This letter is making the rounds of conservative blogs ands is being touted as authentic. It is purported to be by USAF General Jimmy Cash (ret).
Is it real?
Don’t know about the authenticity of the letter, but it would be interesting to discuss the content in GD.
He claims to have watched hundreds of thousands of people killed in missile exchanges between Iraq and Iran in the period 1989-1992. The Iraq/Iran war ended in 1988.
Also, do 70 year old retired generals really use the phrase: “Nu ff-said!!!” in their writings. I rather doubt it.
It is quite possibly from him - he certainly does not appeared to have come forward and denied it and it is all over the conservative blogs.
There are thousands of retired and active generals - one can find almost any viewpoint you want to amongst them.
True… but the logic is so tortured, the history so simple minded, and the characterizations of democrats so cartoonish I would imagine a top general to have a somewhat more sophisticated view of things. It reads like a typical, poorly educated blog screed.
How many writings have you read from 70-year-old retired generals? :dubious: Generals have been known to say things like, “Nuts!” 
Eloquence was never a requirement for military command. Nonetheless, discussion on either side about the tone and tenor of the prose doesn’t take us very far in determining its authenticity.
It appears that at least there is such a person. Oddly, it seems like other people are posting his letter on his behalf; I couldn’t find an authoritative source. The blogs seem to either post it without comment on where they got it, or it came through a third party. There are other far-right screeds attributed to him as well.
Although I could not easily find evidence of authenticity, I can’t imagine why anyone would fake this. It’s not like anyone’s going to say, “See? Everybody in the country knows who Jimmy Cash is. Jimmy Cash said it, so it must be true.” What would be the point in faking this? There are also no apparent attempts by him to deny authorship.
Whether it was actually written by Cash could probably be answered best by Cash. If you want to talk to him, just look up his phone number (I did). There is a Jimmy Cash in Lakeside, Montana, the city given at the end of the letter. In addition, an American Champion 7GCBC single-engine airplane is registered to a Jimmy Cash in Lakeside, Montana, at the same address given at the closing of another online post bearing his signature. So, yeah, that’s probably the same guy.
I guess that proves it! 
BTW a Brigadier General is nothing to be sneezed at, but it’s not a “top general,” it’s the lowest-ranking general in the Air Force, and outside of his attainment of that rank we know nothing about his performance.
At first I didn’t read it because I was just looking at the issue of whether it was authentic. But I have now read the entire letter and it really has nothing at all to do with Islam. In fact he does not mention Islam at all in the entire piece except for his introducty sentence where he mentions it in passing to refer to a different article. He doesn’t mention religious fanaticism, or terrorists hiding behind the Koran. It is mostly about American politics and the conflicting attitudes about war in the Middle East. I would summarize as, “The Democrats are a bunch of bleeding-heart pansies and we have to go into the Middle East and kick the shit out of them if we want to keep the stream of oil coming.”
BTW I suspect that his sentence, “If any shot was threatening to either nation I had only minutes to advise the President, as he had only minutes to respond.” is somewhat figurative. Bush consults Petraeus regarding the situation in Iraq, and it has been widely discussed as to why Bush would skip steps in the hierarchy to consult directly with someone of such a low rank; Petraeus is a four-star general.
Just to clarify, there are no steps skipped when Bush talks to Petraeus. What are now called combatant commanders (used to be called CINC) respond directly to the commander in chief through the SECDEF. That means Petraeus as the commander of CENTCOM answers directly to the president through the secretary of defense. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are not in the chain of command. They advise the president on military matters. As the name implies they are staff. And no the president would not be talking to a one star general unless he was on the president’s staff.
I based my comments on an article I read on page A1 of the Washington Post 4/6/08:
This threatens to be a hijack but my point was that if there is any controversy whatsoever about Petraeus’s access to POTUS it is certain that Cash wouldn’t even be on the radar screen.
I have no military experience, I just read a lot. 
No you are correct. I was commenting on Petraeus’ new job, CENTCOM commander. When he was commander of Multinational Forces Iraq he was not directly linked to the president in the chain of command. But as the CINC the president is free to talk to PVT Snuffy about how he thinks the war is going.
But reading the bio that was linked to the OP Cash at one point was in NORAD where he was some sort of chief of staff. Part of his duties might have been to be the general officer watching the big board. Maybe he would have been the guy to pick up the red phone if there was a launch. Thats just a guess on my part.
I guess I didn’t read the paper that day :o
Well, I’ll have to say I don’t know. I don’t want to call the guy a liar.
It was proposed a while ago. The appointment may still be waiting for Senate approval.
I don’t know if the letter itself is authentic, but the mindset of the writer (at least that espoused in the first paragraph or two) is. It’s Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilizations theory, which basically says that a war between Islam (possibly in a grand alliance with China) and the West is inevitable, and we’d better do something about them before they’re in a position to do something about us.
It’s a central tenet of Neoconservative foreign policy- and (IMHO) it’s more or less the reason we’re in Iraq.
If you’re asking if the assertions in the letter are real, most of them are either false or simply the writer’s opinion. North Korea has not participated in or supported terrorist acts since 1987, to the best of our knowledge. Most (if not all) of the South American democracies have constitutions modeled on our own, which makes the assertion that …
… pretty stupid (not to mention redundant).
Overall, I’d have to agree with CookingWithGas’ assessment and say the whole thing is an anti-left rant cloaked as a “sky-is-falling wake-up call”.
Well, there’s two possibilities here:
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It’s a fake.
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It’s real, and the general in charge of the Cheyenne NORAD center was hallucinating a war between Iran and Iraq in 1989.
If 1. is true, then it’s just a fake. If 2. is true, then it’s a screed from the dumbest and/or craziest retiured general in the world, so who gives a shit?
It’s not the lack of eloquence, its the style. “Nu ff!!!” comes across to me like “ROFL” something I associate with younger folks who have spent a lot of time on Instant Messenger and the like. Of course, that’s not conclusive, I’m sure many older folks have spent a lot of time online and picked up a more modern style, but combine it with the fact that the letter writer is apparently unaware of the dates of the Iraq-Iran war that he claims to have worked gathering intelligence about, and I’m thinking the letter was written by someone else, though perhaps with the real General’s permission.
The phrase “nuff said” (I am presuming the general added a space by accident) is many decades old, something my grandfather might have said. I guess I’m getting too old myself to see it as modern usage. 
Maybe it’s obvious but it’s short for “enough said” when the speaker uses just a few words and declines to go into more detail to avoid sounding preachy.
War Is a Racket - Wikipedia War hero and General Smedley Butler says war is a scam and about money and doing the bidding of industry. This hero explains it.
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html He explains war is a racket .
Can’t find anything definitive, but may be genuine. A bio on the Airforce website does support the details in the letter (Jimmy L. Cash is indeed a general in the airforce, and did indeed serve in Cheyenne mountain).
Doesn’t mean it makes any sense, however. I love how diatribes like this that love to deify Reagan as a new Churchill, and vilify the Democrats as bunch of Chamerlain-esque appeasers forget that biggest concessions in the face of Islamic terror were made BY REAGAN (Iran-Contra and the decision to withdraw from Beruit in 1984)