for those who don’t know who is Judge Brugière :

http://tinyurl.com/yhty25l

if you’d bad intentions toward our country, then better for you not to fall into Brugière’s nets !

He is the master position in France that could chase (even in foreign countries)and condamn “terrorists”, and also make some preventive arrestations.

Now ask you why we hadn’t major terrorist attacks in the past decades, when our neighbours had ! also why communitarism isn’t so effective by us… like in “anglo-saxon” “free countries !!!!!

that we were “right”, is difficult to swallow for your highnesses

In 2006, Bruguiere went to the Pakistani port city of Karachi to investigate a suicide bombing that had killed 11 French naval contractors three years earlier. Pakistani security officials were uncooperative and hostile, he asserts.

Iran also could strike in unexpected ways in remote places such as West Africa or Latin America, where Tehran’s longtime ally Hezbollah has an entrenched presence, Bruguiere warns.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-terror-judge4-2009nov04,0,3572513.story

Now the Arabs may claim that the actions of the Colonial powers were unjust. They may cry that reason, logic and the unswerving determination of billions cry out to undo the legacy of the League of Nations sponsored mandates and the successor Israeli settler state. None of that should matter or have any bearing in law. The standing and rights of the Arabs who contest Israel’s borders or presence are based in the same League of Nations, and earlier European initiated treaty, sponsored legal system that they would repudiate in this case. We could offer to return the French Mandated districts to the status quo ante 1880. That would entail giving entire region of the Levant back to the Turks, expelling most of the Shia from Lebanon West of the Bekaa valley, and dividing the remainder between the Druze and Christians and returning the descendants of the Sunni who migrated South. Somehow I do not think that is the deal they are looking for.

By the way one interesting point about the borders and occupation question happens in the case of Gaza. While for the Israelis the Gaza strip is a Disputed territory with no legal border between it and the State of Israel for the Egyptians it was an Occupied territory because they had to cross an international border to get there..

“Whatever the reason for the deletion of the penaids and the change in the aft section of the RV, it was probably quite mundane – like cost. Or maybe making the aft end of the RV spherical would have made it too hard to handle for the crews installing it.”

I’m sure you’re right. Also group think along the lines of “too many cooks spoiling the broth” can lead to weird decisions. In a bungled aerospace project like X-33 it is typical that every single person is intelligent, competent and devoted to the project. However when group-think cuts in (the design team gets too large or is poorly managed), their collective IQ drops to the lowest common denominator. No doubt Norman Augustine has some law describing this.

The border between Israel and Syria was earlier the border between the French and British mandates. In northern Israel there’s a large lake called the sea of Galilee. The French and British agreed to a border that put the Sea of Galilee completely inside the Palestine mandate even though the border between the two mandates runs close to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. In fact the border runs 50 meters from the Eastern shore of the lake. This was done to make sure that this major water source would be completely controlled by the population in the British mandate.

That border is simply not militarily defensible and the Syrians conquered the strip of land between what is known as the international border and the shore of the lake in 1948. They held this land, and access to the lake, until 1967 when Israel took it back along with the Golan heights, which are nearby.

In all negotiations the Syrians have demanded that the new border be along the shore of the lake and the Israelis have said that they will return to the international border only. Neither side has ever been willing to budge on this issue. Hafez Assad made remarks about swimming in the Sea of Galilee as a boy and preferred to walk away from negotiations than to give up that demand.

Regarding the west bank, all this talk of occupation and Palestinian territory is for the reason that I mentioned: it is believed that the only way to bring the conflict to a close is by negotiations. If the intl community were to say that Israel has a right to the entire west bank that would not help to solve any negotiations. There is a great dishonesty here and all dishonesties like this cause problems. Practically every country in the world is of the opinion that Israel is in violation of the fourth Geneva convention and ‘occupies’ Arab land, even though it’s not the case.

In the case of the C-5A, the ability to inflate and deflate the tires in flight to enable operation from both hard surfaced runways and forward airstrips was designed in from the outset and special bleed air powered compressors with some unique design features were built. But they never bought the hoses to enable the pumps to be hooked up and so the compressors remained on the shelf. One reason for this may have been that they realized that the few C-5As we had (the 2nd production run was scaled back greatly due to cost) were so rare and valuable that you would never risk them flying into a forward airfield where you could and normally would use a C-130.

Whatever the reason for the deletion of the penaids and the change in the aft section of the RV, it was probably quite mundane – like cost. Or maybe making the aft end of the RV spherical would have made it too hard to handle for the crews installing it.

“Peacekeeper had so much more throw weight that it could carry a substantial penetration aids package (which were more or less tacked onto earlier boosters.”

As a sort of hobby thing, I’ve studied the Titan-II and the Mk-6 RV. The Mk-6 was very important in the development of entry vehicles. The Mk-6 was such a large RV that the early development RVs were heavily instrumented and sometimes carried flight experiments. There was an extensive classified literature associated with the Mk-6 and some of it has been declassified.

When one studies the history of the Mk-6′s development, a couple weird things stick out:

First the Titan-II/Mk-6 as originally designed made extensive use of decoys. The adapter section behind the the Mk-6 had these launcher tubes for ejecting cleverly designed decoys. Also, it was clear from the literature that considerable effort went into developing these decoys. However when the Titan-II was actually deployed, the decoys were deleted, i.e. the Titan-II still had the decoy launcher tubes in its adapter section but the tubes were there for structural purposes only and did not carry decoys.

The other weird thing about the Mk-6 was its base cover. The original wind tunnel design of the Mk-6 called for a spherical section base cover. This makes good sense from the stand point of aerodynamic stability. However the deployed Mk-6 didn’t have a spherical section base cover. Instead it had a flat base made from a single sheet of TPS material, (nylon-phenolic?). From an RV dynamic stability standpoint, a flat base is the worst possible design and would have significantly degraded the accuracy of the Mk-6. General Electric at Valley Forge were the designers of the Mk-6 (they were good!) and would have immediately recognized the disadvantage of using a flat base for the Mk-6. Why did they degrade their design?

To be blogged under the title “Israel’s Borders.”

So the bad guys nuke the cities and take the rest.

The first part, probably. The second part–won’t happen. Red Dawn would happen.

And guess who wrote the definitive manual for fighting such insurgencies? Yup. Kinda smarts, doesn’t it?

Like was always pointed out to the Liberals screaming about “No blood for oil…” or whatever in Iraq. If we had wanted the oil and only the oil, we would have bypassed the cities and taken the oil fields, sucked them dry via Basra and moved on. There is not reason the same cannot be done in the NA area.

And as chaos reigns after the mushroom clouds clear, who is to say that they could not install some sort of puppet regime? And believe me, they will be not as nice in the battlespace as the US armed forces.

Going back to the “Enders Game” analogy:
SO the bad guys deploy their equivalent of the “Little Doctor” = Molecular Disruptor or MD – hence the name, and just wipe out the non-compliant. (BTW, that was the only way humanity could defeat the Formics, get close enough to the mother world and deploy the ultimate solution – MD = Xenocide) And since they have convinced the world that Americans are universally hated, there will not be much of a complaint from anyone. It also serves as a warning to those contemplating other insurgencies.

Regarding the Israel-Arab conflict I think we may be close to seeing the self-destruction of the PA and the Palestinian govt. While Obama’s mistakes in foreign policy may be the proximate cause of this, really all those mistakes have done is reveal the intrinsic weaknesses and contradictions within the Pal system. There is no central govt that controls all the Pal territory. There is no Pal leader (ruler) that is supported by the majority of the Pal people. There is no way that they can rule themselves. They have no firm commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Their rulers have never tried to prepare the Pal people for a peaceful resolution of the conflict. All of these things and more make a negotiated peace impossible, for now and maybe for ever. In reality there was probably nothing Obama could have done to fix these problems. The things he would needed to have done he would never agreed to have done. This would mainly include massive political pressure on the Arabs and the Pals to address these kinds of problems.

The basis of the peace negotiations between Israel and the Arabs is UN resolution 242. This is a very odd resolution. While it does say in its preamble that the acquisition of territory by force is not legitimate it doesn’t follow up on that idea at all. If the authors of that resolution really believed that Israel’s conquest of Arab territory was illegitimate why doesn’t it say this clearly. Why doesn’t it simply say: Israel Get Out? I think there are a few reasons why it doesn’t say that.

First, Israel conquered that territory in a defensive war. While it’s not the sort of thing the UN does, to legitimize the taking of territory by war, in this case Israel was completely supported by international law in taking and keeping that territory. I believe that the authors of the resolution knew this. They didn’t say it but they also didn’t contradict it either.

Also, when the resolution was written there had been three big wars between Israel and the Arabs in the previous 20 years. The authors’ objective was to devise a framework to solve the conflict, so there would be no more wars. Telling Israel to Get Out wouldn’t have solved that, and telling the Arabs that they couldn’t have their lands back also wouldn’t have solved the conflict. Instead they invented a completely new concept in international law: land for peace. This idea doesn’t exist anywhere else in international law and no other conflict has ever had this kind of a proposed solution. In reality either Israel had a right to the conquered territories according to intl law, or it didn’t. This Solomonic idea of land for peace doesn’t exist in intl law, before or since 242. In fact the minimal implication of 242 is that Israel has a right to the territories unless and until peace is negotiated.

The authors of the resolution believed that only a negotiated settlement between the sides would result in real peace, and I believe that that is the main reason that 242 was written the way it was. Let me say as an aside the 67 war was part of the cold war and the Soviet Union was a big part of the behind-the-scenes provocations that led to the war and was probably also an actor in the UN after the war.

In fact 242 has been partly successful. Israel has signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan that although not perfect have led to a long period without major wars. However it may not be possible for 242 to work with the Syrians and the Pals without major changes in their viewpoints.

In the end I suspect a regional war will resolve things.