That is, why does it sound so silly to Americans?

During the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein called it `The Mother of All Battles', which apparently was good symbolism for his people. But to Americans, it just sounded silly. Spoof movies were made with slogans like `The Mother of All Movies', and stores had `the mother of all mattress sales', and other goofy stuff.

Last week, somebody from the Taliban said that they would `fight to the last breath', which I suppose is supposed to sound scary, or show determination, or something. But every American I know who heard said something to the effect of `if you insist'.

Osama bin Laden said that he was prepared to die; Jay Leno did a joke about it, saying something like "Well, that works out okay, because we're prepared to help him."

I have the vague sense that I saw a movie once in which one person said "Over my dead body!" and the other replies "That can be arranged."

Doesn't that seem odd? I mean, the notion that somebody is prepared to fight to the death feels like it is *supposed to be* intimidating. But in actual practice, to Americans, it doesn't seem intimidating at all. If the Taliban really does fight to the death of the last man, we may end up having to kill 50,000 people. We may not be happy about that, but we aren't going to cry about it after we're done. (Iraq's death toll in 1991 worked out to some tens of thousands, so it's not like killing 50,000 people would be a particularly new experience for us.)

Is it just confidence that the US military can effectively destroy any target it chooses, with relatively minimal US losses or collateral damage? So when they talk about fighting to the death, to us that's not threatening because we don't feel threatened?

Is it something particularly cold-blooded about US culture? The kind of passion needed to talk about fighting to the last breath is sort of alien to us. When leaders say "We are prepared to make an appropriate response", Americans know that this means "We are prepared to turn a bunch of buildings and planes and tanks and soldiers into rubble."

I've got two quotes I was trying to choose between for this post, and they both illustrate what I mean:

"No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country." -- George S Patton

"War is the remedy our enemy has chosen, and I say give them all they want." -- William Tecumseh Sherman

Patton just seems to sneer at people dying for their countries as a case of misplaced bravado, unless it accomplishes a military objective. Sherman seems to have no qualms about going all-out with everything you've got once the fight has started. Niether of these is the sort of fiery rhetoric I would expect from Iraq or Afghanistan.

What is it about American culture that causes death-themed threats to sound so stupid to us?

Darren F Provine ! ! http://www.rowan.edu/~kilroy "I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult." -- Rita Rudner