Tag: war

A label can’t reasonably be described as a slur when it is both demonstrably true and accurately descriptive. This should suffice to explode the recent dishonest attempts of various neocons to hide blatant Jewish disloyalty to the USA under the guise of anti-semitism:

In a Jan. 13 opinion piece, Andrew Adler offered three possible options to ensure Israel’s security in the Middle East: a strike against the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, an attack against Iran, and having Israel’s U.S.-based Mossad agents assassinate Obama. Adler said “a hit” against the president would “preserve Israel’s existence.” He said Vice President Joe Biden would then be able “to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

If you’re openly advocating the murder of a head of state in order to force that state to become the subordinate military arm of another state, it is totally obvious that you are placing the interests of the second state first. Assuming that Adler is an American, this is outright treason. Emotional appeals to the Holocaust no more justify Jewish treason against America than appeals to the Mongol slaughter in China would justify treason committed by Americans of Chinese descent.

Now, I have nothing against the Israel First position when it is expressed by Israelis. They should put Israel first; no one else is going to. But likewise, Americans are expected to put American interests first. This is only one of the many reasons why the USA should return to its longtime historical policy of outlawing dual-citizenship.

It is also worth nothing that the idea of assassinating the U.S. president in order to “preserve Israel’s existence” is a monstrously stupid one. If the Israeli leaders were ever so mindlessly arrogant as to to attack their country’s foremost supporter among the nations of the world in a manner that not even National Socialist Germany or the Soviet Union ever dared to attempt, most Americans would be more than willing to nuke Jerusalem.

To say nothing of the fact that Biden confuses things so often, he might accidentally order the invasion of Israel when he meant to attack Iran. Anyhow, here is exactly what Adler wrote:

“Well, here are your “Kobayahsi Maru” options. “Kobayahsi Maru” is a term used in “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” to describe a no-win scenario or facing a solution that involves redefining the problem.

One, order a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah and Hamas, knowing that military and civilian casualties will be high, but not as high as they would be in 2017.

Two, go against Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s wish that Israel take a lethal bullet in the name of preserving a healthy, worldwide economic climate, and order the destruction of Iran’s nuclear facilities at all costs.

Three give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice-president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy include helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.

Yes, you read” three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

Now, I actually found the second option to be even more shocking than the third. I mean, on what planet does this “healthy, worldwide economic climate” Adler describes exist? But speaking of Israeli involvement in U.S. politics, it may be worth noting that one such Israeli citizen is presently keeping the Gingrich campaign afloat.

“A wealthy backer of Newt Gingrich will inject $5 million into a “super PAC” supporting his presidential bid, two people with knowledge of the contribution said on Monday, providing a major boost to Mr. Gingrich as he seeks to fend off aggressive attacks from Mitt Romney, his main Republican rival. The supporter, Dr. Miriam Adelson, is the wife of Sheldon Adelson, a longtime Gingrich friend and a patron who this month contributed $5 million to the super PAC, Winning Our Future. Dr. Adelson’s check will bring the couple’s total contributions to Winning Our Future to $10 million….”

Even Michael Yon has reluctantly concluded that it is time to get out of Afghanistan:

This war is going to turn out badly. We are wasting lives and resources while the United States decays and other threats emerge. We led the horse to water.

Importantly, there is no value in pretending that Pakistan is an ally. We should wish the best of luck to the Afghans, and the many peaceful Pakistanis, and accelerate our withdrawal of our main battle force. The US never has been serious about Afghanistan. Under General Petraeus we were starting to gain ground, but the current trajectory will land us in the mud.

The enemies will never beat us in Afghanistan. Force on force, the Taliban are weak by comparison. Yet this is their home. There is only so much we can do at this extreme cost for the many good Afghan people. We must reduce our main effort and concentrate on other matters. Time to come home.

Sincerely,

Michael Yon

It’s ten years late in my opinion, but nevertheless, he’s correct. Tim Lynch concurs:

There it is; Afghanistan is toast, and what the last 10 years has taught us is we cannot afford to deploy American ground forces. Two billion dollars a week (that’s billion with a B) has bought what? Every year we stay to “bring security to the people,” the security situation for the people gets worse and worse, deteriorating by orders of magnitude. Now the boy genius has announced a “new strategy”. A strategy that is identical to the “strategy” that resulted in a hollow ground force getting its ass kicked by North Korea in 1950; a mere five years after we had ascended to the most dominant military the world had ever known.

As usual, the culprit is historical ignorance and the “this time it’s different” crowd. Seriously, every time someone claims that “this time it’s different” or “today’s youth [fill-in-the-blank], they should be fitted with shock collars and zapped. Anyone who knows anything about military history or who has ever played a strategic wargame knows that it is much harder to hold onto territory than it is to grab it in the first place.

Vox’s first rule of war: if you don’t colonize, don’t occupy.

The United States has been utilizing what may prove to be the most historically inept strategy in the entire history of warfare, in which the enemy nations are occupied while allowing its own territory to be colonized.

Jonathan Tobin tries to claim that killing scientists isn’t terrorism:

As far as he [Glenn Greenwald] is concerned, if the U.S. or Israel are behind the killings, then both are “terrorist states” and President Obama may be a “a terrorist, a state sponsor of terrorism or, at the very least, a supporter of terrorism.”

But you need a particular form of moral myopia not to see that heading off a potential second Holocaust in the form of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel or the nuclear blackmail of the rest of the Middle East is not a form of terrorism. Anyone who believes Iran should be allowed to proceed toward the building of a nuclear bomb has either lost their moral compass or is so steeped in the belief that American and Israeli interests are inherently unjustified they have reversed the moral equation in this case. Rather than the alleged U.S. and Israeli covert operators being called terrorists, it is the Iranian scientists who are the criminals. They must be stopped before they kill.

Given that terrorism is defined as violent acts which are intended to create fear, are perpetrated for a religious, political, or ideological goal, and deliberately target or disregard the safety of civilians, it should be completely obvious that murdering scientists for the purposes of preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon is terrorism. Whatever state is responsible therefore is guilty of committing acts of terrorism, although I would not go so far as to call it a terrorist state because terrorist states typically make a formal policy of terror and direct terror against their own citizens. The First French Republic was a terrorist state, but I don’t think either Israel or the USA can be categorized that way even if they are responsible.

But does anyone doubt that if China started murdering scientists at Honeywell, Boeing, or Lockheed Martin who were working on the next generation of U.S. military weapons, it would be regarded as both terrorism and an act of war?

What Tobin should have done is to try explaining why intentionally targeting civilians for murder is justifiable and why it is a worthwhile risk considering that doing so exposes American and Israeli scientists to reprisals in the future. Now, I think that one could probably make a reasonable case for Israel to target the civilians of various Arab nations because their own citizens are already being similarly targeted and attacked. But the same is not true of Americans, so it would be a massive mistake for the USA to do it.

The problem is that the American media appears to be preparing the citizenry for more military action against civilian targets in friendly nations, such as took place already in Pakistan. For example, on Hawaii Five-O the other night, the intrepid heroes prevented planned assassinations against a SEAL team, then were permitted to watch the live video stream of a SEAL assault against a drug cartel in Mexico.

Regardless of how worried you are about Iran possessing nuclear weapons, history very strongly suggests that they will obtain them sooner or later. It wasn’t all that long ago that doomsday was prophesied if North Korea ever obtained nuclear weapons, and yet they now have them and nothing has happened except for the death of the North Korean leader… which does tend to raise a few more questions about the true extent of these targeted murders. Anyhow, the point is that the prospective justifiability of an action does not modify the substance of the action, and to insist otherwise is a particularly clumsy and counterproductive form of propaganda.

Andrew McCarthy actually appears to be surprised that the USA is finally following the example set by the Soviet and British empires:

The surrender is complete now. The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading jurist, to mediate secret negotiations between the United States and the Taliban….

After thousands of young Americans have laid down their lives to protect the United States from jihadist terror, President Obama apparently seeks to end the war by asking Qaradawi, a jihad-stoking enemy of the United States, to help him strike a deal that will install our Taliban enemies as part of the sharia state we have been building in Afghanistan. If the Hindu report is accurate, the price tag will include the release of Taliban prisoners from Gitmo — an element of the deal Reuters has also reported. The administration will also agree to the lifting of U.N. sanctions against the Taliban, and recognition of the Taliban as a legitimate political party (yes, just like the Muslim Brotherhood!). In return, the Taliban will pretend to forswear violence, to sever ties with al-Qaeda, and to cooperate with the rival Karzai regime.

It would mark one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

That’s an absurd claim. It only ends the shameful chapter that began when the USA didn’t immediately bring its troops home after exacting its revenge for the Taliban’s support of 9/11. From their surprise over the failure of the “Arab Spring” to their complaints about the “surrenders” in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with their collective refusal to confront Islamic expansion in the West, it is clear that the neocons have the collective strategic cognitive capacity of a slow-witted World War I infantry general. They genuinely believe that sending more troops forward is the answer to every military question.

Their strategic perspective is Hitlerian. The German Reichskanzler had the same inability to understand that retreat must always be an option if you don’t wish for your troops to be utterly destroyed every time there is a temporary setback.

The neocons don’t recognize that the clash of civilizations is much larger than a single nation here and there, and that each nation merely represents a single salient. And it is no more “surrender” to withdraw troops from places like Afghanistan or Iraq than it was for Von Manstein to extricate his troops from the Korsun Pocket in World War II. In fact, it is the exact opposite of surrender, because the withdrawal preserves the troops and allows them to fight another day.

McCarthy and his strategically ignorant colleagues quite clearly don’t know the first thing about military history, war, or how it is fought. And given the way in which the governments of the West still refuse to lift a finger against Islam in their own countries, but only fight it in lands afar, it is readily apparent that these are merely the opening skirmishes in the greater conflict to come.

It’s all fun and games being a neocon, invading other countries, and spreading world democratic revolution, right up until the moment that someone accidentally pokes a nuclear power in the eye with “collateral damage”. If “well, we didn’t mean it” doesn’t work for kids, it’s probably not going to work for nations either:

NATO helicopters and fighter jets attacked two military outposts in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing as many as 28 troops and plunging U.S.-Pakistan relations, already deeply frayed, further into crisis.

Pakistan retaliated by shutting down vital NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, used for sending in just under a third of the alliance’s supplies.

Pakistan should cease all cooperation with the US military. Why should they tolerate the US killing Pakistani soldiers in Pakistan any more than we would tolerate the Pakistani military killing American soldiers in the USA?

It appears Obama may be considering the time-honored strategem of attempting to distract the populace with fireworks during a time of economic difficulty.

Yesterday we reported that the Arab League (with European and US support) are preparing to institute a no fly zone over Syria. Today, we get an escalation which confirms we may be on the edge. Just out from CBS: “The U.S. Embassy in Damascus urged its citizens in Syria to depart “immediately,” and Turkey’s foreign ministry urged Turkish pilgrims to opt for flights to return home from Saudi Arabia to avoid traveling through Syria.” But probably the most damning evidence that the “western world” is about to do the unthinkable and invade Syria, and in the process force Iran to retaliate, is the weekly naval update from Stratfor, which always has some very interesting if always controversial view on geopolitics, where we find that for the first time in many months, CVN 77 George H.W. Bush has left its traditional theater of operations just off the Straits of Hormuz, a critical choke point, where it traditionally accompanies the Stennis, and has parked… right next to Syria.

Apparently the Libyan affair ended too quickly and neither Yemen nor Uganda ever really heated up enough to crack the front page. One wonders what sort of vital American interest is supposed to be at stake in Syria. And I’m curious where all the Syrian immigrants will be settled, Nebraska or Idaho?