Tag: war

Somehow, I doubt that the third time will prove the charm:

U.S. and British warships have reportedly launched the opening salvo of the intervention in Libya — called Operation Odyssey Dawn — firing some 110 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Qaddafi anti-air defenses, mostly on the coast of Western Libya and extending between Tripoli and Benghazi. Word is that U.S. AFRICOM will run the first few days of the operation in an effort to “shape the battlefield” before turning over command to another member of the coalition.

The initial launch also included the launching of American electronic warfare aircraft.

Nothing spells decline and fall like a bankrupt, demographically dying empire getting entangled in one unnecessary military conflict after another.

UPDATE – This is certainly an amusing development: A hard-core group of liberal House Democrats is questioning the constitutionality of U.S. missile strikes against Libya, with one lawmaker raising the prospect of impeachment during a Democratic Caucus conference call on Saturday.

I told you that the Democratic elders want to get rid of Obama a while ago. There is absolutely no way they want him leading them into the 2012 electoral campaign. And it would be absolutely hilarious to see Democrats leading the impeachment charge against this lamest of first-term lame ducks.

The Tripoli Trap

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.