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

Author: Jonn Lilyea

  • Axis of Evil in disarray?

    Looking at two stories today, one from James T. Hackett and published in the Washington Times, the other by way of Captain’s Quarters in the Gulf in the Media describe the economic morass in North Korea and Iran, respectively.

    According to Hackett, North Korea is having problems internally because Il can’t pay off his military and political leaders;

    Stories out of North Korea may explain the government’s belligerence. South Korean intelligence sources claim to have the text of remarks Kim Jong-il made to government and military leaders shortly after the July missile launch. Mr. Kim reportedly said he decided to launch the missiles because of the “serious situation within North Korea.”
        The serious situation is the threat to his regime caused by unrest resulting from economic difficulties and food shortages. A South Korean aid official told the press the fuel shortage in the North is worse than he has ever seen it, and power outages are more frequent than at any time in the last 10 years. South Korean intelligence reportedly claims the unrest has spread to the party, government, and military elites who keep Chairman Kim in power.

    While in Iran, according to the Agence France-Presse story;

    Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh has lamented that the development of Iran’s oil industry was suffering from US pressure.

    “Iran has been under different sanctions for years and many companies have not been able to cooperate with our country for fear of US pressures,” Vaziri Hamaneh said, according to the semi-official news agency Fars on Tuesday.

    “They even do not easily deliver some dual-purpose equipment that we had previously bought. They cause trouble for us under different pretexts,” he said.

    “Foreign banks have been refusing to cooperate in the field of investment and financing,” he said, adding that in response Iran has put its focus on domestic sources to replace foreign companies.

    So, in a manner reminiscent on a smaller scale to what the West did to the Soviet Union, we appear to be breaking them. But, we don’t have the benefit of an Iranian or Korean Gorbachov who will react predictably and rationally to their collapse. Instead, we have two whackjobs who might try to retain their power by lashing out at their nearest perceived enemy (much like how Tom Clancy predicted the Soviet Union would react in Red Storm Rising) to try to unite their populace behind them. And with oil-rich Chavez in Venezuela on their side, it may trigger a real oil war.

  • Biden will block troop increases

    According to a Washington Times story, Senator Joseph “Can you notice my hair plugs” Biden will bock troop level increases in Iraq;

     …he will try to block President Bush from sending an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq, calling it “the absolute wrong strategy.”
        Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware plans three straight weeks of congressional hearings on Iraq policy next month in hopes of persuading the president to abandon a plan he is thought to be seriously considering.
        “We’ve already broken Iraq. We’re about to break the United States military” by sending more troops, said Mr. Biden, who is seeking the 2008 presidential nomination.

    So what does he know? When is the last time Biden made a correct call on any foreign policy we’ve conducted during his Senatorial tenure? And if his advice is so critical, why is he waiting until next month to propose this grand strategy of his? Joe, sit down and shut up. Let the grown ups win the war.

  • Goodbye, Mr. President

    I guess everyone knows President Ford died last night at the age of 93. Everyone seems to be blogging about his presidency this morning like Captain’s Quarters, Flopping Aces, Michelle Malkin, etc. So I thought to take the time to pay my own respects.

    President Ford is the only Republican President that I haven’t voted for, since, to my endless shame, I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 when I was 21. I saw him in person once from afar. When I was a brand-spanking-new private fresh out of jump school, my company, B Co. 1/75th Infantry was selected to march in the 200th Birthday of the Army celebration at Fort Benning, GA on June 14, 1975. We were training at Fort Bragg, NC and jerked out of the field, issued new camoflage uniforms and loaded into aircraft at Pope AFB and kicked out over Friar Field. Watching his brand new Ranger Battalion jump was President Ford. The next day, spit-polished we passed while he reviewed the newly-minted elite unit.

    In my bookcase, I have forty-or-so first edition, signed books that I’ve collected over the years by various authors that range from fiction authors to Presidents. In fact, I have at least one book by every Republican President since Mr. Nixon. Among them is a signed copy of Mr. Ford’s “Humor and the Presidency” – I spent a lot of money on that one in an auction because to me, it embodied Mr. Ford. Since the book will last alot longer than I will, I wanted whoever gets my collection eventually knows that President Ford, despite everything that he faced in his short, accidental tenure, he was still able to laugh at himself, and laugh with everyone around him.

    God bless you, President Ford.

  • Democrats and the military

    Finally, something that stunned me today while reading James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today. He unearthed an op/ed from the NY Times’ Kelly M. Greenhill from last February. How I missed this, I’ll never know;

    Four decades ago, during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara created Project 100,000, a program intended to help the approximately 300,000 men who annually failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test for reasons of aptitude. The idea behind Mr. McNamara’s scheme was that the military would annually absorb 100,000 of the country’s “subterranean poor” — people who would otherwise be rejected.

    Using a variety of “educational and medical techniques,” the Pentagon would “salvage” these Category IV recruits first for military careers and later for more productive roles in society. Project 100,000 recruits — known as New Standards Men — would then return to civilian life with new skills and aptitudes that would allow them to “reverse the downward spiral of human decay.”

    Mr. McNamara further concluded that the best way to demonstrate that the induction of New Standards Men would prove beneficial was to keep their status hidden from their commanders. In other words, Project 100,000 was a blind experiment run on the military amid the escalation of hostilities in Southeast Asia.

    Despite the skepticism of the military leadership and objections from some of Mr. McNamara’s own advisers, the first New Standards Men began entering service in October 1966. By the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, approximately 150,000 had been inducted.

    The test results;

    In the program’s first three years, nearly half of the Army’s and well over 50 percent of the Marines’ New Standards Men were assigned to combat specialties. The results were not surprising: a Project 100,000 recruit who entered the Marine Corps in 1968 was two and a half times more likely to die in combat than his higher-aptitude compatriots. After all, they tended to be the ones in the line of fire.

    I guess that’s where John Kerry, John Murtha and Charles Rangel got their experience in combat.

  • Why we fight

    I’m reminded of the collective ignorance of the media today by reading this stupid AP article; U.S. Deaths in Iraq Exceed 9-11 Count. I’ve seen others blog about it, like Little Green Footballs who calls it a “grim milestone watch”, but I think it’s a total misrepresentation of the entire war against terror.

    The Left claims that they understand why we went to war in Afghanistan, the Taliban supported those who attacked us, supposedly. So we were right to unseat the Taliban – we could’ve stopped there, they say. Yup, we could, if the war was about revenge.

    Since the war in Iraq has cost more American lives than were lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the war is a failure; if the war was about revenge. We could focus our military assets in Iraq on finding bin Laden in Afghanistan instead; if the war is about revenge.

    This war is about our national security, not revenge. Petty, small-minded people plan out acts of revenge – petty, small minded people like the people we’re battling in the Middle East. Petty, small-minded people who’ve been attacking us for more than a decade.

    When we were attacked countless times in the 90s, we did nothing. That brought about the attack on September 11th. September 11th isn’t an event that survives all by itself in history. It doesn’t mark a single unprovoked strike against the United States, rather it’s the highwater mark of a series of unanswered attacks.

    Only empty-headed journalistists and equally-empty-headed populist political candidates try to turn this into a war of empty platitudes, into 30-second sound bites about eye-for-an-eye, useless acts of revenge. It’s about the survival of Western Civilization. If this war against terror is indeed about revenge, we’ve already lost it – we’ll have become Stone Age warriors like our enemy.

  • Learning the wrong lessons

    While perusing the usual newspapers this morning, I read about the war in Somalia with Ethiopia in the Washington Post. There’s so little in the news about this, it’s difficult to find anything sometimes.

    But the war is directly related to our own war against terror, since Islamofacists learned about our weak spot from Clinton’s hasty withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. Saddam Hussein made it mandatory for his military leaders to watch the film “Black Hawk Down” in the days preceding the US war against Hussein in 2003 to demonstrate how easy it is to destroy our public will to fight our enemies despite our battlefield victories.

    About half way down the WaPo story is a quote from some imbecile named John Prendergast, “a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group in Washington”. He’s quoted as saying;

    “Hasn’t anyone heard of Iraq? A military strategy of ‘countering terrorism’ never works and will likely blow up in their faces.”

    I wonder what this “senior analyst” would have us do? Apparently, well-illustrated by the situation in Somalia, leaving the terrorists alone doesn’t work. As illustrated by Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton with Yassir Arafat, negotiations don’t work, either. So what’s the solution Junior Space Cadet John Prendergast?

    According to the latest Pentagon reports, specifically the DoD report to Congress last month, the Iraqis are moving towards stability, perhaps not as quickly as we’d like, but they’re going in the right direction. If we had removed Hussein and then left Iraq to it’s own devices (like we did in Panama in 1989 which already had a democraticly-elected government and a law-enforcement entity which were more loyal to the people than to Noriega), it would have become the new Somalia.

    In the Washington Times this morning, there’s an Associated Press story that claims that Iran is on the precipice of economic ruin, and if we only wait long enough, internal unrest will bring down the current regime. Unless, of course, the Iranian population believes the the US and Israel are the source of all of the evil in the world and commit themselves to destroying us in the interim. Which they already believe, by the way, Roger Stern, of Johns Hopkins. Bombing them before they get the nuclear bomb is a lot safer than a hungry, angry population with a nuclear bomb.

    So the “Peace At Any Cost” crowd have finally found their voices and the mainstream press is more than willing to broadcast their ill-conceived message. There are thousands of comparisions to Neville Chamberlain on the internet, so I’ll spare my readers the same lame paraphrases.

    The truth is; these aren’t pro-Peace voices. They’re anti-Bush, anti-Republican and anti-American voices. They’re the voices of the corrupt and morally bankrupt who put cheap politics above our welfare and safety. It would be more accurate to call them the “Democrat Majority at-any-cost” voices.

    In attempting to research this piece, I found thousands of articles that count the American and Coalition dead and wounded, but not a single chart depicting the other side’s losses One CBC article even made a point of mentioning that because the Pentagon doesn’t release enemy casualties, they don’t know what the number is – as if they’d believe the Pentagon number anyway. The Pentagon has provided them an excuse for being intellectually bankrupt.

  • Thanks, Troops

    I just want to thank all of my readers who are still in uniform for giving the citizens of this great country another peaceful and hopeful holiday.

  • Ted Kennedy demonstrates definition of bi-partisan

    So the President concedes a minimum wage hike to Democrats to show them he’s willing to work with them. And he throws in a tax break for small businesses, who would be hit hardest by paying their unskilled, entry-level employees more money. Only seems reasonable doesn’t it? Since, according to the Democrats for the last six years, politics is compromise.

    Nope not for Ted Kennedy. He wants a “clean bill” that “doesn’t have any baggage” Clean? Baggage? Clean wouldn’t include a tax cut for small businesses who would bear the greatest burden of a minimum wage hike? Baggage like incentives to dissuade employers from slashing their entry-level jobs?

    Kennedy misrepresents the demographics of minimum wage earners when he claims that they have been paid the low minimum wage for 10 years. Anyone who is still making minimum wage at the same job for the last ten years has bigger problems than a pittance pay raise.

    Back on October 21st, I exploded the myth of the minimum wage earner using the Labor Statistics Bureau’ numbers. Less than 1% of American workers make minimum wage. More than half of minimum wage earners are under the age of 25. And half of minimum wage workers are in the food service industry and earn tips over-and-above their basic salary.

    But since when has Ted Kennedy ever paid attention to the truth?