All Tied Together
Wired says there is a substantial war in Pakistan in all but name. At least one of the drone strikes was aimed at disrupting attacks planned for Western Europe. The targets might have included well known landmarks like the Eiffel Tower.
A sharply escalated campaign of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan is aimed in part at al-Qaeda units suspected of planning terrorist attacks on targets in Europe, a threat that U.S. officials described as “credible but not specific” enough to allow authorities to anticipate precisely where or when a strike might occur.
However, the Associated Press reported that the Eiffel Tower had been briefly evacuated, suggesting that some of the targets of the attack were high profile sites. These events underscored how much of the “war in Afghanistan” really takes place outside it. That is politically inconvenient for an administration which is conducting but one foreign war — in Afghanistan — and very reluctantly at that.
In the Beltway, it’s considered bad form to refer to the Pakistan “war.” The term is too loaded with geopolitical baggage, and raises too many questions about who should be overseeing the conflict at home. But when NATO helicopters kill more than four dozen in Pakistan in a single day; when the CIA-led drone campaign hits 20 targets in 23 days; when thousands of U.S.-trained Afghans cross the border to fight insurgents on Pakistani soil; when American troops ferry aid to Pakistan’s flood victims; when the U.S. Air Force flies surveillance sorties over Pakistan; when American security contractors operate on Pakistani turf; and when U.S. Special Operations forces school Islamabad’s army in counterinsurgency (and sometimes lose troops to firefights in the process), what else should we name this multi-pronged military campaign? What other term would possibly apply?
Nor was Europe the only target of the plots being hatched. The Wall Street Journal said US investigators are looking into whether the “Mumbai-style” strikes being planned in Pakistan were also aimed at the US. “Intelligence collected primarily points to potential threats targeting European countries, including the U.K., France and Germany, U.S. officials said. But after a spate of thwarted or botched plots against the U.S. this year, investigators are looking hard at any potential connection across the Atlantic.”
That would be even more inconvenient, because it would imply that no matter how complete a victory is won in “Afghanistan” it will not obviate the threat to further attacks in the West. It certainly won’t if the attacks are being planned in Pakistan. So, while the “Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper said earlier this year that the heightened pace of drone attacks ‘shows how absurd the American hardliners’ accusation is that he [Obama] is soft on terror’” it also shows that Obama’s strategy of ‘ending the war where it began’ is a sound bite without substance. The war is not “in Afghanistan” in any localizable sense. Its strategic roots are elsewhere. If the link between drone strikes in Pakistan and European threats is solid, it underscores the global and interconnected nature of the threat even more. Then Europe, far from “doing America a favor” by supporting its overseas wars in NATO solidarity is actually being defended by the American military effort by providing a forward defense against terror without burdening the European taxpayer.
But neither the “war in Pakistan” nor the faults in Obama’s strategy, nor even the European reliance on American forward defense are likely to get much play. The same old memes highlighting the search for Osama Bin Laden, bringing the troops home and the moral superiority of pacific Europe will be trotted out. The narratives won’t exactly be true but in politics, that is not a requirement.
All the talk about “getting Bin Laden” reminds me of the old rumors that Hitler had somehow escaped to Argentina after WW2. I’ve yet to see any evidence that he lived past late 2001, such as photos of him holding a current newspaper. All we have are occasional audio tapes which were vetted by the CIA (the same CIA that failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which worked to undermine George W. Bush).
I’ve speculated before about terror attacks timed to the run up of the midterm elections in the US. If successful — and the Democrats lose Congress — it would give the terrorists bragging rights in the Muslim world (the way the Madrid train bombings in Spain were said to have changed election results in favor of the Socialists). Also, the draw down in Afghanistan could be credited to the terror “enterprise” attacking the West.
If the intel for the drone attacks is correct, it speaks to good — and multiple sources — of information (so they can be checked against each other). Perhaps there are dissenters when it comes to terror attacks in the West. They would want Nato to leave and let them grab power in Afghanistan and believe that successful attacks might cause the West to stay.
However, thwarted plans might encourage European Politicians to leave (their involvement is making them a target).
“What other term would possibly apply” Why, Overseas Contingency Action of course! Wired needs to get up to speed with the latest edition of Newspeak.
WRT to Europe, they have been sucking on the US security teat for so long (and complaining about the taste of the milk) that they have little idea of the cost, in both resources and will, being borne by the target of their endless whining. They could little afford their Socialist Nirvana much less their “moral superiority of pacific Europe” if they had been responsible for the cost of their defense over the last fifty years.
Strategically AfPak is a disaster zone, Afghanistan is a geographical expression, they have never had a functioning national government in modern times, Pakistan is an artificial construct (a Frankenstein’s Monster if you will) stitched together out of mutually suspicious ethnic groups joined only in the fact of their religion. Throw in nukes, religious fanatics and a billion-plus dollar drug trade and you have what will be an intractable problem for a very long time.
But, running away and covering your ears while shouting “NA Na NA, I can’t hear you” is not a valid answer by any means.
Watching the Resident bumble around is painfully reminiscent of how we backed into the Viet Nam conflict. No plan, no declaration of war (or even a War Powers Act resolution), no objective, no end in sight, just a slow racheting up of involvement.
Then there is Yemen, Somalia, the Sudan and a dozen other places that the terrorists have established hives, are we to add these to the list of places we can bomb at will? Is the Big O free to blow up people anywhere in the world as long as we don’t put boots on the ground?
Not that I have objections to killing terrorists, I just like to see the rules being followed by our leaders.
1. rickl
“Hitler had somehow escaped to Argentina after WW2. I’ve yet to see any evidence that he lived past late 2001″
Man, Hitler must have been really old by 2001!
Now that I have proven that I can quote people out of context have I get a job as a NYT journalist?
Hey, isn’t that the “Bush Doctrine” that Katy Couric was challenging Sarah Palin on?
“Its strategic roots are elsewhere.”
It’s strategic roots are in Saudi Arabia. It has substantial metastases in Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, et al. At somepoint, we have to address the point of origin.
This is a morbid line of thought, but…
If Mumbai style attacks are planned for the US, WHERE do they engage in them?
The US is not Europe, as we all know, and as many liberals here and abroad like to claim, we in the US are “gun nuts”. The point being is that unlike Mumbai, many places in the US are likely to have their own rapid reaction force in the form of an armed citizenry and cops who won’t be afraid to engage in gun battles unlike Mumbai.
That being the case, it seems to me that the LAST thing Al Queda would want is a Mumbai Style attack that quickly ends in the terrorists getting gunned down in the streets by the populace they are supposed to be terrifying. Not quite the victory and message they would be going for:
“Terrorists Attempt to Strike Terror in Midwestern Town. Midwestern Town Responds with Hail of Lead.”
Assuming that is true, are they most likely going to choose those areas where armed citizenry will not be found in great numbers? More liberal leaning cities and population centers where gun ownership is not high, and the right to carry is not existent?
Even the Fort Hood massacre gunmen chose a specific area on an Army base where firearms were NOT allowed for his attack.
Of course, certain liberals cities might be difficult. NYC is tough on private gun ownership and carry, yet it has a large and well armed police force. Then again, it does have a dense population.
I bring it up because either they would choose to not do a Mumbai style because of this issue, or more likely they will pick the weakest of targets to wreak the most carnage in the shortest amount of time before retribution comes.
I was going to write my prediction, but I don’t want to give those bastards any ideas, but anyone following my line of thought may deduce it.
The linkage between Operations in Pakistan and terror plots against Western targets should be a reminder of just what we accomplished with Iraq. (But it won’t be.)
Iraq gave us a rare opportunity to rip into the enemy communication network under “military” rules, which are far different from “law enforcement” rules. Since the enemy is globally linked, this allowed exploits and reactions that could not otherwise be done. A laptop seized by an infantry platoon in Ramallah could be exploited to uncover a cell in New Jersey. In the hands of Intel guys it could do even more- the net could be penetrated, and the terror cell in New Jersey or Marseilles or wherever set up for a failure.
This cannot happen when the laptop must be treated as evidence for a court proceeding.
Now we are clearly doing the same in Pakistan, but without control of the battlespace, it is much harder.
The Mumbai attacks were carried out by a small group of gunmen operating in buddy pairs and directed, at least to some extent, over mobile devices. A drone strike would presumably be directed at a command or key support cell, though the gunmen themselves may still be at large.
According some reports, key elements of the Mumbai strike team were kept separate until the final stage in order to preserve operational security. If so, the destruction of a command cell may mean that the different parts of the attack teams may be unable to find each other, even unaware of each other’s existence. That may scatter, but it does not entirely obviate the threat.
The jihad movement is amorphous. Never can tell when a bunch of English lads will decide to take things into their own hands and blow up a tube or two.
But suppose for a moment there was a united jihadi leadership. What would they be thinking?
Europe has basically conceded defeat. Even in Britain with a “Conservative” leadership, the only question is how fast to run down the remainder of its armed forces. Germany still want to get rid of their nuclear power plants, and leave themselves more dependent on imported energy sources which Jihadists can control. Muslims are progressively being treated as above mere European law.
The US and Europe both are sinking deeper into the consequences of their own financial mismanagement, which will leave them paralyzed. Other outposts of the western world like Canada and Australia which have avoided the worst of the financial meltdown are still hooked on the Anthropogenic Global Warming lie, which will cripple them going forward.
A putative Jihad Central might decide that this is the time to play a long game. Encourage the lads to restrict their direct actions to Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, etc. And sit back while the Western World slips into irrelevance.
After all, Jihad Central has many future conflicts to think about — India, China, Russia, Brazil. Why waste resources hastening the exit of the first round losers?
Wretchard,
The war in the tribal regions of Pakistan sure brings to my mind our unacknowledged (really, to this day) part in war in Laos; our part running from 60-75 thereabouts. We hear about the drone strikes, but, as in Laos, I’ll bet there’s a tale-to-tell of efforts on the ground.
Kinuachdrach:
Your reasoning is sound, but it presumes a rational leadership of the Jihad movement. I think that is a stretch. I also think the answer to your last question: “why waste resources hastening the exit of. . .losers?” is “to enhance recruitment efforts. People — especially the people who join the jihad — will be attracted to a movement that shows it has the stones to attack the biggest player around. And I’m thinking the “chatter” out there is predicting something before the end of the year. Before the US election? That, of course, is the big question. F
#7 – I’m pretty sure there are still cities and places where concealed carry is prohibited by law, such as universities, or parts of Chicago or even DC. Chicago seems like the obvious answer to me.
For almost a year now, I’ve supported a different Afghanistan strategy – give the Pashtos their own semi-autonomous regions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Give both countrys’ “internal security” operations the ability to cross throughout Pashtunistan, regardless of the international border (so long as neither country makes a territorial claim deviating from the border). Turn Pashtunistan into a Terrorist Hunting Preserve, and assist both countries in their internal security operations.
That solves a number of problems: You are no longer inhibited by the border and are free to hunt at will. You’re supporting both rather shaky governments with internal security, strengthening central authority against an insurgency. And you take away a chief grievance of the political Taliban by creating the nominally-independent region.
Besides requiring the State Department to actually do work and diplomatically work out the details with both host nations, what are the drawbacks here?
Once again, al-Qaeda shows themselves to be relatively poor students of military doctrine. I am glad they haven’t read up on D-Day and our methods of diverting the enemy, or the classic North Vietnamese political/physical method of waging war.
Instead, they tend to go for big events (planes, buildings, high population centers, etc) to inflict maximum damage. A low intensity campaign would have the same effects – anyone remember the DC Sniper? – if kept up with enough randomness.
Not that I want to give them any ideas… but this just shows poor thinking by their decimated leadership.
7. Weary G,
There are many places in even Midwestern/Southern/Mountain towns that are voluntarily devoid of defenses. I won’t enumerate them here but there are many places where potential targets concentrate that have inadequate protection.
Police arrive after the fact (I know that cuz I am one) your only defence at any point of attack is an armed citizen. The cops will respond with force (unlike the Mumbai cops they will be armed and will probably have SWAT on the way as well) and, as most live in their towns, won’t hesitate to take out terrorists that are threatening their friends and family. That is why I advocate that every decent citizen get a CCW and practice and carry relentlessly. We are the ones that can protect ourselves.
BTW recent FBI data shows that ALL violent crime declines when more citizens are able to exercise their 2nd Amendment Rights. Push for “shall issue” laws in your state and town, the life that is saved may be yours.
When you think about the terrorist organization method vs Western response I am struck by the similarities to capitalism vs command economies. Terrorists proclaim an objective and some basic guidelines and allow their adherents to freelance the details, the West responds ponderously with lots of top-down directives and complicated rules and schedules. Resource utilization vs ideological methods. If the little nutters would put their energy into someting aside from hate they would live like kings!
The approach being taken by the Obama Admin is analogous to engaging the Whermacht, Luftwaffe, Kreigsmarine, and armed forces of Imperial Japan on the battlefield and bombing their military bases in the areas they invaded and on their own soil – but not waging a strategic bombing campaign desigend to destroy their warmaking potential, not ripping the hearts out of their cities, not engaging in a blockade of their seaborne imports and using unrestricted submarine warfare against their merchant fleets.
In short, it has embraced the most favored mythologies of the Left concerning warfare. In such a view it is, at best, permissable to allow the knights to engage on the chosen field of battle while not involving the civilians. Mahan’s great and decisive battle between fleets can take place but not with the corollary that the winner will be free to raid the loser’s coastlines, sink all his shipping, and support an invasion of his territory.
Too bad the enemy does not play by these same rules. So the Luftwaffe can flatten Coventry just to show it can but heaven forbid that we turn Hamburg into a funeral pyre. The Japanese can butcher the occupants of Nanking and Manila but there is no way we will conduct a pyrotechnic urban renewal campaign in Tokyo. The Junkers, Henschel, Messerschmitt, Mitsubishi, Nakajima and all the other factories producing weapons for our enemies will go unmolested; might hit a civilian with one of those raids, don’tca know.
As Wretchard would say, they want their wars “just so.”
As Wretchard would say, they want to sink the ten ships of the IJN and declare the war won. The return of the Phillipines, Guam, and the rest of the Pacific and occupied China and Korea will be subject to 6 party talks that will fix things right up.
We see how they would have fought WWII. And given their way we would still be fighting it. Long Wars are long by choice.
Didn’t Team America already take care of the Eifel Tower?
Today’s article in the Washington Post provides another example of the President’s thinking: Pakistan is the problem and therefore we must fight a war in Afghanistan.
Declaring Afghanistan a “war of necessity” so that “the cancer doesn’t spread there” is subtly different from his earlier declaration that the Afghan campaign was necessary because “those who attacked us on 9/11 are planning to do so again” and it was necessary to deny them a “larger safe haven” from which to plot and kill more Americans. In that case the Afghan campaign must be an effort to contain Pakistan through efforts based in Pakistan itself! Maybe the goal is to acquire a client state in Afghanistan and then switch over at some point to Afghanistan in order to watch the former base in Pakistan. But if so then why the rush for an exit strategy? Does it make sense for America to expend blood and treasure in Afghanistan to watch Pakistan, and then give up Afghanistan — probably to Pakistan — in order to contain Pakistan, which is in Obama’s words, where the cancer is?
Nor would containing Pakistan solve the problem of containment entirely. Bill Kristoff of the New York Times wrote:
Kristof is right. “We don’t even compete”. If the idea is that somehow drone technology can kill militants faster than “Wahabi-funded madrassas” can matriculate them then the Obama administration has a surpassingly strange notion of both humanitarianism and strategy. It is waging war in a pointless and gratuitously brutal way. But why? Nothing in the administration makes sense until politics is factored in. Suppose the Afghan strategy is not aimed at winning so much as making some political factions in the President’s Big Tent feel good? Maybe it is war waged, not in the pursuit of victory, but for therapy, a balm to soothe the pathologies of the Left.
Yet another problem which presents itself is this: if a forward defense has no utility, how come an attack bound for Europe or America can be forestalled in Pakistan? These are questions which ought to be asked, though I doubt they will noticed much.
Wretchard #17:
So the “flypaper” side effect of the Bush Admin strategy has now become the central strategy for the Obama Admin.
@ #7.
“I was going to write my prediction, but I don’t want to give those bastards any ideas, but anyone following my line of thought may deduce it.”
We may not know where they would attack, but I can predict one thing with fair accuracy: the next day gun stores in the area will be sold out.
7,13,15,19–reminds me of the raid in Northfield MN by the James Gang. They killed a teller, didn’t get any money, and most of them were gunned down in the street as they tried to leave. The rest were quickly hunted down and killed except for Jesse and Frank.
We could try that, no?
Wretchard @ 17:
I am not a leftist and can’t stand the prez’s domestic policies for the most part but thrashing the jihadi’s by drone or boots on the ground is ok with me. If we can kill them without losing any of our boys that’s even better. I’m always punching up on this forum so enlighten me if you see fit, but it seems to me Obama is saying one thing and doing another when it comes to the GWOT. Maybe i’m a simpleton who can’t read between the lines. I think, maybe, with respect to Iran that Obama is playing the same game with them. Extend the right hand in peace, wink wink, while the left hand moves in for the kill. Politics in my view, is always filled with doublespeak when dealing with your enemies. Who abides by the honor code when dealing with people who want to destroy you?
There are “soft” targets all over this country, whether red or blue state – they are called schools. Google Beslan.
Wretchard (17),
I think Obama is trying to buy time with the drone attacks until he can declare victory and leave Afghanistan. Hard to say if that is aimed more at keeping certain segments of the Democrats or certain segments of the REpublicans relatively happy.
Ashen (21),
If they were serious about Iran, it could be done “safely” (i.e. without public confrontation) by being more aggressive against the Iranian proxies.
#14 Kevin: “Instead, they tend to go for big events (planes, buildings, high population centers, etc) to inflict maximum damage. A low intensity campaign would have the same effects – anyone remember the DC Sniper? – if kept up with enough randomness. Not that I want to give them any ideas… but this just shows poor thinking by their decimated leadership.”
Lee Harris in ‘Civilization and its Enemies’ addressed this very point; why didn’t al Qaeda follow up 9/11 with a ceaseless barrage of smaller attacks, in random locations? If they were trying to produce “terror”, what would be better? Everyone was on pins and needles waiting for the other shoe to drop; the press coverage would have been massive, and would have spread the anxiety and fear far beyond the actual damage they could do.
The reason was that they weren’t operating from the same Clausewitzian ideas of war that we use. They were playing out a fantasy, in which the pure Muslim warrior, empowered by Allah, become the unstoppable force that humbles the West. The WTC and the Pentagon were props in this wish-fulfillment drama.
The terror attack of 9/11 was not designed to make us alter our policy but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves and on those who share the same fantasy ideology: it was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by Al-Qaeda not for their military value–in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor–but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: a mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as was proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?
…We must continually remind ourselves that one and the same physical act, such as 9/11, does not have the same significance for us as it does for those who follow radical Islam. And nowhere is this difference more telling than in the interpretation of the final collapse of the World Trade Center. Tapes of bin Laden have made it clear that this catastrophic event was not part of the original terrorist scheme, which apparently assumed that the twin towers would not lose their structural integrity. The unlooked-for collapse gave to the event–in the terms of Al-Qaeda’s fantasy ideology–an even greater poignancy: precisely because it had not been part of the original calculations, it was immediately interpreted as a manifestation of divine intervention. The nineteen hijackers did not bring down the towers; God did.
And for why radical Muslims have not launched a constant low-level guerilla war? It wouldn’t be flashy enough for them:
9/11 was not an act of Clausewitzian terror–that is to say, terror used as a strategic weapon for the sake of its psychologically debilitating effect on the American people. It was a symbolic drama, a great ritual demonstrating the power of Allah, a pageant designed to convey a message not to the American people but to the Arab world. Smaller-scale followup acts would have had no glamour, and it was glamour–and grandiosity–that Al-Qaeda was seeking in its targets. These targets, let it be said one last time, were selected not for any strategic value but simply because they were the most suitable props for the great symbolic fantasy drama that Al-Qaeda had devised–a drama, once again, designed to be decoded not in American living rooms but in the Arab street. The pure Islamic David required a Goliath. After all, if David had merely killed someone his own size, where would be the evidence of God’s favor toward him?
it also shows that Obama’s strategy of ‘ending the war where it began’ is a sound bite without substance.
Really? Let me check…hmmm…nope, it appears that you are wrong, wrong, and even more wrong.
Bush’s little adventure in Iraq was/is never more than a massively destructive and deadly distraction. It was al-Qaeda and its supporters who were the threat and not some former US ally. Instead of getting all cognitive dissonant about this, maybe you should instead look at what all the hard, unspun facts are saying and return to reality.
When defining the “enemy,” the lack of an actual nation as center of gravity and the inescapable common denominator of Islam makes defining the enemy as Muslims more attractive every day. TO BE CLEAR, I am not advocating the wholesale slaughter of Muslims, but we absolutely must be able to acknowledge this fact and put them on notice that eventually it may come to that if they can not reign in their bad actors. Sharia and the US Constitution can not coexist side-by-side. That fact is both irrefutable and apparently, in some circles, unmentionable. IMO, a recipe for disaster.
I always thought Pakistan was the next front (after Iraq), not Afghanistan. A littoral nation (logistics), loose nukes (scary aspect), terrorists (target rich), common border with an ally (India)etc. From a military standpoint, what not to like. Would Iran be acting like cowboys if surrounded by Indians, ala Little Big Horn? Perhaps I am missing something and if so someone here will happily point it out.
7. Weary G /14. kevIN/15. anton, et al, Michelle Malkin made and supported an argument that the internment of Americans of Japanese decent was, in part, for their own protection from mobs of angry and armed Americans. If small groups of terrorists start shooting up rural US cities, I see a repetition of history on the horizon.
Today’s article in the Washington Post provides another example of the President’s thinking: Pakistan is the problem and therefore we must fight a war in Afghanistan.
If the president is thinking, then I, for one, am encouraged.
/sarc
Exhelo #24:
The liberal bureaucracy does not ever even try to “solve” problems. It prefers to “manage” them.
So we are still at war with poverty 45 years later and the beggars are still winning.
Their answer to arms control was “Strategic Arms Limitation” while Reagan took the bold “Reduction” approach as part of his “They lose we win” concept.
Heaven forbid we ever fix anything! Look what happened with Reagan and the end of the Cold War. It rally hit the fan then, all those military bases and factories closing in strong Democratic states. Much worse than a nuclear war in their way of thinking.
And look what happened with JFK’s “Moon” challenge. We did it and then all sorts of bureaucrats and their workforce have been scrambling to justify their existance ever since.
As Jerry Pournelle pointed out on his blog the other day, the Left can only conceive of a peasant-like existence, in which a gain by one person implies a loss by another. To that I add they can only conceive of a continuation of yesterday with some appropriate cost-of-living adjustments at regular predictable intervals.
Richard’s article is well done as usual. I agree with Josh that the concept of Obama thinking is a bit of a reach, though. Well, maybe he has no choice now that his advisers are taking off.
This is the sort of thing that drives some of us to distraction – knowing what we know, while having some fellow smile that smile that conveys “You can’t prove it”. All this in the face of about 1200 Jews being murdered by “our peace partner”.
Arafat ordered Hamas attacks against Israel in 2000
Saying Afghanistan is the the source of aggression is like saying saying Truk was the source of the Japanese Empire’s assault on the Pacific. ‘See, we sank a lot of ships at Truk and now we can look for an exit strategy.’ It was necessary to neutralize Guadalcanal early on, as it was necessary to drive the al-Qaeda’s allies from Afghanistan at the outset, but it is wrong to think it will end there.
The center of the Islamic radicalism’s power is the ideology and money and state support that rolls out of the Middle East. To fight their expeditionary forces in Afghanistan according to a timetable when there is ample evidence that it is merely one of many battlefields is not going to work.
And this will be amply demonstrated in the coming years. No matter what assurances are offered, whatever the spin; unless and until the core of the enemy’s strength is reduced — I do not say by force alone; with some force perhaps — then you are just chasing a rubber ducky around the bathtub. Worse you are accepting that the enemy can strike, Mumbai or 9/11 style, at the Western homeland and not even name it.
It is folly and it will soon be evident. Barack Obama is losing the confidence of the electorate not because his policies are discussed on this site. It is losing credibility because of its evident shortcomings.
Problem with the Eiffel Tower is that it’s structurally full of holes. Or a small plane would have already lodged in it. But it would have looked like spinach caught in your teeth. /s
““Terrorists Attempt to Strike Terror in Midwestern Town. Midwestern Town Responds with Hail of Lead.”
lol….you made my day…thanks…:)
BC…
That oft relinked photo-op belies the fact that Saddam didn’t get what he wanted from Rumsfeld: no loans, no military gear, no operational support.
Instead, he was permitted to buy food and medicine… not a trivial thing in wartime.
We were also willing to help in agri-business.
As for ALLY: Saddam was and always remained a SOVIET CLIENT STATE. Period.
That made him radioactive.
That you can drool Ally tells all that you’ve dropped in from some alternate universe.
—–
Our client state HAD been Iran. She’s the power with all the connections in Washington.
She only got cut off from military exports AFTER the embassy fiasco: CONGRESS cut Iran off.
Even to this day, Iran features American arms in all her military highlight videos: F4, F5, F14, M60, M113, HAWK; British Hovercraft, etc.
These days these old weapons work right along side Russian arms: Migs, etc.
And now Iraq is getting American arms: M1A2 — brand new, not refurbished!
In very short order, Iraq’s 9th Tank division is going to be too much for Syria to handle.
America allied to Saddam in any way – -what a revisionist joke!
Blert #35:
Funny how they can scream “IRAN CONTRA!” at the top of their lungs for decades and then suddenly seem to forget all about it.
As has been established in movies: the ultimate soft targets are mass sports and entertainment events. However, since 911 their softness has dropped a lot.
Other soft targets are aplenty and have been pre-announced by the criminally insane.
Just the other day, some nut-case popped off his AK47 at the University of Texas. He didn’t last long.
We know for a fact that AQ wanted to hit NYC bridges… But the NYPD kept getting in the way.
We know that AQ wanted to snap up some crop dusters. Now that scheme is ruined.
—–
Until we have a Tokyo Bay surrender of the faithful — which did in Shintoism — the basic nature of islam will generate ever more instant jihadis.
As Lincoln said of the free and the slave states events must drive them all to one state: all free or all slave.
Islam is slavery. The same dynamic holds. The world must either become all free or all slave. The rigor of islam makes that so. It’s the ultimate double-down theological bet.
I would make the case that islam is already Constitutionally prohibited on slavery grounds alone. It merits debate. Its other strictures against comity and peace must also be brought into view.
That the MSM can so willfully whitewash its villainy is disturbing. Plainly, the air-heads feel free to criticize only when it is socially safe. That’s why Israel is a target: it’s safe to declaim her.
I’ve NEVER seen any expose out of the Magic Kingdom that harshes the absolute monarchy. But there is much to criticize: the lowest level of freedom in religion on the planet.
Talk about a long war—–
”
First World War officially ends on October 3 2010
The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.
The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.
Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead. …..
“On Sunday the last bill is due and the First World War finally, financially at least, terminates for Germany,” said Bild, the country’s biggest selling newspaper.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/8029948/First-World-War-officially-ends.html
Re AfPak. STRATFOR
Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.”
The stated US goal in Afghanistan was the destruction of al-Qaeda. While al-Qaeda as it existed in 2001 has certainly been disrupted and degraded, al-Qaeda’s evolution and migration means that disrupting and degrading it – to say nothing of destroying it – can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan.
We do not really care who rules Afghanistan as long the regime does not support AQ.
Pakistan can help us reach a deal with the Taliban and Pakistan can keep them to it.
Pakistan wants to run its trucking trade to the Stans in the north and it needs a stable Afghanistan for that as well as for the planned pipelines running oil from the northern Stans to ports in Pakistan.
W #32…thats a brillant post. Indeed we are chasing the rubber ducky around the bath tub. Unless we have leadership that recognizes that the enemy is Wahhabism, that the maddrassas have to be shut down, that the money flow from Saudi Arabia to the “fundelmentalists” must be stopped and that the West must cease its dependance on their oil, we are only chasing the rubber ducky. Where’s the leadership with the guts to tell it like it really is? Tactically we win small battles with the surgical strikes and assasination by drone (ABD) strategically we are losing the war. So lets define the war…and the war is over energy! To win we have to uis nleash the power of the US, open all of our energy spigots…develop ANWAR, underground small nuke plants, natural gas for transportation and heating, electric vehicles and wein ourself off of foreign energy. Drive the cost of energy so low that manufacturing will be compelled to return to the US and with it full employment. At some point we also have to address our alliance with Europe and since we have supported their defense and to a large part their economies since WWII, cut them lose, along with the UN which only perpetuates the pain in the world. If we go back to a US First position, the rest will fall into place. Where is the leadership going to come from to do this ??
So then. It looks like the 2012 Presidential election will be the most important one in the US since the Civil War, give or take.
#39 SIGINTEL
Industrializing the war effort is definitely a part of the necessary solution, but I’m not sure it’s the whole story. Part of the way in which we won the Cold War was the Idea effort, or battling the conventional narrative in the Communist and devloping worlds. There are still vestigial agencies that exist as a result of those efforts, like USAID and Voice of America. What we need to do is re-harness those agencies to spread our cultural message as an alternative to the Wahabbist one. Obviously the media narrative must be spread in more modern fashion, be it satellite TV or viral text message, but the minds of the Muslim world is the first and last battle ground in this war.
Admittedly, the ruling class no longer has the cultural confidence to be so honest about such philosophical imperialism. That’s just the first hill the rest of us must take on the field of this battle.
Sigintel, the enemy is not Wahabism except insofar as that branch is fundamentalist Islam as laid down in the Koran. The enemy is Islam, and it has one main and two secondary centres of gravity (actually three, but one of them can’t be touched).
It might well do fairly serious, and possibly fatal, damage to Islam if those three places were permanently eliminated in an unmistakable manner, and one designed to knock down one of the Five Pillars (hajj). And this would be rather cheap. After first confiscating any assets owned by states that call themselves Islamic – notably Mordor aka Saudi Arabia – it would take less than an hour. Three warheads, three targets, groundbursts as dirty as possible. And then start deporting Moslems. And if any of them elsewhere start violent demonstrations? Then they have revealed themselves as enemy belligerents out of uniform and the Geneva Convention can be applied. Immediately.
We need Charles Martel. What we have is Quisling.
Jonk…yes there has to be a war of words and a propaganda machine dedicated to getting the young minds unwrung of the Islamic dogma. The Internet will play a large part in breaching the wall of idiology that the Wahabbists erect in the madrassas.In Pakistan, the governement is pushing the development of the Internet and sooner or later, the Wabbai students will find an Internet cafe and get a glimps of the west. Having spent years of traveling in and out of Indonesia and Malaysia, I know that there’s a constant struggle by the population to fully embrace western ideals and commercialism along with the strict adherence to Mohamedism that they are taught in the mosque. The youth there seem to be less likely to become extreamists. While they have had some bad boys there who targeted the western symbols in Bali and Jakarta, we should embrace Indonesia for its moderate form and practice of Islam.
Fletcher…I agree that the emeny is Islam, but we arent going to take out Mecca and Medina, and we arent going to send American born muslims packing…not unless we are drawn into a WWIII sceanario and I dont see that happening with the Saudis…with the Iranians, yes …then “Katey bar the door”.
“Then Europe, far from “doing America a favor” by supporting its overseas wars in NATO solidarity is actually being defended by the American military effort by providing a forward defense against terror without burdening the European taxpayer”
Though at the beginning, it’s our participation to the war in Afghanistan that motivates the Paki’s jihad on us. Our soldiers reported that the supposed Talibani that they were fighting were more than often disguised Pakis, and since these are involved in Afghanistan, the “Talibani” fightings strategy bizarrely improved, more professional, and better armored
Gordon,
“….reminds me of the raid in Northfield MN by the James Gang. They killed a teller, didn’t get any money, and most of them were gunned down in the street as they tried to leave. The rest were quickly hunted down and killed except for Jesse and Frank.”
Same thing happened to the Dalton Gang in Coffeyville, Kansas, on October 5, 1892:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Gang
I think a Mumbai-style attack in the U.S. would likely end very quickly and very poorly for any terrorists dumb enough to actually try it.
To blert: Sorry, but I’m not exactly the revisionist here.
The jhadis want to die…and before they do they’ll take out as many infidels as they can. We need to stop them before they get in…close the damn border and stop all automatic visas.
#32 Wretchard,
Don’t forget the money. The Arabs will fund terrorism against us as long as they have the money to do so and aren’t distracted too much at home. Taking their oil income away from them will solve both problems. Until then we are just playing whack a mole.
“The center of the Islamic radicalism’s power is the ideology and money and state support that rolls out of the Middle East.”
Re: In the Beltway, it’s considered bad form to refer to the Pakistan “war.”
Having recently exited a blog which allowed for the unfettered, progressive expression of several little inner-Hitlers, while censoring opposing, politically incorrect points of view, I am not at all surprised to see the article to follow. We must hope that progressives will continue to editorialize as they blog (down and dirty) and further hope that the American public will be alienated and righteously indignant at the polls. If not, this will be the last truly democratic election until after the war, I fear.
Village Voice Writer, Fmr. Obama Organizer Attacks ‘White America’: ‘White People Have Simply Gone Sheer F–king Insane’
Meanwhile, our allies (?) in Europe are trying to renege on an anti-terrorism deal they made several years ago.
jWarrior
The EU commission is irrelevant
I’ll hope we get out of the EU trap
Fletcher Christian @ 42
If there is an answer this is it. Lots of “fallout” but no pain no gain.
Not to be crass but, wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier to deport all Muslims from Europe and the USA then keep them out?
25. Dr. Mabuse
The scenario you relate is precisely what Al Qaeda is not capable of.
After Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were prepared to attack numerous targets with their military. They were engaged in ‘conventional warfare’.
The muslims cannot engage in ‘conventional warfare’, because they would be decimated.
They have not learned, yet, the limits of their Allah.
Strategic bombing of important military targets or vital infrastructure: no, Al Qaeda is not capable of that. But they’re perfectly capable of bombing crowded supermarkets or movie theatres or malls, yet they haven’t done so – why not? Because such activities don’t fit into the operatic fantasy they’re trying to live out. In a way, their grand success on 9/11 makes it harder for them. To keep their hold on the Muslim imagination, they have to keep up the superhuman act, with Allah as the (literal) deus ex machina. This is why they keep trying to concoct equally impressive spectacles. Exploding planes plummeting over Detroit, blowing up the Eiffel Tower…these are attempts to keep up the grand narrative. To go from the Twin Towers to blowing up Joe Blow’s Liquor Store would be a crushing deflation. As Harris said, this is theatre, and we have to stop trying to shoehorn everything the enemy does into our own logical, no-nonsense, bottom line paradigm of waging war. This isn’t that sort of thing at all. It’s more like Hitler thinking that Fortune was favoring him when Roosevelt died, or James II believing that the Blessed Virgin Mary was turning back William of Orange’s invasion force by the contrary winds that kept him from leaving port. It’s a semi-occult superstition. We don’t have to share the belief, but we have to recognize that it exists and is capable of directing men’s actions.
It is a big mistake to think of al Qaeda as “Islamo-fascist” …
Al Qaeda’s members are much more like “Islamo-Bolshevists,” committed to revolution and a reordering of the world along anti-capitalist lines.
Many parallels can be drawn between the Russian revolutionary movement of the late 19th and early 20th century movement in general and Al Qaeda.
And also many lessons can be learned.
First and foremost being that Al Qaeda is not a unitary movement (we can expect splits like the one between Zarqawi and Bin Laden) and that they are highly reliant on press– now the internet– to disseminate their messages.
Therefore they can be monitored.
Like the Bolsheviks in 1914, these Islamist extremists are part of an underground sect, struggling to land more than the occasional big punch on the enemy.
But what if they were to get control of a wealthy state, the way Lenin, Trotsky, and company did in 1917 in Russia?
How would the world look if there were an October Revolution in Saudi Arabia?
Well they tried it in KSA and it failed big time.
AQ has shuttled around from failed state to failed state, Sudan, Afghanistan now Somalia and Yemen —they will end up on Tristan da Cunha.
Re- the Mumbai attacks—they were coordinated by elements within Pakistan’s intelligence service–ISI as part of their war with India.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7890226/India-Pakistans-ISI-had-direct-control-over-Mumbai-attacks.html
All the more reason to support Kissingers initiative involving, China, India, Russia, Iran and Pakistan to design Afghanistans future under US leadership.
None of the above countries want a narcoterrorist AQ state on the borders or near borders.
Meanwhile we have a developing narcoterrorist state on our own border with more than 28,000 people murdered in Mexico the last few years.
AQ is developing stronger links with Latin American narcoterrorists—a potentially big problems for the US–it will not be coming from Mosques–it will be coming from ex State Prison gang members throughout the South and West.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote,
“The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.”
Our fundamental interest is American First.
Not getting entangled in distant lands religious, tribal,land disputes–but that is what we doing–we need focus, determination, commitment and ruthlessness in pursuing America First interests–let the UN deal with the rest.
You can say it loud, or you can say it quietly, but we are at war with Islam. Now, what does that mean? Maybe it’s a little like being at war with entropy, and you will never be free of it. That’s sort of the “progressive” view of it, why they don’t grok the idea of a massive attack upon Islamic targets. Would we nuke an entropic capital?
But maybe that’s not the model. It was not the model for our war against fascism. We found some places to bomb – it wasn’t that difficult a determination – and we bombed them. Long story short, it worked.
I just write these obvious facts for any children who might trip across the discussion and wonder why there are two sides to the question at all.
As long as Pokiston is a place with a capital called “Islamabad”, it is not likely to change. For that matter, as long as we have a president called Barack Hussein Obama … well, you do the math. But are we at war with Pokiston? Not really, because it is not really a country, as we view things. We are at war with Pokiston’s left foot, kidneys, and right ear … which unfortunately they are not in full control of. And then what? Well, one has to enjoy situational ambiguities, I guess.
Victor,
The battle is ours; we win or we die. The UN might oblige in our burial, with sufficient funding and a study.
Victor,
With all due respect, consider: “All Tied Together”.
Some good points by many. Victor starts out well, but then shows his hand, ‘it’s us against the world’ or ‘it’s us against Islam.’ I believe this is the same Victor who scorned the Stuxnet posts by Roger Simon as bad Israeli PR. So then if we dissect Victor’s animosity and his further put-down reference of ‘tribal’ and ‘religious’ wars, we get, well, jingoism.
Well, Vic, if it comes down to the US going it alone without Israel (and Britain and others), or Israel going it without a Victorized America, I’ll take my chances on Israel. G-d works in mysterious ways. Your pleasant bigotries equate to strategic failure which others must overcome to save…you. Those others not being Israel but nicer Americans who can see more clearly.
http://bobrowen.com/nymas/americafirst.html
58,59
Part of the problem is the frame ” All Tied Together”
We are not.
The Anglosphere —countries that were part of the British Empire have, in the main, common values and business practices–private property rights, common law, democracy etc the Papal Christian world in general shares those values.
We are not tied together with the rest of the world apart from trade–common accounting practices and property rights are all we need to do business with other cultures.
General Petraeus and Gates have made it crystal clear many times– our policy in the Holy Land seriuosly harms American defense and commercial interests–it is what it is.
If you live in the West or the South you understand that the major threats to your family and business are the narcoterrorist drug gangs from Mexico that recruit their members from State Prisons– look at what has happened to Salinas CA–it is a no go area for police without military grade weapons– same with East LA, E Oakland and EPA etc.
A fortress America policy in collaboration with the Anglosphere is more effective, cheaper and preserves our values.
We should contribute to the UN based upon the value we get for America First–and we need to end the lobbying by alien nations who distort our policies against America First, be they Chinese, KSA, Israeli, or anyone else.
It is time to circle the wagons, close ranks and deal with our real friends in the Anglosphere.
The great social disease of the West is that we have been conditioned to refute or ignore reality when acknowledging it might hurt someone’s feelings or show that the current people in power are idiots. In order to cure the disease we must quit enabling morons and would-be despots and describe them as what they are and let the chips fall where they will.
“Progressives” are nothing more than communists in drag, even if a lot of them who style themselves as such don’t know it.
The tenets of Islam are wholly incompatible with the ideas of Western civilization. We might can have peaceful co-existence from a distance, but allowing Muslims to immigrate into Western nations is like courting cancer. No good will come of it.
“Why waste resources hastening the exit of the first round losers?”
We won’t lose because the Muslims can’t win. We will just muddle along until we either get a POTUS with a pair or something so terrible happens that whoever is in the Oval Office has to grow a pair.
One Boomer can reduce the Islamic population from 1 billion and change to just the change. Real Change… Change you can count on….
The problem is something like a nuclear strike on New York is basically untraceable.
The fixation with Osama is part of the problem. Going after him means that terrorism is an act of crime, not an act of war. So to fight back you need evidence leading to a criminal, or group of criminals.
If terrorism is seen as a weapon of war, like a tank or stealth bomber then it doesn’t matter that their isn’t any hard evidence. As a crime, you need that ‘smoking gun’. As a war, anyone with a gun gets targeted BEFORE tehy can make it smoke.
As a crime, a nuke in New York means some weasel POTUS can claim we don’t know who did it. As a war, it doesn’t matter. EVERYONE with nukes goes on the to-do list. NO exceptions.
This lack of focus is entirely the fault of Peanut Carter. The day after Amadamnutjob and his buds grabbed the Embassy, Peanut should have marched his cowardly arse down to Congress and got a declaration of War. Before the first B-52 got back to base from their bombing mission, the Mad Dog Mullahs would have been on the phone. Asking when we want to pick up the recently freed hostages and BTW, did we want all the heads of their former captors?
I don’t think it is wise to rely on the nuclear bomb in the struggle with extremism, but ultimate reliance will have to be reposed in WMDs if the West as a civilization is unwilling to take its own corner in a fight. Then what was not won, nor even attempted by mental strife will be settled by the annihilation of populations. The stairway to the edge will built of parts labeled caring and compassion and tolerance yet be nothing but a false signal that will betray the desert raider to an end made inevitable by our own human instinct for survival.
The rational thing to do would be to engage the enemy ideology with every resource in our own civilization. That is what an average man would do. But for some reason that kind of solution is beneath the elite, whose triumphs must appear to be as effortless as the actions of gods. Yet they are human. And if their vanity takes them to the brink, and feel fear, then they will do the animal and weak thing. They will destroy the poor ignorant people they could not stoop to argue with.
They will destroy the poor ignorant people they could not stoop to argue with.
good lord amighty, that is it, that is them, in fourteen words. thirteen and a kicker.
The Capitol was the one target on 9/11 that wasn’t hit.
It is a known symbol.
Don’t think it’s soft. But they did try to hit the Indian Parlement.
In this war “nuke” is more a term, a shorthand, than a necessary weapon. Face it, our conventional forces could wipe out any amount of Islamic opposition, they have virtually no defense against what we can do for full-on assault.
But I suppose your point holds there, too, the question being do we need to annihilate them, or can we make them our friend? To which question I answer exhaustedly, “kill a modest number, the rest will quickly offer to be our friend”. Unfortunately we have not yet manned up to that modest number, and Islam does not care beans for a small, replaceable rate of loss, indeed they praise it, even seek it. If we don’t want them to keep seeking it at our expense, even an expense we “can afford”, then we need to make our point clearly. And then probably repeat every twenty years or so, but that would be as may be.
A elite culture which behaves with exaggerated respect and even reverence towards a belief system up until the second it incinerates its adherents with a Hellfire missile looks very much like a civilization with a multiple personality disorder. Imagine how confusing it is to face a a Western foe which requires the Koran to be handled with white gloves and then turns around and shoots you for carrying out the words in said Koran; that pays for stuff it builds then blows it up; that loudly proclaims its willingness to build a mosque at Ground Zero yet reveals it is wiretapping whatever it can, because if truth be told, it can’t afford to trust you, its numerous obeisances and honeyed words notwithstanding; that closes Guantanamo from a high moral horse then turns you over to the Egyptian secret service for questioning, etc, etc, etc. What would you make of such an elite culture? You might think them mad and probably call upon Allah to give you the strength to rid the earth of such lunatics.
But do not be rash; remember the Reaper droning overhead and consider that the confusion arises only because you lack the understanding to truly appreciate the genius of this apparent madness. And if it is inscrutable, if you don’t understand it, like the policy of borrowing your way out of debt, then open your eyes wider and watch network television until clarity comes to you. Either that or take up the infidel custom of consulting the bottle, which maketh all crooked ways straight.
A elite culture which behaves with exaggerated respect and even reverence towards a belief system up until the second it incinerates its adherents with a Hellfire missile looks very much like a civilization with a multiple personality disorder.
We’re “complex”
Anyway, sometimes even a blind squirrel finds a nut.
I’d rather have this bottle in front of me, than to have to have a Hellfire lobotomy.
The obvious play in 79 was reciprocity: we should have immediately seized the Iranian embassies in Washington and at the UN.
Blindfold the boys and haze them. Give the mullahs their own.
Cut their goodies off, too.
Rather than storm the Iranian nation — just impose a embargo on exports.
Sit on that position.
Delay and delay until the mullahs run out of cash — they were new in town — and call it game over.
Move back in with the democratic opposition. It’s all good.
Peanut got creamed.
LOL –and the worst part of all, the lunatics can’t run the asylum to even the lunatic standard –
yEaR 2011:
Edison, to investment banker: “I’ve got some ideas….”
Banker, “Are they stoopid enuff?”
Edison, “Well…actually, no….”
Banker, “Then GEDDOUDDAHEEYAH!”
Pointing to eventual WMD use in the generational struggle against Islam (lots of generations since the 7th century, so far) is backing into the dirty little secret of history: genocide works. That is, be it wiping out every man, woman and child, or just the men, or just killing enough of a population to make moving them to a new land feasible–it works and solves the problem of a population’s behavior.
America, and it’s more firm foundation on Christian cultural values such as the potential for repentance (sincere change of behavior) among all men, has served as a kind of gatekeeper since WW2 to keep the genocidal impulses of man in check outside of socialist countries. There has been, and continues to be, a concerted effort to defang, destabilize and destroy the influence of America through, among other ways, hamstringing effective responses to tough international problems. If, however, America ever is removed from the top spot, it will be replaced by a bevy of powers that lack the foundations that have, even imperfectly, held mass murder as a solution in check.
Expect a return to exterminations, mass deportations, and other things conveniently meshing well with a response to overpopulation. WMDs only make such policy execution more efficient, and significantly easier than engaging ideology with less violent means.
–JC
Sounds like a general tightening is going on.
Here’s what it looks like in north east, south asia and oceana vis a vis china. The first is a pretty apt comparison of Kaiser Wilhemlm and the current chinese leadership.
In the Footsteps of the Kaiser: China Boosts US Power in Asia
the second piece by an aussie marks a number of incidents which mark the chinese relationship with their neighbors.
Don’t kowtow to the Chinese
* Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
* From: The Australian
* September 30, 2010 12:00AM
When there is an asymmetry in the power relation between combatants, as there is between a professional boxer and a normal man and the West and the Islamic world, it is important that conflicts between them be settled at the lowest level of conflict. At the higher levels it becomes dangerous for the weaker party because the stronger may “lose it”.
But politicians are prone to kick the can down the road. They wait for a crisis to emerge, whether it is a debt crisis, an immigration crisis or a terrorism crisis, before reluctantly acknowledging a problem with the status quo, from which they normally profit handsomely, and acting. Even when they act, they often do so half-heartedly. Too little and too late.
This is how perfectly foreseeable problems, like the subprime or Social Security crisis reached meltdown proportions. It isn’t too hard to imagine politicians letting the same thing happen with respect to terrorism too. They’ll ignore it until they cannot any more. The sad thing is that 9/11 wasn’t enough to push them into effective action. It will probably take something far worse to get the politicians moving. And when they do they will still have one eye to the gallery. They often overreact and compound the difficulty.
charles/74; it’s a dual strategy, China and Russia are leveraging the west’s belief that the two of them are circling each other like boxers looking for an opening. The interim goal is integrating Russia and NATO, the Kremlin understanding that once inside the command, it will control. IOW, China is bad cop, Russia is good cop, and NATO is the guy with the kleig lights in his face.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68L4FV20100922
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-22/clinton-says-nato-not-russia-s-adversary-urges-cooperation-with-alliance.html
Wretchard #65 and #75. I haven’t seen that thought articulated anywhere else, but a light turned on when I read those two comments. I believe that your insight is accurate but gosh it’s miserable. I’m going to ponder that some more.
At the higher levels it becomes dangerous for the weaker party because the stronger may “lose it”.
Say what?
Are you trying to express the insight that the weaker party may be at a disadvantage?
I admit it’s an insight that the Islamic world refuses to honor.
Off topic to Buddy: The Frog and The Dragonfly 716 Front St Comfort
Approx Noon 5 Oct. See you there?
efrom the symbolist file:
Jimmy “the community reinvested actor” Carter flies over the realist ate you essay, i mean the real estate USA, and lands with a tummy ache.
Cleveland Clinic spokesman Dr. “Doc” Octor PhD, in unprepared remarks as he hurried through a parking lot jammed with spontaneous flash-crowding Iranian-American home owning Appalachian clog dancers, indicated that the former president has “irony-deficient anomiea” and that a “sulky ignored conscience” had probably “triggered a squirt of stomach acids” as the ex-president overflew America, an area of “intense updrafts”, the hurrying doctor reminded reporters, “of shattered hopes and dreams”.
***
got it, Dave –yessir, i’ll try –barring complications from wedding planning daughter showing up lists in hand sometime around that date –maybe i’ll bring her, and decompress the child a bit. One of the Doolittle Raiders lives in Comfort –did you know that?
A/59, litS/60; –some do not understand, or do understand but don’t care, or do care but are on the other side, that the time to opt out of a long and close and important alliance is when the sky is empty and the coast is clear. If the elements contain incoming pirates, it is too late to amicably ‘pursue other opportunities’. Word is word. USA’s left got a mulligan from the grateful (to the soldiers) South Vietnamese in SE Asia 1975. Shouldn’t go for another, not in one lifetime, that might be to push the disingenuousness a little past some sort of expiration code.
The Regensburg Moment
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/NeuhausRegensberg.php
We can learn from the the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.
Before we unleash the dogs of total war–again–
“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.
Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.
“God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God’s nature.
Faith is born of the soul, not the body.
Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg_en.html
Again–
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote,
“The most fundamental form of human stupidity is forgetting what we were trying to do in the first place.”
Get that clear and coherent–then sit down at the table–or pass the ammunition-
In the end, after all the killing–you still end up a the table–after Vietnam there was a lot of talk about the shape of the table–in 1918 the table was in a railway carriage–the same one the French sat at in early WW2— to surrender to Germany.
At least two writers in the 19th century foresaw the advent of totalitarianism. The first was Dostoevsky and the second was Nietzsche. Both writers grasped the intellectual trend of their day. As education advanced, as the human spirit was given new opportunities for understanding, the result was intellectual radicalism. In the 18th century Edmund Burke warned his contemporaries that education without religion or aristocratic principles would turn against mankind. Burke wrote: “Learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” Burke added, “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but gallows.” Overwhelmed with a similar insight, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche updated Burke’s lament. In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Possessed, a radical young intellectual advocated a world in which Cicero would have his tongue cut out, Copernicus would have his eyes put out, and Shakespeare would be stoned to death – in the name of universal equality. Dostoevsky predicted that the radical mentality – emerging in the 19th century – would kill 100 million peoplein the 20th century. Those without vision, without a sense of where the world was headed, disbelieved Dostoevsky’s prophecy. Such a calamity could never happen, because the world is not a madhouse.
Enter Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Enter, as well, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and today’s politically correct mob. What characterizes them, besides their egotism and narcissism, is their false idealism and moral posturing. According to Edmund Burke: “Nothing is more certain, than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.”
Since Burke’s time, modern intellectuals have overthrown the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. Every structure, every religious precept, every honored tradition, came under intellectual attack. God and country were targeted. Religion and patriotism were targeted. The main surviving ideals of our day are those of leveling, equalizing and taxing into penury. Envy is the Holy Grail of our intelligentsia, and the annihilation of all values is their ultimate end.
“What I relate is the history of the next two centuries,” wrote Nietzsche in The Will to Power. “I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of Nihilism. This history can be related even now; for necessity itself is at work here.” Nietzsche knew what was coming because he understood the radical intellectuals of his day. Nietzsche called them “the tarantulas,” the “secret revengeful ones,” envious preachers of equality whose ambition is tyranny. Nietzsche even foresaw the day when Marxist professors would advance his writings for the sake of their own malignant cause. “There are those who preach my doctrine of life,” Nietzsche explained, “and are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas.” Do not be fooled by them, he warned. They preach life in order to harm life.
The madness of the tarantulas permeates the broad world, with nihilist Russia as their goad. The death of 100 million in the 20th century was merely a foretaste. The call of envy assures that the noblest are slandered, that the greatest are demeaned, and the prosperous brought to ruin. America is in the crosshairs of this grand metaphysic. The world sinks into socialism because nobody knows the secret of defending what socialism was devised to annihilate. We’ve come to think that economics will save us. We know how to make money, after all. As long as the shopping mall regime continues, who cares about the rest? But our economic principles, warned Burke, developed under the protection of aristocratic and religious ideals. Economic science will not survive the decline of aristocracy and religion. “With you,” warned Burke, “they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state may stand without these old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and, at the same time, poor and sordid, barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping nothing hereafter?”
We can, like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, see “what sort of a thing” is coming. We need only consult the same oracle they did. If Western Civilization is not yet poor, it has nonetheless become gross and destitute of religion. The interior mind of our contemporaries is an oracle that anyone might read. The political speeches at the Republican and Democratic conventions are tea leaves. You only have to know how to read them. For that matter, the hundreds of emails I’ve received since the Russian incursion into Georgia offer the clearest preview imaginable of the Winepress of the Wrath of God. For here, above all other signs and portents, that which is stupid and ferocious unmasks the fatal impulse of a civilization that blames itself for the skullduggery of its own enemies.
***
( bolding above is mine, the entire text is Nyquist, from 29 August 2008, from a column entitled The Oracle )
Do not be fooled by them, he warned. They preach life in order to harm life
–Nietzsche
***
In the end, after all the killing–you still end up at the table
–Victor
***
–?
Pakistan halts Nato supplies to Afghanistan after attack http://tgr.ph/a7BJPv
OK, we’ll have to ask help from Vlad
Jonk:
For 25 years I worked for the Voice of America’s parent agency (the U.S. Information Agency). I think we were successful in the Cold War environment, but I am not sorry now that we were shut down permanently in the late nineties (one of the very few US agencies ever to have been closed). The fact of the matter is that ideas travel whether you want them to or not, dependent on things way beyond the ability of any government to control them. And I have reached the conclusion that I want the USG doing as little as possible outside the realm of defense, diplomacy, and regulation of weights and measures (not even sure I want them there). So I am not sorry to see my old agency disappear — and it truth, it did not disappear: the Voice of American continues as an independent agency and many of the functions of USIA (press relations, cultural and educational exchange) are handled now out of the State Department.
I don’t disagree with what you say about the war of ideas, I just don’t think it needs to be pushed by the USG. Coca Cola would be bankrupt if the USG handled the advertising for it. Our ideas transmit to the rest of the globe very well without the USG involved. Let’s not put a bureaucrat in the way. F
“85. Marie Claude
Pakistan halts Nato supplies to Afghanistan after attack http://tgr.ph/a7BJPv
OK, we’ll have to ask help from Vlad”
Looks like a shake-down effort, or face-saving. Odd that the terrorists were close enough to the Paki soldiers (“paramilitaries” WTF does that mean? ISI or Taliban?) that the Pakis were accidentally targeted. Reminds one of the UN post in southern Lebanon that had a Katyusha rocket launcher next to it banging away at Israel with the UN “peacekeepers” watching and doing nothing.
“The rational thing to do would be to engage the enemy ideology with every resource in our own civilization. That is what an average man would do. But for some reason that kind of solution is beneath the elite, whose triumphs must appear to be as effortless as the actions of gods. Yet they are human. And if their vanity takes them to the brink, and feel fear, then they will do the animal and weak thing. They will destroy the poor ignorant people they could not stoop to argue with.”
I don’t think this massive destructive response can be stopped. We simply do not have the faith and self-confidence and clarity necessary as a civilization to declare the other side wrong and barbaric and their ideas unfit for the modern world. That belief in the goodness of what we are, whatever the flaws, been bled out of much of our thinking by a thousand cuts through indoctrination posing as education, the media, multiculturalism, etc.
So, you are right. They will wait until survival is at stake, whether simply their own political survival, or that of the Western Society in total, to react. By that time, I have often predicted, some of those calling for restraint and understanding now will be the ones braying the loudest for blood and retribution.
Wretchard #69:
This brings to mind the analogy in the Heinlein book Staship Troopers, in which an instructor asks a student if it would be a good idea to let a new puppy do anything he wanted and then, when the dog becomes an adult and craps in the house you take him out and kill him.
The student says that would be crazy, you have to teach the dog how to behave.
The instructor replies that the method of letting the puppy do anything and then executing him when he does something wrong after a certain point was the way they used to handle their young people.
In many respects the Left’s appoach to international relations parallels their approach to domestic policies. You pretend certain kinds of people are children until you decide you have had enough and put them to death.
I think that one of the Left’s greatest fears is that the majority of the people will look at how you have to handle the Taliban and Al Queda and decide that is the way problems like inner city gangs and threats like the Mexican drug cartels should be taken care of as well.
85. Marie Claude,
That is what I’ve been worried about. Strapped into his Apache my youngest is one of the most lethal warriors the human race has ever produced. Unless, of course, he is sitting on the tarmac without fuel and ammo. In that case he is just another target.
I don’t worry about Afghanistan being another Vietnam, but it being another Bataan. Cut off the logistics and the 100,000 plus troops in the ‘stan become hostages. That is the fatal flaw in the Obomination’s strategy. That was why Bush went into Iraq. A forward logistics base in Kuwait, rail roads from a major, reasonably modern port. A fair sized road net. Iraq was easy from a logistics POV. Afghanistan is a nightmare. Iran would be almost as bad.
Thanks Richard. I have been trying to express my fears of the USA going postal on Islam and never quite got it right. Nobody understood, they just called me a warmonger, which was pretty much the opposite of what I was trying to express.
It must be a gift, one I wish I had.
If the Obomination had the IQ of a box of rocks, he would use the Pakis cutting of supply lines to start pulling troops out of Afghanistan. Go to a full scale bombing campaign. If it moves, bomb it. If it doesn’t move, bomb it twice.
It takes 14 years or so to make a jihadi. It takes about 3 days to manufacture a JDAM. When you compare costs, JDAMs are MUCH cheaper. If the enemy wants to trade lives for bombs, go for it. Open the factories up 24/7. Build new ones. It will add a few more jobs.
Was it General Sherman who said; ‘If war is the solution our enemy seeks, I say give them all they want.’? Or something like that.
I’ve just come up with another simile. The Muslim world is rather like a nine-year-old boy with ADHD and a penchant for pulling the wings off flies, turned loose with Daddy’s credit card in a gunshop. Perhaps it’s time to take the credit card away.
The real problem with “America First” is that it actually means “The Left Wing of the Democratic Party First.” It will quickly become a call for autarky — self sufficiency — which will quickly morph into autocracy. So, “being free of foreign sources of energy” means we’ll rely on a gazillion windmills administered by a million government workers. The economy will be unionized and organized into cartels administered from Washington. Free trade will become bureaucratic administered fair trade. On the plus side, many will be women: Apparat-chicks rule!
We should not pursue “America First” for the same reason that a boozer should not lock himself up in a room with a line of credit from a liquor store that delivers: It ain’t a healthy form of behavior.
Now, I’m not talking here about what Victor would want. I am only talking about what we would get.
In Ohio the Democrats say Republicans “outsource jobs.” Of course jobs are often outsourced to private contractors locally, but the Democrats mean to say they are “shipped overseas.” They mean to say that somehow they will make this illegal and that somehow people who are currently working will keep working as a result.
Now, my reply to this would be: right now the Democrats in Washington are exporting treasury bonds. They are selling them to foreigners by the tens of billions and spending the money they get like it’s theirs. But actually it is money to be paid back by the current inhabitants of the maternity ward, not the spendthrift politicians. When foreigners buy treasury bonds they do not buy American manufactured goods or other products and services average Americans produce. So the American worker is unemployed and their children will have to pay back the debt.
We are vulnerable to the attacks and degradations of Islam because have let ourselves become dependent on their oil. Not just anybody’s oil, their oil. This dependency has clouded our thinking, and left us groping for solutions peripheral to the central conflict between us.
Cast off that dependency, and our options vis a vis Islam immediately become clearer and our opportunities to resolve the conflict greater. We would not need to kowtow any longer. We would not need to hold back if we chose not to any longer. It would be us, not them , who would be needed to be treat us with kid gloves. It would be us to be feared, not them. Thus, job numero uno, in this war, should be, above all else, energy self sufficiency. George Bush should be permanently shamed for not pursuing energy independence relentlessly immediately following 9-11.
That said, the driving ideological force between us and the Islamic World are Mohammad’s Satanic Verses. These verses are not compatible in any way shape or form with our creed of unalienable rights hand down by God and our pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. One of Islam’s great recruiting tools is the license the Koran grants those of Ummah to do evil. These verses act as a magnet to attract the murderers, rapists and thieves of the world and grants them legitimacy to be revered as holy men and leaders to be honored. Destroy and refute the Satanic Verses and you destroy the malevolent men and women behind Islam as well. To win this war, we need to forthrightly and explicitly confront how evil these verses are and why they are not acceptable.
The Satanic Verses form the ideological poison that we cannot simply accept, but we, led our self loathing left, continue to ignore and paper over this ghastly, impenetrable. irreconcilable evil that separates us. WearyG is right to be concerned when he writes “We simply do not have the faith and self-confidence and clarity necessary as a civilization to declare the other side wrong and barbaric and their ideas unfit for the modern world.” But in actuality we in the West do not need a consensus to clearly define this evil. We only need a few leaders to voice the truth about Islam, and not hide for fear of the media. For if enough of our leaders voice the truth with clarity about the Koran, that clarity of thought will gives us, we the people, with ample room to spare, the will, courage, and strength, to defeat the evils of Islam .
84. buddy larsen (& Victor)
In the end, after all the killing–you still end up at the table – Victor
***
–?
Actually, if you do it right, you end up on the deck of the USS Missouri dictating the terms of unconditional surrender.
HDGreen #92:
“The real problem with “America First” is that it actually means “The Left Wing of the Democratic Party First.””
Actually I think it means “We know we are no damn good at foreign policy so we are going to as little of it as possible and hope that ignoring the important parts of the world and instead invading places like Haiti and Bosnia to distract people’s attention will suffice.”
tharkun/94 “…unconditional surrender, followed by 65 years (and counting) of mutual cooperation on building and maintaining general peace and prosperity.
Unsk…
It’s too late to un-discover KSA’s vast and easy to lift oil reserves.
Oil is fungible, so the is no market mechanism that is going to stop the Saudis from selling their crude.
The best course is to encourage Iraqi production. It has the potential to exceed that of the KSA. Iraq also has plenty of import dependencies, too. Hence, trade will be much more balanced.
Beyond that, Iraq is not going to sponsor jihad like the King.
As Iraqi production rises, Iran will slide into a lesser role. Even as it stands, Iran is a hefty importer and does not have the funding to stand up to the King.
Of course, Iran figures to solve that problem by blitzkrieg. That is the only explanation for micro-amphibious forces: speed boats, commandos, mini-subs, hovercraft — the works.
It is curious to read some of the passionate Shi’ite scribes on YouTube posting their cause. They make it plain that the Sunnis are “Zionists in occupation of the Holy Cities”, to paraphrase.
I must say such terminology is new to me. To conflate the Wahhabbis with Zionists is quite a polemical stretch.
It’s reasonable to wonder WHAT agitprop is being passed around the islamic republican guard corps.
94.
That is a interesting point-
WW1 led to a host of horrors — 10 million dead and the Russian Revolution.
Everyone thought it would be a very brief war that would last a few months at most.
How WW1 ended led to the total demoralization and corruption of German culture and to the rise of the Nazis and directly to WW2 after which the USSR got the most.
In WW1the Germans had agreed to an armistice with honorable and negotiated terms.
By the time they showed up at the table in the railway carriage at Versailles the French had persuaded Wilson and the Brits to change the deal and totally screw Germany.
In WW2 the Germans forced the French to surrender at the very same table in the same railway carriage.
The other result of the deception Treaty of Versailles was the end of 1000s of years of diplomacy as a credible practice.
After that breakdown war meant total war with unconditional surrender for the loosing side–as with Japan and Germany in WW2. Nobody could trust a diplomatic deal anymore.
Another outcome of WW1 was the collapse of the Ottoman Empire–and we are still dealing with consequences of that.
England got Palestine, Trans Jordan and Mesopotamian etc.
Churchill wanted to create three states in Iraq- one each for the Kurds, the Sunni and the Shia—he was overruled under the Empires policy of divide and conquer.
Pursuing American interests first in foreign policy means getting clear on our fundamental interests and then achieving them relentlessly–permanent interests-no permanent friends.
We used to be good at this.
Consider the Suez Crisis of 1956
President Eisenhower identified US best interests in the matter, and forced France, Israel and England to comply with our interests
Eisenhower threatened to bankrupt England— within weeks of such a move, the country would have be unable to import the food and energy supplies needed simply to sustain the population on the islands. England complied
Eisenhowers actions were the death knell of both the French and English empires, both of them old friends and allies of the US.
He understood that in our foreign policy we have no permanent friends only permanent interests.
Americas interests first is what Petreaus is calling for.
–the Hashemite Kingdom antedates the schism and thus ipso facto the apparent key to healing it. But Jordan’s King would need a fierce elemental rhetoric and a few stout armored divisions and air wings to animate the ”so it is written, so it shall be”.
What other consequences flowed from Ike’s Suez actions, Victor? Can you name a few?
stoicheion
Afghanistan is a nightmare and abysse for national debts
Though the worry remains :
Britons training in Pakistan for UK terror attacks http://bit.ly/bOpEJy
The so called war with Islam, Wahabism, is a culture war. In its smallest variant, it is not about liberal Western democracy or freedom, nor is it about the tenant s of Christianity. It is about a perceived weakness of a society, a descent into sin into the clearly marked realms that allows its daughters to dress and act like whores. Islam is a patrimony; a violent one if need be to preserve itself. And why do feminists tolerate Islam? Because in their heart they loath the man-boys that they have created and foster dark fantasies of being sexually abused by swarthy men speaking in foreign tongues. If the Western world were moderately true to their Christian or Jewish heritage, Islam would be at peace with it.
100
Eisenhowers American Interests First foreign policy over Suez had a ripple effect of profound impacts moving forward.
France withdrew from NATO and the US/French relationship never recovered.
France gave Israel the technology for Nukes
Anthony Eden, the UK PM, had a nervous break down and fell from power.
Macmillan acknowledged that England was finished as an imperial and world power and focused upon joining Europe.
With the end of France and England as world powers the US became the sole standard bearer and superpower for the free world–Macmillan acknowledged this fact to Eisenhower in a phone call saying ” well— its over to you now”
The end of the British and French colonial era had profound effects in Africa and SE Asia—this was compounded by the breakdown between France and the US over any common vision for Vietnam.
Suez must have had profound impact in the Muslim and Arab world as US was now the boss and UK and France–the traditional deal makers– were out.
While we never fixed our relationship with France we did mend fences with the UK– but under very different terms–they were now aligned with our vision in foreign policy and the UK became a fully controlled asset in the Cold War.
And this
“Suez Crisis contributed to the adoption of a new national flag for Canada, without references to that country’s past as a colony of France and Britain.
The Egyptian government had objected to Canadian peacekeeping troops on the grounds that their flag at that time included a British ensign.
As Prime Minister, Pearson would advocate the simple Maple Leaf that was eventually adopted”.
uh Victor
except that Germany, nor Italy were invited in Versailles, the big 3 did the work !
and France didn’t leave Nato (burocraty only) because of the Suez affair, but rather that de Gaulle wanted his independance of policy
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2008/04/VIDAL/15800
were invited –> weren’t invited
Victor (103), so you think all those results were good? And in America’s long-term interest? Good grief, I sure hope I’m misreading you…
France left NATO (militarily not politically) under de Gaul and the reason was American nukes in France.
Suez was not part of the calculus.
France nuked up as a result of Suez, and to maintain her rank in the world.
The break up of the European empires was a consequence of WWII – - particularly in the Far East — the only part of French Empire which spun money.
WWII also destroyed rubber profits, the synthetic was here to stay.
The export of the AK47 destroyed the basis for European Colonialism — forget Suez.
France never shared a common enough vision with the US.
EVEN IN 1945 — American and British intercepts caught the de Gaul regime conspiring to play us. The whole episode being swept under the rug as to reveal the politics and sources and methods would be most untidy.
France has spent the better part of two centuries going off the rails. Until 1900 she was the perennial bad girl of Europe. Both Germany and Britain were constantly allied against her. Italy and Spain, likewise always frosty. It’s the whole Nappy legacy — millions hanged and shot tends to be remembered.
It took Belgium’s invasion to get Britain to really embrace France. A century’s alignment was flipped with a footstep. ( Until that moment Germany was fighting Russia — the other hated rival of Britain.)
——-
Algeria is so close to France that until the last days it was unthinkable to contemplate cession. It is of note that two centuries ago the population of Algeria was overwhelmingly continental French. However, after introducing modernity, they’d created their own anti-body: muslim births never let up. Death in childhood dropped, and dropped and dropped. The result is that the ‘locals’ ( strange term for a society that roamed the desert ) eventually over took the continentals.
Come WWII, the Berbers are constantly found to be tipping the enemy, stealing from the war dead, and stealing from the military depots. The last detail being totally blacked out in the news. Because of it the US Army had to station more COMBAT troops behind the lines than at the front. ( Doing double duty, they also trained for Husky.)
As you might imagine, this was the trigger for Algerian independence. Suddenly lots of weapons and ammo reached the Berber. So much so, that a revolutionary army could be supported.
By the ’50′s classic muslim warfare made the sand a dangerous place to go. Eventually, islamic chaos destroyed all political and social comity and the Christians had to pack up.
That template is what the Africanized-Frenchmen have in mind today.
106. Kirk Parker
The point is that at that time the US was clear about its fundamental interests and was prepared to take harsh measures to get our allies–France and Britain–to act in alignment with our interests or suffer the consequences-we meant business and they new it.
We need to adapt similar harsh measures to get our friends and allies to support our fundamental interests in foreign policy today.
Be that Israel or Pakistan—
We give Israel $3B per year and still they will not do what we ask them to do in the Holy Land.
We give aid to Pakistan and they will not do what we ask them to do in AfPak.
They should both face very severe consequences for this non compliance—as England faced over Suez.
The Eisenhower era was a time of great strength and prosperity for the US at home and abroad.
We did not want to go to war with Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact over Suez, that was not in our best interests– we had our own clear agenda.
Reagan had a similar clarity of vision of Americas interests and strong execution of that vision.
We are not the worlds social worker, community organizer or facilitator.
tharkun:
Actually, if you do it right, you end up on the deck of the USS Missouri dictating the terms of unconditional surrender.
Or Manzikert.
I have a very low opinion of the Harry Limes of the world who counsel defeat against an enemy that has dedicated itself to our demise.
“France left NATO (militarily not politically) under de Gaul and the reason was American nukes in France.”
What a curious concept. Where does it come from? Every authority I have seen claims the French say it was because the US stabbed them in the back. France was involved in Suez because they were ‘wooing’ Israel at that time.
What really torqued off the French was that the PM told the Jews they had checked with the USA and were told that the USA didn’t care what happened in some mudhole in Africa. So the Jews told the French that Ike said go for it. So when Ike shut the whole thing down, De Gual thought Ike had buggered him. It might have been true. Ike and De Gaul hated one another for over a decade by then. So at that point in time, any excuse would have done. I have never seen the nuke excuse. I know that was about the time the British stopped building their own nukes and started buying them from the USA. I wonder if France wanted the same deal and Ike wouldn’t give it to De Gaul?
Ike did everything in his power to keep De Gaul out of the loop in WW2. Not only did Ike and De Gaul hate one another ( Not just Dislike) FDR thought even less of De Gaul. De Gaul had no respect from any foreign leaders in WW2. About the only thing everybody agreed on was that De Gaul was a walking coprolite and really needed to just go away. De Gaul died laughing at them. He was a better politician then the rest, except for Stalin.
“We give Israel $3B per year and still they will not do what we ask them to do in the Holy Land.
We give aid to Pakistan and they will not do what we ask them to do in AfPak.
They should both face very severe consequences for this non compliance—as England faced over Suez.”
Paying the danegeld doesn’t get rid of the Dane. It never has, it never will.
42. Fletcher Christian – you have it, sir. This is precisely what needs to happen. Most of us lack the courage and/or the historical knowledge to face up to the threat to human freedom that is Islam. Here’s the hard, brutal truth about Islam:
Read here to get a sense of the Islamic mindset and what its ascendancy might mean for the rest of us:
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Andrew Bostom)
Read here to get a sense of why and how the West’s days may be numbered. We are our own worst enemy unless we face up to the hard choices ncessary to remain free and prosperous.
The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (Lee Harris)
When Muslims assert that Islam is a “religion of peace” they are not engaging in al taqqiya, they are making an assertion in good faith.
The problem lies in the fact that Islam has a defective concept of peace. In semitic languages like Arabic, the consonants are the “root” of the word: islam = submission, and salam = peace have the same root, slm.
The only concept of peace in Islamic jurisprudence is the peace between the conqueror and the conquered, between master and slave. There is no concept of a negotiated peace between nations in Islamic law (and note that law is the defining property of Islam—their clerics are jurists, schools of Qu’ranic interpretation are called fiqh, a legalistic term)—Muslims may negotiate a “hudna” or armistice of limited duration with non-Muslim, but not a definitive enduring peace.
Finally, Islam is a serial murderer of entire cultures and peoples. This is what Islam has done throughout its entire 1400 year history. This is what it has done whenever it has finally gotten the upper hand in whatever culture it has opposed – which is every one outside of its own.
Those whom Islam does not destroy, it enslaves, diminishes and impoverishes when it has the ability to do so. Islam cannot be ‘reformed’ in the light of humanity and freedom. Were that so, it would no longer be Islam. For its psychopathic regard and treatment of women alone, Islam is an abomination and worthy only of extinction – to the last believer. Our message to the Islamic world must be direct and simple: “Threaten our civilization and yours is forfeit. Nuclear dawn on all of your capitals. Without mercy or remorse.” This, I guarantee that they will understand – to the extent that they need to understand anything at all.
#46. BC – You’re just like a dog in a museum, piddling on the floor and barking at things that you have no hope of ever understanding.
Your owners should rub your nose in your puddle and whack you with a rolled-up newspaper.
Richard Fernandez, AMEN.
We have one war: the war openly declared in 1993 with the first WTC attack, but a war that has been waged against us since Yasser Arafat helped kill the US ambassador to Sudan in 1974. The list of American targets since 1974 is long, and I won’t list them now except my own wake-up call: the 220 Marines, 18 Sailors and 3 Soldiers killed by suicide bombing, Lebanon, 1983.
The war now has several theaters of operation: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
What I do not understand is why the larger war is not generally recognized.
There should be a wider view of what we in Western cultures are up against. Our long-terms options are to fight or convert to radical Islam.
Alicia #114:
All true, but the Ayatolla Khohemani of Iran publically declared war on us in October 1987, as if the takeover of our embassy in 1979 wasn’t enough of a message in that regard.
They keep saying “We declare war on you!” Would be nice if we agreed just once and acted accordingly.
114. Alicia,
Almost right! Islam has been at war with the world since Mohammed told his followers that rape and plunder were a pathway to heaven. No significant population ever converted to Islam except at the edge of a sword. We are simply part of the Dar al-Harb (the House of War).
Terrorists have the minds of dogs, we are the Alpha male of the West, ergo we are the current target. A century (plus a bit) ago Britain’s Empire spanned the globe, and another fundimentalist nutter declared that he was the Mahdi and went to war with them. Back then Britain had the self-confidence to put paid to his plans, although a close read of developments shows a significant waffling of resolve in the Parliment before action was finally taken.
So it goes, back in the day the Byzantine Empire was the ruler of the roost, centuries of ceaseless Islamic attacks wore them down and they fell in 1453. Thankfully Vienna was both better guarded and far enough away to avoid a similar fate (but only just).
Alicia/114; wonder what sort of structure is on that site today –the Marine barracks site.
The split from NATO – militarily – occurred after Suez and under de Gaul but the issue was atomic weapons on French soil.
The other issue was that de Gaul wanted to go back to the equal on paper status that he’d had during WWII WRT decision clout. To really do that France would have to become a member of Echelon. No dice. Years of French double-dealing were already on file. France just did not fit in.
——–
WRT Ike and de Gaul in WWII: Ike gave de Gaul everything he asked for in terms of status and intelligence feed. By Ike’s order de Gaul’s men were treated as co-equals in the military chain of command. Ike graciously permitted de Gaul to nominate his players as the official government of Free France from D-Day and there after.
The fact that the French in no way had their act together — that French 1st Army kept going off the rails and spent most of its energies fighting within — did not impress Ike. Of course, Ike disliked Devers intensely. So it was a perfect fit.
( The French 1st Army was an accident of events. Dragoon planning anticipated only using the Colonial French Troops previously engaged in Italy with great success. However, American supplies were so bountiful that it proved possible to re-raise French divisions from the Rhone valley. Since our artillery was based upon the French 155mm and the M1 is easy to master, re-equipping the French proved to be very, very fast. The downside was the politics of France. She’d lost the 1940 Campaign because of horrific mis-spending on her air force and political squabbles. [ Hard to believe that France spent nearly as much as Germany on an air force but had practically nothing to show for it. Each succeeding government flip-flopped on procurement and mass production. Hence, fantastic R&D with very few machines to show for it!] Now that the German was fleeing, bitter in-fighting broke out. )
Ike over-ruled his generals during Northwind and forced them to hold ground in front of Strasbourg. The fighting was bitter. My own father had some fun there at the time.
—-
The idea that atomic weapons was the deal breaker comes from de Gaul.
Blert, you’re right as usual about trying to stop the Saudi’s from selling their crude.
But that’s not my point.
We need to rid ourselves of our dependency on Islamic mid -east crude oil. There are several ways to do that. Just a couple ideas for starters:
• Double down on our own resources and technology. Many here for years have suggested a long list of credible solutions. Drill, Drill Drill, Nuke power, gas, oil shale, whatever. We just need the will to do it.
• Take theirs. My first choice of whose oil field to take would be Iran’s which declared war on us decades ago. They have killed thousands of our soldiers, so it’s about time for retribution and payback.
In developing our own energy independence, we in the process greatly devalue those Islamic countries oil as a weapon. The price of crude will fall sharply and the monies available for terror Jihad will be substantially reduced. But my other point, is that we would be freed from threat of a cut off of our oil supply, so we could finally to use our superior military power without concern of blowback. And we would not even have to lay waste to all of Dar al Islam. Just use de-nuking Iran as a ‘teaching moment” for them to ponder. The key is to finally show the will to use all our resources against Islamic terror, without hesitation.
RWE #115, yes, I forgot the Ayatolla Khohemani’s declaration!
anton #116, true, and even now all but a handful of the world’s conflicts have fighting for Islam as a stated motive by at least one side.
buddy larsen #117, it would be interesting to know what is at that site now.
Blert are you working for PNAC ?
http://www.ena.lu/france_and_nato-020100247.html
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2003/05/LACROIX_RIZ/10168
http://www.dedefensa.org/article.php?art_id=3877
Another off topic: Somebody has to do Buddy’s thinking for him and I am the only one willing to try.
Bring the daughter to Comfort, Buddy. Had my wife look over the pictures of The Frog and The Dragonfly. She just might find that perfect something or other there.
It looks like a well-stocked boutique/dress shop/home decoration center.
And of COURSE I knew anout the Doolittle’s Raider. You must credit my superior intellect, far-rnging network of agents. Okay. Michelle Malkin.
But did you know that Harriet of Frog and Dragonfly is the daughter of Richard and Dorothy Britt? Her parents had not yet met when 2LT Britt was navigator on B24 Chattanooga ChooChoo which was shot down during the first Ploesti Raid. Injured, in shock, unable to free himself from harness, he was soaked to the skin in AVGAS, with more still dripping on him. In fact his skin was sloughing off. Only question was whether or not he would still be alive when spontaneous combustion started.
Then he heard a woman’s voice: “Americans, we will have you out in a jiffy.” The Princess had arrived. Using nothing but hand tools, she got him out without generating any static electricity that would have sent everything sky-high.
Two Germans came up and said he was their prisoner. She told them where to go and they decided they had better go there. Got Britt into her 37 Plymouth and took him to an annex of the orphanage which she soon had expanded and converted into a field hospital. He looks like the first rescued. Thousands of others followed.
The Princess stayed with the Britts during her Comfort sojourns. Harriet said she was a third grandmother. Charley Pinson, the P38 pilot who will be with me knew Dick Britt so this should be an interesting meeting. Try not to go AWOL.
“France has spent the better part of two centuries going off the rails. Until 1900 she was the perennial bad girl of Europe. Both Germany and Britain were constantly allied against her. Italy and Spain, likewise always frosty. It’s the whole Nappy legacy — millions hanged and shot tends to be remembered”
hmmm isn’t funny that Britain and Germany had the same Banks shareholders !
and the secret dream of these european nations was to take over our colonies, idem for Italy that allied with Berlin, was hoping to get Tunisia as areward, Franco was a bit cleeverer, he directly discussed his support of Germany’s war with Hitler, but Hitler refused to allocate him Marroco as a reward, then Franco stayed neutral !
hmmm FLN was sponsored by the Communists (USSR), Saudi Arabia, Nasser, that brings back the Suez crisis in the dilemn: FLN mother office was in Cairo. Now Eisenhower while forbidding to his alliees to carry on the Suez war, was afraid of involving the whole NATO organisation there, and by extension the US, in a indirect war with USSR ( sponsors of the Nasser regime)
Idem CIA secretly conspired against de Gaulle holding of the Algeria war and its aftermaths, hmmm these french colonies shouldn’t be only be a french reserve, ya know there’s some oil and gas in sahara, some rare minerals may-be, (yes ideed, there are such richnesses)…
So from our perspective, The US haven’t helped us only for our sake to take us out of the Nazis claws, they wanted to anihilate our velleity to fare a different option than theirs, to which the Brits were hooked becuz of having been bankrupted by a costful war.
The US, Churchill didn’t want of de Gaulle but preferred a docile french (and former Vichy government worshipper) like Giraud, they were reluctant to help de Gaulle resisance networks, it’s when de Gaulle put in the balance to ask for Stalin’s help, that they finally accepted him (because there was no other alternative) as the representant of France Libre
So, sure that our spirit of independance didn’t fit the US design of “americanising” the western world, but it’s ignoring our psychology, we haven’t a vassal mentality, ie Sarkozy’s clash at the EU commission, and for assuming our independance we need to not adhere to a specific pole, it’s how de Gaulle maintained ties with USSR, and that he recognized China.
Look like the US are loosing their hand as a world gendarme in these days, China is in measure to become the arbiter, and she isn’t going to request our doubbing as fidels, as she prefers to deal with autonom and independant countries