This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Whistling past Iran

    The AP (by way of the Wall Street Journal) is telling us that Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said that the US is in no position to invade Iran;

    “We do not see America in a position to impose another crisis on its tax payers inside America by starting another war in the region,” Mr. Mottaki told reporters.

    Hey, I got news for ya, Junior, it’s all the same war. Yeah, the war began over Hussein, but he’s gone now. Because Iranians couldn’t resist killing Americans, they’ve created their own war in the Middle East post-Hussein. 

    The International Tribune reports that in a raid in Hilla, US troops found more evidence of Iran’s involvement;

    The new evidence includes infrared sensors, electronic triggering devices, and information about plastic explosives used in bombs that the Americans say leads directly back to Iran. The explosive material, triggering devices, other components, and the method of assembly all produce weapons with an Iranian signature that has never been found outside Iraq or southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is believed to have used weapons supplied by Iran, the Americans say.

    This is just phase two of the war. It’s been suspected for years that most of the Taliban leaders went to Iran after the US-backed attack drove them from power, and now weapons and explosives designed particularly to kill US troops are believed to be coming from there. And they’re apparently shielding Mookie al-Sadr from his inevitable demise.

    Of course the International Tribune throws in some doubt that it’s really Iran that’s involved;

    But critics assert that nearly all the bomb components could have been produced in Iraq or somewhere else in the region. Even if the evidence were to establish that Iran is the source, they add, that does not necessarily mean that the Iranian leadership is responsible.

    But an expert says of the copper disc components of some of the devices;

    Could copper discs be manufactured with the required precision in Iraq? “You can never be certain,” Weber said. But he said that “having studied all these groups, I’ve only seen EFPs used in two areas of the world: The Levant and here,” meaning Hezbollah areas of Lebanon and in Iraq. Hezbollah is thought to be directly armed and trained by Iran.

    The Iranian government has brought this inevitable war on themselves.

  • Mookey al-Sadr feeling the “surge”

    According to an AP story in the Washington Times, lovable butterball, al-Sadr sent a message to his followers that he had read by an aide;

    “I’m certain, just like all oppressed Iraqis are certain, that no security plan will work, and no good will come of any occupier,” Sheik al-Sadr said in the statement.
        “Here we are, watching booby-trapped cars exploding to harvest thousands of innocent lives from our beloved people in the middle of a security plan that is controlled by an occupier who does as he pleases.”

    Back in January, al Sadr said the same thing, and then started feeling the heat and dashed off to Iran this month – I guess giving your life for islam is a priviege that’s reserved for the rank-and-file dregs. Now that he’s safely in Iran, he feels his oats enough to flex his lips and, through an aide, incite his troops back into the streets. The only reason he took his militia off the street was to keep them from being irradicated by the US forces. And keep them around to consolidate his own power after the US left.

    I hope US commanders just surge the living shit out of the Mahdi Army and don’t stop this time. It’s a pretty good guess that they’re running out of time and equipment. The AP reports that another weapons cache suspected to be derived from Iran has been discovered outside of Baghdad which brings the total to 63 caches found since February 15th.

    Curt at Flopping Aces discusses the AP’s beclowning of the al-Sadr story.

  • EJ Dionne is still smearing like it’s 1998

    My favorite Leftist moron (you can hear him lisping as you read), EJ Dionne proves that he doesn’t understand the reality of the war against terrorists in today’s Washington Post;

    The fabricate-and-smear cycle illustrated so dramatically during the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby explains why President Bush is failing to rally support for the latest iteration of his Iraq policy. The administration’s willingness at the outset to say anything, no matter how questionable, to justify the war has destroyed its credibility.

    He could be talking about the Clinton Administration, couldn’t he? He completely disregards the fact that Joe Wilson has lied more times to the American people than the entire Democrat Party has lied to the American people in it’s two-hundred-year history. He claims he was sent to Nigeria by the Vice President (in his New York Times opinion piece) whic turned out to be false. He went on to claim that his wife had nothing to do with his being sent to Nigeria, which turned out to be false as well. 

    Wilson claimed that there was no evidence that Hussein had been shopping for uranium in Nigeria, which is also false. Wilson claimed that the Bush Administration “outed” his wife the secret squirrel CIA agent, yet it turns out that Wilson himself outed her to General Paul Valelly.

    So why does Dionne bring up that old hack again? To compare it to Cheney’s statement last week about Blinky the Botox Queen;

    Yet Cheney has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. His latest demon is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he accuses of validating al-Qaeda’s objectives.

    “Al-Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will,” Cheney told ABC News on Friday by way of explaining his earlier attack on the speaker. “That’s their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we’ll quit and go home.”

    Cheney added: “And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaeda. I said it, and I meant it.”

    Dionne doesn’t think this is productive (much like Pelosi herself in her statement that I reported last week);

    No doubt he did, and those words illustrate the administration’s political methodology from the very beginning of its public campaign against Iraq. Back in 2002 and early 2003, it browbeat a reluctant country into this war by making assertions about an Iraqi nuclear program that proved to be groundless and by inventing ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that didn’t exist.

    Then, once our troops were committed, anyone who had second thoughts could be trashed and driven back as a pro-terrorist weakling. The quagmire would be self-perpetuating: Once you checked in, you could never leave.

    Um, EJ, think maybe because your side (ya know the side that the editorial staff of your own paper thinks is “alarmingly uneducated about conditions in Iraq” ) has been lying since the beginning. Can I mention the “quagmire” word to which you and your buddies have been clinging since before the troops set foot in Iraq? Before the first sand storm hit on the second day, ya’all were invoking Viet Nam (which you were also responsible for prolonging with the rest of your chattering class).

    In fact, the crowd at the Huffington Post, more specifically, Paul Abrams can’t resist the urge to invoke Viet Nam even today – as if to make my point for me, and proving you a yammering fool.

    And in case you haven’t noticed, EJ, dear boy, the Left are completely pro-terrorist, and complete weaklings on the war against terrorists. You blast our troops for minute violations of the law of land warfare, and completely overlook the enemies’ huge, nose-on-your-face violations. Ya’all are willing to forgive complete nutjobs, while warning that we can’t stop people who intend to do us real harm. What’s up with that, EJ?

    And now Ms. Rice is jumping in, too. According to Eric Pfeiffer at the Washington Times this morning;

    Miss Rice strongly criticized the Democrats’ plans, some of which would also restrict what actions U.S. troops may take or put impossible conditions on their funding.
        “I think policies that diminish the flexibility of the commanders, the commander in chief, but especially the commanders in the field, that disrupt the normal process of allowing the executive branch to determine things like training times and so forth, this would be a problem,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”
        She said that while “it’s very important for to have the oversight role when it comes to the execution of policy in the field, there has to be a clear relationship between the commander in chief and the commanders in the field.”
        “If you ever disrupt that chain, then you’re going to have the worst of micromanagement of military affairs, and it’s always served us badly in the past,” Miss Rice said.

    So, I guess EJ is going to get on the name-calling bandwagon against the Madam Secretary now.

    And Carl Levin admits that he wants to enable terrorists;

    Mr. Levin said Democrats still plan to bring forward a resolution that reverses the congressional authorization for President Bush to invade Iraq. Democrats have said they would approve a new resolution limiting the scope of Mr. Bush’s ability to wage war in Iraq, with an aim to bring home most U.S. forces from the country by March 2008.
        “Hopefully, we’re going to come with a resolution which is going to modify, in effect, the previous resolution that was very broad,”

    “Well, then we have a constitutional battle on our hands because this is a binding resolution,” he said. “It would be very difficult, I think, for him to sustain that position given the fact that he has relied so heavily on our resolution authorizing him to go to war in the first place.”

    Doesn’t sound like any of the Democrats want the US to win, does it, Dionne, Jr.? In fact, it seems that Democrats are doing their best to lose while trying to rewrite the Constitution. Doesn’t sound like the American thing to do, does it?

  • Global warming

    That global warming is getting all over the driveway again.

  • Albright; Iraq policy worst disaster in US foreign policy history

    The ugliest, and arguably the most worthless Secretary of State in history, Madeleine Albright, claims that Iraq may be the greatest US foreign policy failure in history;

    “I think that Iraq is going to go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy,” Albright said, with former President Jimmy Carter at her side in one of a series of “Conversations at the Carter Center.”

    “We have lost the element of goodness in American power, and we have lost our moral authority,” she said. “The job of the next president will be to restore the goodness of American power.”

    I guess she didn’t hear that Haiti is still going badly, the Somalis just now rid themselves, for however briefly, of the al Qaida influeces in their country after the Klintoons bailed on them nearly 13 years ago. How’s that Bosnia thing going, Maddy? Remember the one that you and the guys promised we’d be out of 11 years ago?

    And do you remember that Yassir Arafat was begging for a peace deal with Israel under President Bush 41, but by the end of your administration, he was strutting around rejecting the sweetheart deals you and your boss were offering?

    Since you had Jimmy Carter next to you, ask him how the hostage crisis went in Iran. Ask him about the 9,000 Soviet combat soldiers that were stationed in Cuba to prevent us from responding to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (as if Carter would have responded anyway). And I guess a reasonable person could draw a straight line from the policy failures of Carter and Clintoon to the troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan today, couldn’t they?

    Let’s talk about the “goodness” of American power. The truth is, Maddy, most Americans could give a tiny rat’s ass what the rest of the world thinks of us as long as we have food on the table, clothes on our backs and a roof over our heads. And we’re not worried that we might get blown to pieces on the way to the supermarket this morning. 

    Regardless of what you might think, the “goodness” of American power is in the eyes of the beholder. Countries who don’t see the goodness of America’s power today aren’t acting in the best interests of their own people, and they certainly don’t care a whit whether you, an American (I’m guessing you’re an American this week) are still breathing in the morning.

    Oh, and then, all pumped by Maddy, Jimmy Carter (my favorite pointer-outer of American failures) started yapping;

    Carter said all previous presidents have said the United States would go to war only if its security was endangered, but that President Bush made it clear that there is a new policy of pre-emptive war.

    Um, Jimmy, do you remember the Carter Doctrine? Do you remember that you pre-emptively stationed a couple of US warships in the Persian Gulf to protect the free flow of Gulf oil at market prices? Apparently not.

    This what is killing the Democrat Party. The people who claim to be the voice of the Democrat Party just act like they’re so damn smart – and there are enough syncophantic lunkheads out there who want to be thought of as smart, too. So they just nod and smile like a class full of college freshmen who just heard the first paragraph of The Odessey read to them in Greek.Then the lunkheads go forth and regurgitate this baseless, vile stuff everywhere across the internet on discussion boards – then they link to mierda like this as if it’s some sort of evidence of their towering intellect. And other lunkheads join the choir.

    Someone prove me wrong and tell me about one enduring foreign policy triumph of either Carter or Albright. Just one. Successfully forcing the Soviet Union to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1988 by boycotting the Moscow Olympics in 1980 doesn’t count, however.

  • Patriotic Pelosi gets her knickers twisted

    According to AP (masquerading as My Way News), VP Cheney said;

    “I think if we were to do what Speaker Pelosi and Congressman Murtha are suggesting, all we will do is validate the al-Qaida strategy,” the vice president told ABC News. “The al-Qaida strategy is to break the will of the American people … try to persuade us to throw in the towel and come home, and then they win because we quit.”

    Testosterone-engorged Pelosi then jumps on the table (figuratively, of course) and takes offense, according to Fox News Channel;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday phoned President Bush to air her complaints over Vice President Dick Cheney‘s comments that the Congressional Democrats’ plan for Iraq would “validate the Al Qaeda strategy.”

    Pelosi, who said she could not reach the president, said Cheney’s comments wrongly questioned critics’ patriotism and ignored Bush’s call for openness on Iraq strategy.

    “You cannot say as the president of the United States, ‘I welcome disagreement in a time of war,’ and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country,” the speaker said.

    And I guess disagreement is a one-way street in Pelosi-land. A no-confidence vote on our military engaged with the enemy isn’t acting against our national security a bit, eh? For her to characterize the VP’s comments like that is just specious yammering by the intellectually vacant Blinky Botox. How’s that for disagreement, Nan?

    What’s all of this crap about being patriotic suddenly? Before September 2001, you couldn’t find two leftists who’d admit to being patriots that you could rub together in the entire nation. Now suddenly, their knickers get twisted when you question their committment to our winning this war against terrorists. Although the thought of rubbing Pelosi and Murtha against each other is enough to make me skip lunch today.

  • My favorite George Washington story

    Since I was a child, George Washington has always been my hero. He led an army to victory over the most powerful army in the world and then set the greatest nation on earth on it’s path to bring peoples’ government to the world. But I think my favorite story about him is this one;

    Once the army was in mutiny, not against George Washington but against the Congress that had not paid the soldiers in months. The troops on their march against the Congress, were met by officers who promised a meeting the next day at 10:00 AM with the commanding general. Spirits were high and not friendly. Few thought that Washington would brave a confrontation with the mutinous troops. Indeed, the clock was about to strike 10:00 AM and there was no general in sight. Only seconds before the clock struck, the meeting house door slammed opened and George Washington briskly marched in. What followed was to me one of the most extraordinary speeches in history. General Washington in no way began in a conciliatory fashion. He was the general. He told the troops that the meeting would be held with full military discipline. The speech continued for some time when he picked up a letter with the troops demands. He squinted at the letter, then fumbled for his glasses and said that not only had he grown gray in the service of his country, but his eyes now needed glasses. The troops had never seen his glasses. He called to one veteran, and remembered an incident during a battle. He recognized another veteran, and briefly spoke to him. Was he not with them at all times especially the worst of times? When they were cold at Valley Forge, he was cold. When they were not paid, he was not paid. When they were hungry, he was hungry. When the battle was the worst he had been on the front line. He began to read the demands with some difficulty. The soldiers were embarrassed for, and saddened by their commander’s eyesight and difficulty. The eyes of many of the battle veterans began to water, and they stopped the general; apologized to him, and asked if he would take their grievances to the Congress. George Washington was in the hearts of his soldiers.

    How many politicians today could resist riding at the head of the only armed force on the continent to seize the reins of a weak government? I can think of only a few who would have chosen the course George Washington took.

    It was just a few years ago that I finally got to live my childhood dream and tour Mount Vernon and walk in the steps of our most important founding father. I get misty when I follow him down the back stairs from his bedroom to his study that he walked in the early morning darkness preparing for his day as a farmer. A farmer who rejected the opportunity to be King.

    But the most important object to me in the entire house is in the front entrance.

    On the wall is a simple iron key;

     

     Actually, it’s the key to the Bastille presented to Washington by General Lafayette. To me it’s a reminder that not only should Washington get credit for establishing this nation as a free nation, but he’s also responsible for every nation on earth that calls themselves a democracy.  

    And today is his birthday - please remember him, because I’m fairly sure he was thinking of you.

  • I guess ya hafta be there to understand

    After Tony Blair announced that the UK was drawing down 1/3 of it’s presence in Iraq, the whiteflag Republicans started freaking out according to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker;

    “What I’m worried about is that the American public will be quite perplexed by the president adding forces while our principal ally is subtracting forces,” said Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a longtime war supporter who opposes Bush’s troop increase. “That is the burden we are being left with here.”

    The notion that the British pullback actually signals success sounds like bad spin, added Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). “I think it’s Alice in Wonderland looking through the looking glass,” he said.

    It’s almost as if they didn’t believe the President when he said we wouldn’t be in Iraq one more minute than we needed to be there. Blair is only pulling 1/3 fewer troops than he has now because THEY’RE NOT NEEDED. When was the last time we heard of a major assault in predominantly Shi’ite Basra?

    In fact on the second internet page of the WaPo story cooler heads are quoted;

    “What the British are doing, and what we really need to do, is to tease out the cultural complexities of this thing,” said Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest (R-Md.). “On the one hand, they are signaling to all the Iraqi people, whatever sect they are — Sunnis, Shias, Kurds — they are not going to be an occupying force. That’s a powerful signal to send. And the other signal is that they are passing the torch to the Iraqis, who are the only ones who can handle this ancient — I’d say primitive — sectarian dispute.”

    The White House argued that comparing the British situation in Basra and the U.S. position in Baghdad fundamentally distorts reality. The south, where the British have been in charge, has no Sunni insurgency and far less violence than Baghdad or Anbar. The coalition plan all along has been to pull out foreign troops when an area is ready for Iraqi control, the White House said.

    The announcement was hardly a surprise to Bush Administration despite the WaPo’s opinion posited as a headline that it was awkward timing. Sharon Behn of the Washington Times quotes Secretary of State Rice;

    “The coalition remains intact,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to Berlin. “It is the plan that — as it is possible to transfer responsibilities to the Iraqis — coalition forces would no longer be needed.”

    And the Brits aren’t withdrawing completely. Apparently Prince Harry is being deployed to Iraq in the Spring;

    Harry – a second lieutenant – has expressed his desire to serve alongside his comrades in Iraq, saying that there was “no way” he was going to undergo rigorous training and then stay away from the battlefield. He graduated last year from Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

    Good on him! That might help the British understand why soldiers go to war. Might.

    According to BBC News, Tony Blair insists that he’s not opposed to sending more troops if they’re needed in Iraq again;

    However, when he was asked about reversing that decision on the Today programme, he said: “I don’t want to get into speculating about that because we have the full combat capability that’s there.

    “So, if we’re needed to go back in any special set of circumstances we can, but that’s not the same as then increasing back the number.” 

    So how the Washington Post considers this “awkward”, I have no idea.

    UPDATE; By way of Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, I discovered that Reihl World View has a link up to a January 11, 2007 BBC article announcing Blair’s plan to withdraw some troops from Iraq.