Al-Qaida right in Muslim eyes. In any case, Al-Qaida is fairly weak in the Muslim world. They cannot conquer any country. This is why they love it when we attack Muslim countries. We take down rules they hate for them. They’d love to see a full on civil war between Shi’ites and Sunnis. And with Saudi Arabia threatening to back Sunnis in Iraq, while Iranians are backing Shi’ites in Iraq, that’s what you’ll get. The irony is that America wants to back the Shi’ites in Iraq. Cheney’s foolish “80% rule.”

Anyways, I diverge. The way to cut the head off the snake of Al-Qaida is to thoroughly discredit their ideology. Their ideology is built on the West attacking Muslim nations. So how do we discredit that ideology? Well, we’ve failed already. We attacked, so far, two Muslim nations (Afghanistan and Iraq), we’ve threatened two others with destruction (Syria and Iran), we’ve allowed Israel to utterly bombard a fifth back to the stone age (Lebanon)…we’re not doing so well.

I bet, and I believe this pretty strongly, but I bet Captain Moroni would have been utterly disappointed with our military strategy over these past six years.

I also feel assassination is a legitimate tool in warfare. It’s absurd to think that as ground forces clash, elite military leaders would be exempt from bodily risk. They should be primary targets. In my view, Teancum was unusually energetic, courageous and heroic. It amazes me how could anyone fault or criticize him for sneaking behind enemy lines and striking directly at the two men who maliciously stirred up the Lamanites to fight against the Nephites.

At this point I won’t speak about what should be done about Ahmadinejad. I don’t know enough about his direct involvement in funding terrorism, though he certainly fans the flames with his idiotic bravado and vicious rhetoric.

You’re absolutely right that the Book of Mormon doesn’t say that Teancum was a prophet. There is Pahoran’s comment telling Moroni to give Teancum power to conduct the war “according to the Spirit of God” which if you were really stretching you might see as some implication of prophetic inspiration, but I still think it’s a stretch. I suppose you could also argue that Teancum was a prophet in the sense of “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” as well, but the Book of Mormon doesn’t even say that Teancum had a testimony. However, because of his close associations with Captain Moroni, who is generally assumed to be a prophet, I think many Mormons regard Teancum as a kind of a prophetic figure.

But my point was not that Teancum was a prophet but that the actions of generally righteous people (whether prophets or soldiers or whatever) recorded in the scriptures are not always the best actions.

danithew,

You said: “When a state is in a war, the leadership of the adversary should be a primary target.” I suppose this is beginning to drift away from the original post, but how would you define the leadership of the adversary? Does it have to be a commander in the field or are civilian leaders fair game? What if the civilian leader is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces? How do we define a state of war? Does it have to be active combat or can it be an expansive cold war or a nebulously defined war on terror? Can US marines assassinate President Ahmedinejad of Iran if it turns out that Iran does in fact support adversaries of the United States?

The point is, once you approve of one assassination, it gets easier to justify other kinds of assassinations; where (and how) do you draw the line? It doesn’t seem like a good path to start down. I should clarify of course that I’m talking about the legitimacy of assassinations in the current world situation more than in Nephite political society, about which we know very little.

But to bring it back to the original post, I completely agree with you that we should pay attention to all the scriptures, not make absolute moral judgments based on isolated passages taken out of context.

Oh, I’m not saying his move was a wrong one, however his actions were ruled by anger and emotion, and not by cool logic. Moreover, I don’t question his righteousness. I was merely clarifying that the Book of Mormon does not imply he was a prophet, yet many readers of the Book of Mormon come away with that assumption.