Long, Hot Summer
Islamic militants have consolidated their hold in parts of southern Yemen, controlling market prices, ordering women to stay indoors and recruiting young men into their ranks. The AP says “government forces do not appear to have the will to fight the Islamists, raising fears that al-Qaida’s most dangerous wing is making significant gains as the weakened regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh unravels in the face of an array of opponents.”
The Yemeni government says it has averted a suicide bomb attack on Aden which has a port and oil facilities. In order to bolster the embattled Yemenis, Saudi Arabia has given it 3 million barrels of oil in a number of shipments which arrived through Aden.
The VOA reports that U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman arrived in the capital, Sana’a, to try to broker an end to Yemen’s political crisis. He called for an immediate power transfer from President Ali Abdullah Saleh, recovering from wounds in Saudi Arabia, to end the paralysis. “Washington is growing concerned about increased activity by Islamic militants in Yemen as the country struggles with a broader opposition uprising against Saleh. Insurgents have launched several attacks in southern Yemen during the country’s political unrest.” Isobel Coleman, writing in a Foreign Policy blog says “Yemen now suffers from a power vacuum.”
Yemen’s current situation is not so much a negotiation between the advocates of reform and the remnants of the old regime—as is the case today in Tunisia and Egypt—but instead looks more like a raw power struggle between rival armed factions. The sons and nephews of President Saleh have a monopoly on the country’s security forces, whereas the influential Ahmar clan, a rival family, has its own forces fighting Saleh and in recent months has been bankrolling the protests. A further wild card is General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar (not related to the Ahmar clan), who defected from the military and brought loyal troops with him. These troops have been protecting protesters and have also clashed with Saleh’s forces. This situation could easily devolve into civil war. Moreover, the political opposition is relatively weak and not in a position to argue effectively for lasting reforms amidst this chaos.
“The longer this goes on, the worse it is for Yemen and the Yemeni people,” said Christopher Boucek, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Things were made worse by attacks by Islamist groups on the oil pipeline infrastructure which have further reduced the country’s ability to support itself.
Yemen is simply one of several countries in the region which are reaching critical points: the Libyan campaign against Khadaffy, the scheduling of the Egyptian elections and the continuing crisis in Syria are some of the others. There is very little talk from the administration now about leading the “Arab Spring”. Now it is mostly wait-and-see and hope for the best.
So, how do our 100,000 troops in Afghanistan do anything to deal with this? How does staying there do anything to deal with this? What was the point of spending around half a trillion dollars and 1500+ KIA and 20000+ WIA in Afghanistan over the past decade to deny AQ a haven and sanctuary if they can just up and move to Yemen and we’re not really doing anything about it.
Moreover how does it prevent another Hamburg cell from meeting and becoming radicalized at a mosque in Europe or wherever?
I’m not saying we should leave Afghanistan immediately, I don’t think that would help matters. I do think however that there’s a better way than what we’re currently doing.
It just seems that we have no overall strategy when it comes to the issue of jihad. It doesn’t seem like there’s really an over-arching strategy with an ultimate objetive or objectives to deal with islamic terrorism, its ideological nature, and what needs to be done to confront and defeat it. Nor does there seem to be a strategy for the role Afghanistan should play in that overall strategy.
As Wretchard said there doesn’t appear to a common thread linking our approaches in Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc… We just seem to be handling all these individually with no regard for how they relate to one another.
We’re focused on Afghanistan while AQ is setting up shop in Yemen. I don’t see how another fighting season on anorther 2 year straining Afghan security forces does anything about AQ in Yemen. Or in Pakistan. Or in Saudi Arabia. Or wherever.
Also can one of more knowledgble BCers explain the fighting season concept. Why are certain seasons bad for the US military to fight in. We spend 700B a year on defense. We should be able to fight whenever and wherever is necessary.
There are anywhere from 28000-40000 madrassas in Pakistan alone with around 2 million students every year. And that’s just Pakistan. How many of them have we shut down since 9/11? How many millions more youngsters have been indoctrinated with jihad and radicalized since 9/11 while we’ve done nothing about it except given billions in aid to Pakistan? How many graduates of these Madrassas have gone on to radicalize and recruit others at mosques throughout the region? What good does killing Taliban in Afghanistan do if we’re not doing anything as wave after wave of replacements emerge from these madrassas. The word Taliban literally means students(i.e. students at these madrassas). But it seems we’ve totally ignored the madrassa issue.
Just some thoughts.
Well, Rick Allen, its like this. If we didn’t have to lick SA boots for bulk oil supplies – for instance if we had more of our own to process – we would have some freedom of movement in the political realm as it exists in the ME today. But due to political correctness and idiocy in the current and past four presidential administrations, we don’t. So we are pretty much up the creek.
I first thought when reading your headline that you would comment on the increasingly violent youth mobs occuring in some big cities here in the USA. It would be worthwhile to get your analysis of what is happening on that front. Perhaps get a constructive dialog going without it devolving into “the darkies are out of control”.
I guess the events in Yemen are important on some level. I suspect that in the overall history of that region this situation is not all that uncommon.
The events here are much more troubling to me. It reminds my of ’68 but without the angst of Vietnam. I don’t think it has anything to do with poverty or racism or lack of jobs but more of the use of technology and the blatant ability to get away with it.
Richard, this is off topic and if you do not want me to derail your thread, please feel free to delete this.
Rick@1:
“Why are certain seasons bad for the US military to fight in. We spend 700B a year on defense. We should be able to fight whenever and wherever is necessary.”
It’s not us, it’s them. Traditionally the Afghans just hole up during the winter, as it’s pretty brutal there, and most of them don’t have the protection our forces do from it. Our guys could fight any time, but with all the hidden sanctuaries the Taliban have in caves and whatnot during the winter it would mostly be fruitless searching. In the spring and summer they come out like rats from their holes, and that’s why it’s the fighting season.
This goes back to an observation made by a commenter yesterday. That it’s become harder and harder to write about subjects. That’s probably because we’re entering a phase where separate, analytical analysis become less valid. Things are mushing together.
Take oil prices. That’s driving stagflation, the continuing unrest in the Middle East AND domestic unrest among unemployed youth. People are frustrated all over the world. I don’t think it is completely hyperbole to say there’s a great foreboding. Even Maureen Dowd is getting snarky about the President.
But what the events in Yemen and the Middle East show — what Greece shows — is that he’s pretty hapless by this point too. It’s no fun any more beating up on President Obama. All the guy can do now is make some speeches.
That’s because the key blunders have already been made. The momentum is there and all we’re waiting for it the impact. This, as I’ve said elsewhere, has done two things. It’s polarized people — like Mike Wallace lashing out at Michelle Bachmann — somehow Wallace wants the old world back, and if only people like Bachmann hadn’t come along. But even Wallace knows better than that, deep down.
Like I said, things are squashing together. And it’s getting hard to talk about solutions when the control surfaces themselves no longer have any real influence on the flight path of things. So, about the only thing we can really do is just observe what happens next, without being able to tie it up in any neat analytical boxes.
Our guys could fight any time, but with all the hidden sanctuaries the Taliban have in caves and whatnot during the winter it would mostly be fruitless searching.
What we need is to have a way to “tag” some of those that we don’t end up killing, and let them “escape.” Wherever GPS says they go, they’re likely to be among other Taliban. We could have intense winter bombing sorties using thermobaric bombs (assuming they really do “hole up in caves”).
Mike Wallace is the father. Chris Wallace is the Red Diaper Baby–and an unattractive one to boot. In a normal universe he wouldn’t be a Sunday morning newsman. I would like to ask him about his credentials and who was the flake who hired him.
1. Rick Allen: It just seems that we have no overall strategy when it comes to the issue of jihad. It doesn’t seem like there’s really an over-arching strategy with an ultimate objetive or objectives to deal with islamic terrorism, its ideological nature, and what needs to be done to confront and defeat it.
Bang. The elephant in the room just broke a lamp. We can’t even admit that we are at war with Islam. While it may be true that not all Muslims are terrorists, 99.9% of the terrorists are Muslim. Not addressing that fact is like saying we could not go to war with Germany because not all Germans are Nazis, and even some of them are not militant. Military spending is only a waste if you do not use the money spent to solve military problems. Deploying troops to build nations is not a wise use of resources. 1)The nation that pays for the infrastructure does not benefit, 2) The capital could be better spent improving this nation, and 3) You have not stopped the enemy from creating more fighters. The majority of people in the ME are no better than children, uneducated, unable to think critically, and indoctrinated into a tribal ideology with no other frame of reference.
There are really only two options, IMHO, the Germany/Japan method or the isolation method. With Germany and Japan we fully opened the can of whoop-ass without regret or hand-wringing. When those nations faced the reality of their own defeat, we helped them find another way forward. They are doing pretty well today on the whole so I would call that a winning model. They must face the reality that their religion is a failed ideology, just as the Japanese had to face their own. Break them as violently and decisively as possible. Allah must be shown to be helpless in the face of overwhelming force of arms. That, they can comprehend.
Isolationism is how we encouraged this whole mess.
Islamofascisdm is relentless and patient; they know we will tire, so they take their losses now and “resurge” later. It is now “later” in Yemen, despite the clever drone attacks. It will be “later” for the Taliban sometime next year when the Americans withdraw in force.
American leftists are the same way: patient and relentless, whereas American conservatives are not. Republicans seem to think that just holding the upper hand in political offices, and perhaps changing the composition of the Supreme Court, is sufficient to change American governance to the way they (and a bare majority of Americans) want it. They cede all manner of institutions to the left. The left even provides a good deal of the copy (through AP dispatches) in conservative newspapers!
We don’t know how to fight the long war at home anymore than we do the one overseas.
Wretchard, that line, “the control surfaces themselves no longer have any real influence on the flight path of things” is absolutely brilliant, both as an image and a descriptor.
All the past accepted and understood peceptions, understandings, theories and tools to implement them suddenly resemble trying to use Newtonian physics in a quantum mechanics world. Nothing works and the people who are making the decisions have no clue why they don’t. The truly terrifying aspect is that those very people are either unable or unwilling to see that the old ways are NOT working. The only response seems to be Double Down and Full Speed Ahead.
I’m thinking of that railway ballad, “The Old 97.” Speaking of the engineer:
“He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle
And scalded to death by the steam”
Unfortunately we’re all on the same train as the engineer. I would gladly give up the schadenfreude to escape the train wreck. Wiser to work on my personal airbag.
@4 So we can’t seek them and find them? If we know where the caves are or whatnot why can’t we just go there and destroy them? BTW, I don’t think there really are any caves. Just like OBL was supposed to be in caves all the time when in reality he was in some decent sized house in a suburb of Islamabad.
Does it make any sense to anyone that you fight them in the spring and summer and then give them all fall and winter to recuperate, replenish their supplies, rejuvenate, etc…
On PBS Frontline they interviewed a Taliban commander in Pakistan. He said that the ISI and Pak Govt knows where all the Taliban are and that they could round them all up in 15 minutes if they wanted to. We need a strategy that will get them to do that. I don’t know what it is. Maybe we could offer the President/PM and military leaders 1 billion each in some account in Zurich if they do it. Even at say 5 billion total it’d way cheaper and easier than our current approach.
Basically as long as the Taliban remain untouched in Pakistan any semblance of voctory in Afghainstan is impossible. What if we had built a giant Berlin-Wall style barrier between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Huge conrete barriers. It would have sealed the border and allowed to focus on Afghanistan, shape the battlefied, and totally wipe the Taliban out there. Probably would have been a very good idea.
Agreed about Saudi Arabia and their influence. We’re literally over a barrel there. I don’t know if we really have any good options there.
As long as there is financial support for jihad, there will be an endless supply of jihadis. The real centers of gravity of the conflict are in Saudi and Iran.
We need to focus on identifying and eliminating the financial backers.
rick allen…
Let’s cut to the chase: Pakistan’s elites are making a fortune off of the Afghanistan campaign. They are economically addicted to it. That’s why they protected/ hid bin Laden all of these years.
Step one is to reduce our presence in Afghanistan — and to end mission creep.
All of that do-gooding entirely back-fires. Imagine, we’re trying to educate young girls while their fathers can’t read! End result: assassinated teachers and girls blown to bits. Opposition forces more animated than ever. Perfect.
Get ALL of our NATO allies out of the neighborhood. Bringing them in was pure GWB folly. They make absolutely no positive contribution to the campaign — which is supposed to be one of retribution against AQ and its enablers.
How that ever morphed into nation building — well, the historians will have plenty to say about that.
That the Taliban are nasty, brutal and retrograde is the natural consequence of wahabbist indoctrination.
The bodies come from Pakistan — the money and ideology come from KSA.
Protecting the Afghanis from the Taliban is pure mission creep. At a fundamental core they don’t like us — no matter what we do.
We are 15,000 years apart in social development. The consequence: a morality chasm too great to bridge.
American troops can’t comprehend the rule-set of 15,000 years ago:
Property is to be stolen — not traded or earned…
Women are property — to be swapped or gained by combat…
Boys are for pleasure — females are for babies…
Skirmish warfare 100% of the time — all energy and imagination is on fighting…
Deception is all — since everyone has virtually the same arms…
Because of pandemic hard drug addiction — there is zero prospect that the Afghan National Army will ever be effective.
The correct model is the days of knights — and squalor. Only the very best Afghans can do anything right — exhibit competence. It is around them that their fellows must structure. It’s going to be a ‘big man’ society for many centuries yet.
Under no circumstances should we permit migration from Afghanistan to America.
All muslim immigration should be stopped ASAP.
The islamic rule-set will never be re-jiggered inside the USA. It’s only possible at the point of origin – -very much in the manner of Shintoism.
It will take stinging military defeats and the loss of icons — the ones allah claims to make inviolate — to destroy faith.
In the long span of humanity — MOST religions have collapsed. And collapse is how they go. It’s NOT a prolonged process. Some of the biggest ( high population ) have snapped overnight. ( Incas, Aztecs, Carthage, Stalinism, Hitlerism, et. al. )
—–
Once the mission is contracted back to basics… the need for Pakistan collapses. At which point we just cut them off financially — across the board — no international money at all. The Punjabi cannon ball will then crack.
Until that day, we’re financing ALL of the armies in the field — at the same time.
The other harsh measure: no more food exports to the pits of jihad. They should need to concentrate on survival.
The value of food vs oil is going to have to be re-normed.
It seems this administration is looking for some place to send the troops they are removing from Afghanistan. Yeman ain’t good but it is better then Afghanistan. If the won gives the orders and lets the Marines off their leash, They can finish off Yeman BEFORE the 90 day limit is reached.
I’ll bet the Obomination regrets not doing that in Libya. We need a Patton. Somebody who isn’t interested in hearts and minds. Somebody who’s ROE is; ‘If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t move blow it up’.
Patton had the 9th TAC. If he had Apaches instead, he would have been in Moscow by August 1st. 1944. Most people don’t understand just how deadly well handled attack helios are. The Taliban does, as do Al Qaeda.
Tripoli could have been had for a song 2 months ago. An FFL Mech Battalion could have taken it. War over. The Duck roasted. Instead NATO tried to bluff. That never had any chance of working.
Delusion is an essential element of statecraft. Only usually one tries to delude others. In this case the only believers in NATO military power are the OLD European nations.
Every other State realizes that Old Europe is weak, senile and pretty much toothless. They sell their best weapons to their enemies, Let their young men loose their martial spirit and their officers their skills. The Duck wasn’t quivering in fear he was shaking with mirth.
W/5: I agree with George Atkisson/10 that the control surfaces metaphor is typically brilliant: arresting and full of explanatory/predictive power. When I read it, I thought, “so the next question is, what is the remaining time to impact?” Psychologically, sociologically, we seem to be in free-fall.
As for the jihadi problem: I am fresh out of solutions.
oMan 15. As for the jihadi problem: I am fresh out of solutions.
If the US became energy independent with oil and gas the ME would go “broke” and without money
many of the future jihadists would starve to death. In any event, a famine is on the horizon in the ME.
GA/10—even more to the point:
“It was on that grade that he lost his airbrake
You see what a jump he made”
Ie, 70 feet into the gorge of the Dan River, landing upside down—are we heading for a plunge? How is our airbrake?
“Take oil prices. That’s driving stagflation, the continuing unrest in the Middle East AND domestic unrest among unemployed youth.”
I don’t think this is the case – rather the banks won’t lend and business won’t borrow, build or hire because they don’t know what regulatory or tax insanity is coming next from our now looney and corrupt government.
We don’t need foreign oil,or more windmills for that matter, we just need to develop our own.
The Middle East is screwed because of Islam, and until this is faced and dealt with, the whole area will remain an economic and humanitarian black hole. Turning Mecca into a smoking crater would be a good start, yet other than Ann Coulter, no-one seems willing to even talk about it.
evolution runs amok.
the old culture lashes out at the new.
the old always loses.
i no longer care about the evolutionary extinct.
the cool thing is watching evolution evolve.
SirWalter/16: agree that we should be reducing our dependence on ME. Agree that famine may be stalking the region. If it hits, who will pump and ship the oil we need? Will we occupy the Saudi fields? Will we go home and negotiate a deal in which our energy survival is contingent on our delivery of food to the Iranian mullahs or the Muslim Brotherhood or whomever else is then running the Caliphate? Who holds the upper hand in that forced exchange? Is it any less unstable than the free fall we’re in? What happens if Obama is replaced by somebody who wants to reassert power that is no longer credible?
Altimeter is unwinding at an unprecedented rate.
It’s out of control in Peoria, in California, in Minnesota, let alone the middle east.
Liberals outlast conservatives because politics is what liberals like to do. Conservatives rise up to slap down the liberals every now and then because they have to, not because they like doing it. Conservatives would rather build airplanes, tractors, copiers and computers.
Politicians believe in political systems and by extension, government. They believe that governments can be made to work for the benefit of all. Ergo, they are liberals, not conservatives.
Conservative politician is a contradiction in terms. To govern, conservatives MUST draft somebody, anybody but a politician
wretchard 3,
The momentum is there and all we’re waiting for it the impact.
Ladies and Gentlemen the good news is that your flight crew will now distribute the free drinks.
At some point someone’s gonna get a wilder-than-normal hair up their ass and attack Israel. And all hell will break loose.
#18 Hunt Johnsen – That would still leave Medina and Qom, and the mullahs would find some excuse and continue their evil rantings.
Three more smoking craters – Medina, Qom and Riyadh (the last to eliminate the House of Sauron) – might do it. It’s a great pity that the fourth “holy” city is shared with two of the world’s decent religions.
Don’t leave out “AND prepare”.
More hope and change!
(Or is that, “Back to the future”?)
http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/06/is_this_man_the_next_president.html
Oh, never mind. Because what the world needs now is another disfunctional, kleptomanic, lying, murderous Arab State whose goal is the destruction of the Zionist Entity….
But to finish up on a more positive note, let’s conclude with a window into the thought processes of the “spiritual advisor” that Our Nobel-Peace-Prize-Winner-in-Chief spent 20 years not listening to:
http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/article/2011/06/23/3088272/jeremiah-wright-israel-is-to-judaism-as-flavor-flav-is-to-christianity
(Let’s hope he’s still not listening!!)
I think the best way to draw our forces down in Afghanistan is for them to march, ride and chopper their way down to the sea by cutting a swathe through Pakistan, use our airborne and Ranger capability already in Afghanistan to seize the Paki nuclear weapons and let it be known that there will be instant HUGE retaliation in kind if any of their nukes are spirited away and/or detonated anywhere near our exiting troops.
If we decide to maintain some SF troop presence in Afghanistan after that we will have no trouble with an aerial resupply corridor right up the guts of what is left of that cesspool.
heheheheheh
“So we can’t seek them and find them? If we know where the caves are or whatnot why can’t we just go there and destroy them?”
Targeting. That has always been the problem in guerrilla (4th generation warfare).
The Romans perfected a fairly effective solution when they conquered Iberia (Spain) 2,000 some years ago. When a column was attacked the Romans went to the closest village and killed 1 out of ever 10 inhabitants. They kept track of how many times they had to do that and after the 4th trip, they killed everybody and brought in new serfs from another part of the Empires. It took over 2 centuries but eventually they got a peaceful population. Very non PC.
IN 4th generation warfare the population is the terrain. The terrain is the population. You have 100 guys in white bathrobes with towels on their head. How do you tell which one is returning home from his 8 hour shift in the IDE making factory?
How do you tell which one is on his way to shoot the local police chief?
Technology helps some but basically, you can’t pick out the terrorist from the rest of them. So the only 100% sure way is to kill them all. That isn’t PC and has been a crime for the last 3 generations.
I think the best approach would be to put the chemists to work and develop a gas that will sterilize males. Just Males and only within hours of exposure. Every time there is a terrorist attack, pick a city and sterilize the males in that city. We are not killing anybody, so there is no crime. Let the Muslims know that if they don’t learn manners, they will be the last generation.
Just ran across another way of fighting 4th generation warfare;
http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/pothot/articles/20110628.aspx
Call it the Islamic way. Strikes me as more of a holding tactic. A fighting withdrawal so to speak.
Stoicheion:
“So the only 100% sure way is to kill them all. That isn’t PC and has been a crime for the last 3 generations.”
Well, the Russians had a pretty good try at it, killing over a million and driving 3-4 million overseas. It didn’t work out for them. I don’t think their failure stemmed from moral qualms.
“I think the best approach would be to put the chemists to work and develop a gas that will sterilize males. Just Males and only within hours of exposure. Every time there is a terrorist attack, pick a city and sterilize the males in that city. We are not killing anybody, so there is no crime.”
Brother, I am a professional chemist who stepped away from the field to become an infantryman. I would welcome the chance to kill the enemy. And you can count me the hell out of that “best approach.”
Oops. For “overseas”, read “abroad.”
“Well, the Russians had a pretty good try at it, killing over a million and driving 3-4 million overseas. It didn’t work out for them. I don’t think their failure stemmed from moral qualms.”
While earning your degree in Chemistry, did you perchance learn what the word “ALL” means? 1 million out of 20 million is about 5% As a Chemist you should know the difference between 5% and 100%. Or maybe not.
JPS, I would count you out of just about everything.
stoicheion,
I did learn what ALL meant, but I appreciate your solicitude. What I mean is that the Russians came a lot closer to killing everyone who messed with them, and everyone around them, than we ever would or should.
The numbers I mentioned are national totals. They don’t reflect, for instance, that the population of Kandahar was 25% of its prewar total by the time the Russians were through there. They don’t reflect villages totally annihilated, pour encourager les autres. They don’t reflect the casualties with both an arm and a leg blown off, because when they got their leg blown off by one mine and they fell, their arm hit another.
I don’t believe the Russians failed because they weren’t ruthless enough. But yes, you’re right that if you kill literally everyone in an area there will be no remaining resistance. Perhaps I should have acknowledged your tautology at the outset.
As for the rest, I reacted strongly because I know Afghans with manners, who hate the Taliban more than any of us, and who’ve risked their lives to stand with us. So the idea of sterilizing them–not specifically, but just because they happened to be around–in reprisal for the actions of people they hate, makes me angry. If you see no crime there, I’m happy to be counted out of just about everything you’d recommend.
The old cliche’ “follow the money” is appropriate here. We all recognize that KSA and Iran are the source of funds (supplemented by others, but the primary source nonetheless). And the funds? Oil revenue derived from the West and developing nations.
The real problem, I submit, is not jihad. No doubt, Jihadis have adopted a vicious, religiously-centered ideology that can hurt us, but they populate countries that remain third world cesspools. If jihadist funding dries up, they can continue to kill each other, and might be able to make an occasional terrorist foray into the West. But at the end of the day, this broken culture can do little to harm us — if there’s no money to build more Madrassahs, fund more terrorist training camps, and support transnational Islamist movements.
So, how to reduce funding significantly? Could meaningful alternative energy technologies be developed with an investment of half-a-trillion dollars, a trillion? Who knows, but rather than pissing away trillions on wars that we do not have the will or the stomach to win, it might be better to establish a anti-Islamist security strategy with a single goal in mind: to make oil worth much, much less over a ten year time span. The strategic intent is starving the KSA and Iran, and at the same time, neutering the Jihadis. It just might work and as a minimum, it’s certainly no worse a strategy than what we’ve tried to do since 9-11.
Soflauthor – Precisely. Make oil worthless (there are at least a dozen ways), and follow that up by confiscating all the unearned trillions that the enemy holds in countries under Western control, and the problem goes away.
And one of the strategies (or at least one component of the overall strategy) gives humanity resources we are going to have real trouble using up, essentially for free.
But one thing is essential for that strategy. Never, never, never let any Muslim – even one, and no matter how apparently moderate – into space. NEVER.
“But yes, you’re right that if you kill literally everyone in an area there will be no remaining resistance.”
Which I did not recommend but pointed out as a fact. IIRC, that was how the Mongols did it. They killed 90% and enslaved the other 10%.
That is not the American way, unless there are no alternatives ( look up American Indian )
As far as your ‘Gani buds, I’m sure they are nice felloes. Most of those in the WTC were nice fellows also. That didn’t matter to AQ so why should it matter to us?
At least we are not killing your buds.
If you don’t fight to win, you lose.
wretchard @ 5: “And it’s getting hard to talk about solutions when the control surfaces themselves no longer have any real influence on the flight path of things.”
All I can think of is the Air France flight that crashed into the Pacific. The Captain was asleep, the co-pilots were trying to fly the plane, and they had NO IDEA where they were in space.
We desperately need a new captain before the ship is truly lost; we may still have a crash landing, but one we can walk away from.