World Security
Rotten: “Infiltrated by up to a dozen CIA spies, Hezbollah, the official party of God, is taking hits to its prestige—and revealing its weakness… Hezbollah’s entire prestige is built on the idea that it is a highly disciplined organization that is nearly impossible to infiltrate.”
Now Might Not Be the Best Time to Hire Pakistani Mercs: Perhaps seeking to mollify ruffled Islamabad’s feelings, the State Deparment decides to hire Pakistani embassy guards. “The State Department recently announced it’s seeking local Pakistani guards to keep its diplomats safe at the embassy in Islamabad and consulates in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. Those guards will need to ‘deter potential terrorist attacks,’ according to a contract pre-solicitation, by ‘restricting entry of unauthorized personnel, operation of walk-through metal detectors, and hand-held detectors.’”
Hope they pay them well. The Strategy Page says suicide bombering is a popular occupation in the Islamic world because work is degrading, money is scarce and martyrs are rewarded by Allah.
Resupply By Air in Afghanistan: ”Today, we air-dropped a 16-foot platform carrying an all-terrain forklift. It is one of six platforms ever dropped in theater,” said 1st Lt. Chelsea Craig, the 11th Quartermaster Detachment commander. “It is the first forklift dropped in theater and weighing in excess of 15,000 pounds, it is the heaviest platform ever dropped.”
Pakistan releases first images of border posts attacked by NATO: Images show bent mortar tubes, smoldering trench lines, white flags and the general ruin of Pakistani positions. “Amid rising anger, Pakistan’s military has released a set of images which it says show the remote border posts attacked by NATO helicopters and fighter jets on Saturday in an incident that has soured relations between Pakistan and the United States. ”
Nato outpost attacked by insurgents from within Pakistan: “The incident has added to the tension between Nato and Pakistan following the killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers last week in a Nato-led airstrike.”
Syrian forces ‘fight rebels in south’: “Electricity and telephone lines had been cut off in the area, said the statement which quoted a witness as saying the clashes were triggered by the arrival in the town by at least 30 armoured personnel carriers.” Meanwhile, Turkey says it will impose “step by step” sanctions on Syria, but is it serious?
Turkey has opted to impose step-by-step sanctions on Syria over its brutal crackdown on an eight-month uprising that claimed thousands of lives as the Arab League endorsed a set of sanctions on Sunday to push the Syrian regime to stop its bloody crackdown.
Turkey says it will follow the Arab League sanctions but it failed to deliver its own sanctions despite Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s promise in September that Turkey will press ahead with sanctions on the Syrian regime.
UK expels all Iranian embassy staff, withdraws officials from Tehran: As embassy burns. British columnist says, “Hague shakes his puny fist at Iran in the thirty years’ invisible war”.
Maybe they could send the Royal Navy. Oh wait. New carrier ‘not fully capable’ until 2030, and will then be able to launch more than dozen airplanes. The second carrier cannot be operated by the Royal Navy because it no longer has enough men.
If Britain does not have the power to do anything more than send a diplomatic protest to Iran, maybe it can rely on the US, led by a President whose ratings are now lower than Jimmy Carter‘s. Ya think? Maybe he can do better than Jimmy Carter on foreign policy. He is doing five times worse than Jimmy in a poll on economic policy.
Iran will come to you: Never mind, if the Royal Navy cannot come to Iran, Iran may come to it. “Iran is developing an advanced low-flying cruise missile that could potentially carry a non-conventional warhead, Arieh Herzog, director of the Defense Ministry’s Homa Missile Defense Agency, said on Wednesday. … Earlier this month, close to 20 Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers, including the architect of Iran’s long-range ballistic missile program, were killed in a mysterious explosion at a missile base near the city of Bid Kaneh. The officers were reportedly working on the development of a new missile when the explosion took place.”
Iran may have had some help from North Korea: “German newspaper Die Welt reported that North Korea has supplied Syria and Iran with a special kind of steel used for making missiles and building centrifuges for uranium enrichment.”
Russia Activates Missile Warning System: The Russian President said:
“I expect that this step will be seen by our partners as the first signal of the readiness of our country to make an adequate response to the threats which the (Western) missile shield poses for our strategic nuclear forces,” Medvedev said.
Using rhetoric reminiscent of the Cold War, he added: “If this signal is not heard, we will deploy other methods of protection including the taking of tough countermeasures and the deployment of strike forces.”
That is nonsense. Russia should know that the United States is led by a man committed to abolishing missiles, American future combat systems and nuclear weapons and anything else that has held the line up until this time. In its place, he is looking forward to cooperation with Russia and defanging North Korea. All he needs is more “treaties and institutions” to hold rogue countries accountable. Just give him time, but time it seems, has other ideas.
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Chaos, utter chaos. It will not end until there are one or more mushroom clouds. Talk about shock and awe. It will not include US weapons.
At some point someone will have to drop the hammer. That someone will not be liked. Not respected. Feared. It will occur after the first exchange. It will take courage, will and strength to do the job. It will also take enormous national faith in the effort. God help us.
The liberal progressive experiment is a failure. Now we pay the price.
Non-conventional? Would that be Nuclear?
To Quote Josey Wales; “Dying ain’t much of a living”.
So… who’s blowing up Iranian bases? Care to speculate?
#3/john lynch, “So… who’s blowing up Iranian bases?”
I have this image that it’s Wiley Coyote–the Iranian variant, wearing a goofy tall turban jammed askew between his floppy years. You see, he bought this package of Acme nuclear fireworks from the Acme store in Korea, and … well, you can envision the rest.
It occurred to me as I wrote this that some of you BC youngsters might not know who Wiley Coyote is. If so, I feel sorry for you. You are culturally bereft and impoverished. You’ve missed out on lots of laffs.
Beep beep! Zoooooooommmmmmmmmmm!
“blowing up Iranian bases” ? M Leeden makes a convincing case that it’s mostly intramural (and I think he said several months back that Stutnex is probably a Russian project)
but if regime elements are “positioning” themselves (i.e. killing each other) why are they destroying valuable regime assets which, one would think, they would hope to inherit?
#5/regretleft: “… why are they destroying valuable regime assets. . . .”
Um … because they’re nuts? Because they’re idiots?
Roughcoat@4: I broke my arm when I was 14 and spent a month in traction. The first two weeks I was in incredible pain, and they gave me demerol.
As I was on my first dose of demerol, the Roadrunner Show came on. I laughed so hard it made my arm start swaying, and then I was laughing and crying at the same time.
I’ve loved that show ever since (not that I didn’t love it before).
Images show bent mortar tubes, smoldering trench lines, white flags and the general ruin of Pakistani positions.
The Americans bombed them with white flags?
The pictures don’t really show much. I guess the white flags *could* be significant, as some accounts say the US attacks occurred for something like 90 minutes. Just that white flags from jihadis don’t have much history of being worth honoring anyway.
It is interesting that our CIA Muslim spies (in most the Muslim countries and groups) are being rolled up and executed by the dozens in such a sudden fashion? did this administration invite a mole in via our Muslim friendly Prez and the Diversity crowd he surrounds himself with? have we lost our Chinese spies yet?
I’m surprised there wasn’t a “Baby Milk Factory” sign somewhere in there too (printed in English, of course).
Might be smarter than we give ‘em credit for. They may figure those assets are going to get blown up sooner or later anyway by someone else who may not bother with precision targetting. Besides, I get the impression those assets are what hte current goverment has staked it’s reputation on. Blowing them up may be the best way to topple that government.
‘To Quote Josey Wales; “Dying ain’t much of a living”.’
Tell that to the President.
Ledeen in PJ Media writes about it being perhaps intramural. Some on the left are crediting Obama for it. Conventional wisdom has Mossad doing the deed. One of the comments on PJM claims that the blast yesterday happened 2 hours before Rafsanjani was to arrive for an inspection.
You figure that there have been 4+ blasts over the last 2 weeks, with 3 of them at primary nuke facilities. The large one two weeks ago at the missile site that killed the General and several “visitors” (Pyongyang?) could have been simple buffoonery based on what they use to fuel their SCUD variants.
I find the timing yesterday to be most interesting, though, as it sends a direct message to the Mullahs.
While I have fond thoughts of the occasional B-2 at 30,000′ with a long range precision standoff munition being part of the action, I expect to be disappointed.
If it is a combination of Mossad and internal Iranian dissidents, that will be good enough for me. Lord knows they have been hating one another for a long, long time – even longer than they have been hating us. Bring popcorn. Cheers-
here’s what’s odd to me — how were those facilities destroyed? they weren’t bombed from the air, yet they were utterly destroyed. that takes a lot of explosives, more than small teams can carry in on foot. the only explanation that fits the known facts is that the facilities had been rigged with explosives during construction.
When does Argentina reoccupy the Falklands?
Britain reduced to giving its carrier to France may now taste the bitter cup more honourable Englishmen forced on a haughty people. “Shame, all is shame.” Do they celebrate St Crispin’s Day?
If nuclear devices detonate in or over Iran where will the prevailing winds carry the plume?
13. cjm
My theory is it was chance. Iran is unable to import munitions. So thry have to buy black market and smuggle it in. Iran still has a lot of old Soviet D-30 122mm artillery. The Russians have 10′s of millions of old WW2 are munitions. It gets unstable after a few decades. The Russians have lost several small towns thru the spontaneous detonation of munitions storage sites. They are in the process of cleaning up said sites. That means packing up the shells hauling them to a isolated area and blowing them up. Who is to say if it was 1,000 shells destroyed or 700? The ‘extra’ 300 are ideal for selling on the black market. Some General pockets the money and there you are. Iran hides them in the safest spot it can find, which just happens to be where they hide their nuke stuff too.
Incompetence is much more commonplace then malice.
15 stoicheion: some previous explosions might have been old artillery shells, but these failicites weren’t ammo depots. maybe they were storing shells nearby as part of a defensive force, but it really looks like the explosions came from within the facilities.
of course, there is always the possibility that the israelis do have suitcase sized nukes. those, you could carry in on foot or by car
Josh — Them white flags are hard to see at 500kts
Roughcoat
I remember that you are a sheepherd dogs amateur and competitor
here, a video of our young Beauceron, that made her first training with the sheep
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmer29_galaxina-1e-mise-au-troupeau_animals
MC,
That is one happy dog. The sheep look like they want their government union boss.
Blast From the Past
actually the training was by the Europe champion, he has a small farm within his enterprise, and the sheep are for training his dogs and ours when he organises training sessions. So the sheep are in use to be driven by lots of different dogs. Hmm, for ours, it was the first time that she saw these animals, and we were wondering if she was getting to understand the “job”, apparently yes, though in the morning she was rather fancying eating sheep sh*ts
As the Beauceron is consedered as sheepherd dog, we have to make such trainings for getting her official registration, otherwise, my man rather practices agility, but that may change, if the dog is really good and happy at sheepherding
the sheep are in use to be driven by lots of different dogs
Here we call those “Democrats.”