It is not hard to understand why the idea of military intervention in support of the Libyan rebels battling against the Gadhafi regime is tempting to some Americans. Responsible for both the Lockerbie bombing and the Berlin disco bombings that killed both American soldiers and civilians, there is little that is not reprehensible about Muammar Gadhafi. Nor has there ever been even a pretense of democratic legitimacy about the government of The Brother Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which came to power in a conventional third-world “colonel’s coup” in 1969.
Tag: war
Pull the plug
Considering how one of the primary consequences of the NRO-endorsed neocon objective of “spreading democracy” has turned out to be spreading sharia everywhere from Afghanistan to Egypt and Iraq, it’s well past time to declare the concept a complete failure:
On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration’s fecklessness, in particular the president’s appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying — not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic “democracy” we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions.
This shameful episode (and the certain recurrence of it) perfectly illustrates the folly of Islamic nation-building. The stubborn fact is that we have asked for just these sorts of atrocious outcomes. Ever since 2003, when the thrust of the War On Terror stopped being the defeat of America’s enemies and decisively shifted to nation-building, we have insisted — against history, law, language, and logic — that Islamic culture is perfectly compatible with and hospitable to Western-style democracy. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.
It only took 10 years to figure out the obvious. How much longer will it take for conservatives to realize that permitting barbarian immigration is not, in fact, beneficial to the stability or survival of Western civilization?
Egypt and the Iraqi Crusade
It would appear to have gang seriously agley:
It’s an irony almost too bitter to bear that George W. Bush, an evangelical Christian fired by a vision of freedom with religious overtones, waged a war of liberation in Iraq that led to the uprooting of the country’s Christians. And did almost nothing to prevent it, or even remark upon it. Iraq’s Christians are the collateral damage of the country’s post-Saddam revolution….
Before the invasion, roughly 1.4 million Christians lived in Iraq. About half of them have fled, with many more sure to follow. For a community that dates back almost to the inception of Christianity, this is nothing short of a historic cataclysm.
Once more there are reports circulating that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down again and this time they are apparently correct. There are also 8 million Coptic Christians now living in Egypt. Will the world demonstrate even a tenth of the concern for them that it still shows – or at least feigns to show – for six million Jews who died more than 60 years ago?
R.I.P. Dick Winters
The Band of Brothers has lost its leader:
Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died. Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight.
Strangely, this marks the second time Maj. Winters has died in the last month. Ender managed to get him killed as he led Easy Company to victory at the very end of Purple Heart Lane, the ASLSK scenario which recreates the machine gun ambush at Carentan on June 12, 1944.
A squad of men followed Lt. Harry Walsh into town, but facing machine gun fire from the edge of town, the rest of his men froze into ditches alongside the road. With Battalion HQ yelling encouragement from the rear, acting Company Commander Lt. Dick Winters jumped into the road and screamed for his men to follow. Having never heard Winters scream before, Easy Company quickly attacked down the road, distracting the enemy machine gun nest enough for Lt. Walsh and his men to neutralize it.
It was fitting that MMP paid Winters the compliment of identifying him as a 9-2 leader. He merited it. If you haven’t seen Band of Brothers yet, I would highly recommend it. Very highly. It was extraordinary to watch the dramatization of the infantry battles, then listen to the comments of the men who survived them. And you cannot watch the series without coming away with a deep and abiding respect for the calm warrior and leader of men that Dick Winters was.
Col. Macgregor on the Neocon Wars
A military officer points out that the Great Depression 2.0 is not only going to bring the Neocon Wars to an end, but expose the conceit and deceit that served as their foundation.
When it comes down to a choice of spending trillions of American tax dollars to economically transform and police hostile Muslim societies with dysfunctional cultures or funding Medicare and Medicaid, entitlements will win, and the interventions will end.
When the budget ax falls, many inconvenient facts will come to light, unmasking the great deception that America confronted a serious military threat in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a deception promoted and fostered by politicians and ambitious generals who sought to gain from it. It will horrify and discourage Americans to learn we’ve bankrupted ourselves in a fight that always was analogous to clubbing baby seals. From 2001 onward, we never confronted armies, air forces or capable air defenses. Bottom line: There was no existential military threat to the United States or its NATO allies emanating from Afghanistan or the Middle East. There is none today.
It’s too soon to tell, but reductions in defense spending may demonstrate that it’s far less expensive to protect the United States from Islamist terrorism as well as the criminality flooding in from Mexico and Latin America by controlling our borders and immigration. We must, however, stop wasting American blood and treasure on misguided military interventions designed to drag Muslim Arabs and Afghans through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in the space of a few years, at gunpoint. They will have to do these things themselves.
Well said and summarized. What a pity that so few ranking members of the American military were willing to speak out about what was always a shamefully stupid series of unnecessary invasions and military occupations doomed to failure. It is somewhat astonishing that the media and politicians are in an uproar over one little girl murdered in Arizona given their complicity in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of little girls that American military forces have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Calling those deaths “collateral damage” doesn’t justify them; one could just as easily justify the Arizona fatalities using the same excuse.
No one is all bad
Say what you will about violent Mexican drug gangs, but you really can’t dispute their very sensible position on clowns.
Two street clowns were found dead in southeastern Mexico…. The clowns were found in bright costumes and makeup on a roadside Sunday in the city of Villahermosa, bearing signs of torture….
Speaking of clowns, both David Frum and Thomas Sowell have concluded that massive illegal drug-related violence with a body count in the tens of thousands in Mexico alone is not an argument for legalizing drugs, but rather intensifying anti-drug efforts and making use of the U.S. military. Masters of logic, they are.
Genocide is for blacks
I would say African-Americans, of course, only as one of my Nigerian sprinter friends had to point out more than once to one of our relentlessly PC acquaintances, they’re not Americans. Anyhow, Brendan O’Neill notices that African nations apparently do not engage in wars any more than the United States does. Except, instead of engaging in “police actions” and “global struggles against violent extremism”, they apparently just wage “genocide”.
When does war become genocide? When the protagonists are black people. That is the only conclusion one can draw from the unhinged claims that the Ivory Coast is on “the brink of genocide” following the disputed presidential elections and the stand-off between the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo and president-elect Alassane Ouattara….
These discussions reveal rather more about the warped Western imagination than they do about realities on the ground. Seemingly incapable of making sense of contemporary political conflict, observers reach for sensationalist, one-size-fits-all explanations instead. These conflicts are like pornography for Western misanthropes who see in every African stand-off the potential for Holocaust-style horrors. It’s a PC rehabilitation of the idea that there is a divide between the civilised West and uncivilised Africa – only today we use the more acceptable-sounding terminology of “genocide preventers” (us) and “genocidaires” (them) to establish our superiority over the dark-skinned barbarians.
A pertinent observation on how even the most fervent equalitarians cannot successfully hide their own fundamental lack of belief in human equality. On a tangential note, I can’t help but note that many of the same people who are so concerned about overpopulation and global warming are also deeply concerned about preventing genocide and starvation. How, one wonders, do they think that what they believe to be the excessive human population is going to be reduced? Relying on material wealth, feminism and irreligious ennui to sap the reproductive instinct strikes me as having no effect on at least three-quarters of the human population, which leaves genocide, famine, and mass forced sterilization as the available options.
DIY drone
This makes me think that the security forces of the world must be getting more than a little nervous. The state no longer possesses air supremacy.
As Carroll Quigley noted, the power of the aristocracy over the masses has historically depended upon how great the divide between state and individual military power is. Once someone figures out how to turn these little RC planes with speeds of up to 130 kph and 27-mile range into delivery systems, pretty much all bets are off. And there’s no reason they can’t be effectively turned into cheap drones without too much trouble.
I suppose the obvious countermeasure is adding laser turrets to all the closed-circuit cameras. But it’s not hard to see the recon-related possibilities here either.
A fabulous military
No one cognizant of history would think to deny that homosexual men are capable of fighting effectively. The Sacred Band of Thebes alone would suffice to disprove that notion. However, one salient fact to consider about the Sacred Band was that it was a band, which is to say, it was a military unit that was set apart from other military units that did not share the particular predilection that made it such a remarkably cohesive unit.
The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which effectively permits the many closeted homosexuals in the U.S. armed forces to openly exhibit their abnormal preferences and presumably to act upon them, is therefore likely to prove less salutary to American military efficiency and effectiveness. While it is true that other Western militaries have eliminated their bans on homosexuals, it is also worth noting that none of them are presently capable of successfully invading Jerry Jones’s new stadium even if it were defended only by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
So, it is at the very least questionable to assume that there will be only minor negative consequences from this latest experiment in social engineering. Although the ambitious and politically correct general officers won’t admit it, the grand experiment of women in the military has been a massive failure whereas the integration of black soldiers was a success. Only time will tell if the result of this third great experiment will be more akin to the first one or the second.
Assassinate the fat kids
It is, apparently, a matter of national security:
First lady Michelle Obama plans to warn in remarks Monday that the nation is seeing “a groundswell of support” for curbing childhood obesity, and she is unveiling new ammunition from current and retired military leaders.
“Military leaders … tell us that when more than one in four young people are unqualified for military service because of their weight,” the first lady says in the prepared remarks, “childhood obesity isn’t just a public health threat, it’s not just an economic threat, it’s a national security threat as well.”
If this doesn’t lead you to start being more skeptical every time Washington rings the “national security” bell and expects you to begin salivating in acceptance of gate rape or whatever their latest crime against the citizenry is, you’re hopeless. But the logic is inexorable. If national security threats justify terrorist designations as we have been reliably informed by the judicial system, and a terrorist designation permits the president to assassinate American citizens as we have also been reliably informed by the nation’s courts, then based on clearly the White House would be justified in ordering Predators to begin raining Hellfire missiles down on playgrounds filled with obese little fatties.