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

Author: Poetrooper

  • Iranian General’s Hare-brained Chutzpah

    What do you suppose is it about the leaders, particularly the generals and admirals, of so many Middle Eastern nations, that leads them to be so boastful? Is it a cultural thing? Or is their psychological indoctrination as young officers so intense and irresistible that it overwhelms their common sense? One could almost wonder if Middle Eastern military academies include in their curricula such courses as Basic Battlefield Saber Rattling I&II, Advanced War Zone Saber Rattling and then perhaps post-graduate courses in Geo-Apocalyptic Saber Rattling?

    We all remember Saddam Hussein’s bravado prior to the Gulf War, him standing on balconies brandishing automatic pistols or assault rifles, firing them into the air above the heads of adoring throngs of loyal Iraqis who believed his boasts about destroying the infidel Americans in the “Mother of All Battles.” He got his Mother of All Battles, alright, and it didn’t go too well for his supposedly indestructible Revolutionary Guards, much less his lesser units. Proving that the ingrained tendency to bluster is undeterred by hard lethal lessons, Saddam repeated his public demonstrations of bravado preceding the Second Gulf War, the MoAB that resulted in the total destruction of his vaunted Guards units as well as his own ignominious execution by hanging.

    Now here we are years later and similar braggadocio is coming from Saddam’s old nemesis, Iran. Faced with possible military action by western powers to halt Iranian development of nuclear weapons, Iran’s generals and admirals are boasting that they will rain death and destruction on the United States and Israel. This time the bluster is coming from the Iranian version of the Republican Guards, the Revolutionary Guards, one of whose generals seems just a bit brash:

    The semiofficial Fars news agency quoted Gen. Ami Ali Hajizadeh of the Revolutionary Guards as saying U.S. bases are in range of Iran’s missiles and could be hit in retaliatory strikes. He referred to Israel as “occupied territories.”

    “Measures have been taken so that we could destroy all these bases in the early minutes of an attack,” said Hajizadeh, chief of the Guards’ air-space division.

    All these bases, huh? The swaggering general, commander of the air wing of the Guards, is also confident that his command is a match for the U.S. Navy vessels now in the Persian Gulf:

    Hajizadeh said the Guards also successfully test fired an anti-ship missile that could sink U.S. warships in the Gulf. Gen. Hajizadeh told state TV that the shore-to-sea ballistic missile, called “Persian Gulf,” has a range of 300 kilometers (180 miles).

    Someone should inform the general that test firing a missile is a tad different situation from deploying and using missiles tactically. My advice to General Ali would be to go to this official Navy website and scroll through the warfighting capabilities explained there, keeping in mind that the information is several years old, meaning, no doubt, that the technologies and capabilities revealed there are even more advanced and effective by now. He should pay particular attention to the defensive, anti-missile systems such as the Aegis BMDS and the Sea Sparrow. His naval counterpart, on the other hand, might be more interested in the shipboard anti-surface (anti-fast boat) weaponry such as the Phalanx Close In Weapon System (CIWS) or the new, remotely-operated Typhoon chain gun created by Israel’s Raphael Corporation and now on many U.S. vessels. Of course, none of this even takes into account the hundreds of combat aircraft, both carrier-borne jet fighters and attack helicopters available to the admiral commanding the battle area.

    Somehow, I don’t think the United States Navy is breaking sweat over the warfighting prowess of the Revolutionary Guards. Many of our older Navy commanders are probably mindful of the supposedly invincible Republican Guards of Iraq and how most of them ended up. Do you suppose General Ali will still have such hare-brained chutzpah once his Revolutionary Guards have suffered a similar fate?

    If he’s still alive, that is…

    Crossposted at American Thinker somewhere.

  • Horse Soldiers

    There is a very interesting and informative video up over at Daily Caller, “Horse Soldiers,” that is quite appropriate viewing for this Independence Day. The video is about a small U.S. special operations team that went into Afghanistan immediately following the 9/11 attack to strike at the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in their homeland. It’s a short video that should be expanded into a full-blown, Hollywood production but of course there’s little chance of that because Americans are the good guys. There’s even a female in a major role, the avenging “Angel of Death.”
    Go watch it…it’s well worth your time.

  • Why We Must Tolerate Trolls

    I’m new to TAH, as both a contributor and a commenter. I must admit to a bit of surprise to discover that a website dedicated to presenting veterans’ and warrior’s views to an essentially veterans’ and warrior’s community has a few liberal trolls lurking ‘neath the bridge of communication that exists here.
    Trolls are so truly like teenagers in that they are sure that they and only they know the truth about everything. Actually, I expect that many of the trolls who cruise through IAH are probably, in fact, teenagers or young college students, as their posts would seem to indicate. So stridently sure of themselves, they are quick to dismiss the collective, hard-earned through hard experience wisdom of the regular members and readers of this site. Never having been in combat, they feel comfortable telling those of us who have, how wrong we are.

    I say that trolls are like teenagers, but that truth actually extends to the entire liberal world from which they venture out to pester and aggravate adherents to sites such as IAH. They are childlike in everything they post, constantly seeking to prove that those of us here with so much more actual world and life experience are just a bunch of clueless simpletons. Ah, does that remind you of the know-it-all teenagers in your own families?

    Notice something else about the trolls who post here? They always do so with much passion, the fiery, know-it-all passion of youth. I can’t remember the comedian who made the trenchant observation that we should turn over the operations of all government to teenagers: “While they still know it all.” What a great line and an obvious consideration we must keep in mind when these drive-by adolescents cruise through IAH and shout their expletives out the partially opened windows of their closed minds. If you note the shouting of such a troll as Insipid, (who on earth would ever take such an idiotic username unless he really didn’t understand the meaning of the word) you can quickly discern that this boy really doesn’t have much life experience. Is he bright? Well, perhaps but in such a way that his intellect has been subjugated to his ideology, an unfortunate outcome for him.

    I must confess that I am not immune to rising to the bait on occasion. When I should just sit back and smile at the ignorance being offered up by the likes of Insipid, I sometimes simply can’t resist the bugle call to action to defend either my own posting or the opinion of some other IAH regular. I suppose you could liken me to some old slavering dog layin’ on the porch who just can’t resist the temptation of chasing that coon that wanders into the yard. OK, Insipid, make something racist out of that.

    I know, I know, it’s foolish in the extreme to respond to a teenager, but sometimes I just can’t help myself, as when Insipid calls me a racist. I would wager that I have far more interracial life experiences, both good and bad, than young Insipid ever imagined having. Therefore when he calls me a racist I want to sit down with him and explain to him the realities of racial co-existence in modern America. I don’t believe Insipid has a clue. His cluelessness makes me wonder if he’s not some little rich kid who’s never worked a day in his life. The real truth is, I’d like to sit down across from him and maybe slap a little sense into him.
    Ah, that’s just wishful thinking…

    Whatever, here’s a heads-up to Insipid and the other trolls at this site: I’m an old poor boy who worked his way up in the United States Army and life to my present position where spotting phonies isn’t too difficult.

    Know what I would welcome her? An old, been there, done that type troll who in spite of living a life of believing in liberal foolishness still drinks the Kool-Aid and would like to contest the rest of us at TAH. Swatting young fools like Intrepid doesn’t really provide any intellectual challenge. Perhaps an old liberal fool might afford a more worthy opponent.
    Nah, a liberal fool is a liberal fool and the grey ponytail is a giveaway.

  • The Roles of the Races

    I suppose it’s truly silly of white victims of black criminals to expect equal treatment by the mainstream media. But still, it’s aggravating when we keep getting smacked in the face repeatedly with examples like this. Here we have a spontaneous act of senseless and extreme violence perpetrated against an innocent, white male out walking his dog, by a black male and it is reported without any hint that the attack could have been racially motivated.

    Reverse the races of the two men involved and imagine how this would be delivered to the public. The white perp’s race would be in the first paragraph if not the first sentence and the term possible hate crime would follow closely. Instead of the calm reporting of the facts as in this article, there would be a tone of outrage conveyed and demands for immediate police apprehension of this murderous white bigot whose violent racism has instilled a sense of fear throughout Chicago’s black communities. You get the drift.

    I suppose we should give credit to the Chicago NBC affiliate for at least identifying the attacker as black, a fact surely to go unreported should the story get picked up by the networks, that being an unlikely scenario considering the roles of the races.

    View more videos at: http://nbcchicago.com.

  • Why Does Obama Bow?

    This is a topic rife with psychological and political implications, most of which will not be welcomed in the liberal world of Obama supporters. This supposedly most confident man we elected to lead our country to greatness back in 2008 seems to have some inherent tendency to show deference to foreign leaders of countries of far lesser global importance and strength than our own.

    Why is this, the average American might ask?

    My immediate assessment is that this is simply a manifestation of the huge fraud perpetrated against the American people in 2008 when we elected an inexperienced, first-term senator, whose major life accomplishment had been as a former community organizer, to be the president of the United States. He didn’t deserve the position nor the honor. Nor did he deserve the phony Nobel Prize for Peace bestowed for nothing more than being Europe’s loudest, leading, liberal barking dog. He well knew he didn’t deserve the office or the honor and now, in moments of meeting more intelligent, more accomplished and more deserving politicians in the world, men and women of actual accomplishment in their own countries, he simply can’t restrain himself from displaying his own acknowledgement of the fact that he is undeserving of being where he is. Call it Affirmative Action Induced Inferiority Syndrome, or AAIIS.
    We did not become the most wealthy, the most powerful, the most influential nation in the world by accident, as it appears this affirmative action president appears to believe. That achievement came through hard work and sacrifice and a willingness to show the world through our always determined and, yes, even sometimes belligerent, posture that we, the people of America, believe that we have found the path to freedom and prosperity for humanity through our capitalistic economy and our republican form of government. A president who had come up the hard way, without the preferential treatment Obama received because he was half-black, might better understand the truth of that. He might have a better sense of why his country leads the world in prosperity for our citizens and realize the fact that most Americans would love to lead all the other citizens of the world to the same levels of freedom and prosperity.

    But this guy, supposedly the most powerful man in the world, bows down? I’m of two minds here, the first being that he’s suffering from AAIIS and is simply insecure and unsure of himself. That would seem to be borne out by his wimpy acquiescence to the horrid disrespect shown him by the Russians on repeated occasions. The other, more sinister, view I must consider is that he intentionally seeks to debase our nation in the theater of world politics for purposes of advancing his socialist agenda. Remember the basic tenet of socialism: it is a leveling of all things, including nations.

    What more graphic demonstration of the leveling of geopolitical power could there be than the leader of the world’s most powerful nation-state bowing to third world tyrants?

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Actually Going After a Cartel

    Washington attorney and AT regular contributor, Clarice Feldman, did a masterful job of chopping Eric Holder and his politicized DoJ into mincemeat this past weekend for its many transgressions, with the Fast & Furious outrage being foremost in her article. What follows is an elaboration not on the details of the scandal but on the political motivation behind it.

    When BATF agents first blew the whistle on what is now known as Operation Fast and Furious, the rationale offered by DoJ for such an evidently foolish operation was that it was designed to allow BATF to track and prosecute the leaders of the Mexican drug cartels. As more information surfaced from the Mexican government and the BATF’s Mexican bureau chief that none of them knew anything of this operation, many of us who were paying a bit closer attention to the case immediately smelled the first foul scent of corruption.

    The fatal flaw in DoJ’s explanation was this: if the Mexican authorities had not been brought into the operation, nor even the BATF’s own agents authorized to operate in Mexico, then the proffered DoJ justification made utterly no sense, for the simple reason that once those walked guns hit the south side of that border there was absolutely no process in place to track them to their supposed targets. Therefore, DoJ was patently misrepresenting its motive. Why?
    (more…)

  • Special Operations Speaks

    The Obama campaign is twisting the truth into political pretzels in attempting to make its candidate appear to be a tough guy in the terror wars. Trying to remake the public image of a pol famous for voting present into that of a steely-eyed, cold-blooded leader of hunter/killer teams of special operators who seek out and destroy those who would bring harm to our innocents is a difficult task that just became more so. That’s because a bunch of genuine tough guys are coming together to combat the sham campaign of that wannabee warrior in the White House.

    Retired Navy SEAL, Captain Larry Bailey, a pivotal player in the debunking of John Kerry’s ego-embellished war record back in 2004, is putting together an election year organization made up of bona fide special operators, past and present, who are not happy with the efforts of our counterfeit commander-in-chief to cloak himself in their special mystique. Unlike the all-Navy Swift Boat Veterans who torpedoed Kerry’s Vietnamese junk, Bailey’s new military organization, Special Operations Speaks, is a multi-service outfit with chapters from the Navy’s SEALs, the Army’s Rangers and Green Berets, the Air Force’s Air Commandos, the Marine Corp’s Force Recon, and the newest group of special operators, USMC’s MARSOC, Marine Special Operations Command. There’s also participation by veterans of all services and their families.

    It is not just Obama’s phony warrior pretensions, however, that have these military professionals organizing this counter-operation, it is the actual and immediate dangers being created in the covert world of their clandestine combat operations by this amateur playing at soldier for political purposes.

    When politicians with no military training or experience get involved with military planning and operations and fail to heed the counsel of the professionals advising them, the results are almost always bad for the troops involved as well as their nations. When community organizers with almost no experience, either military or civilian, are involved, the potential for disaster is compounded. It is akin to some Hollywood fantasy where teenagers suddenly have control of the world’s most powerful weapons and forces. In America’s present situation, that fantasy is almost reality. We have a White House more politically driven than any in memory by a tight inner circle where military experience is non-existent. Suddenly, when it becomes apparent that their guy has an image problem, military secrecy and national security are thrown under the campaign bus to make a lion out of their lightweight. This is Kerry 2004 redux, Democrat militarism resurgent, as it is during election years when it becomes politically useful.

    Add Special Operations Speaks to your favorites bar and drop in to visit and support. It’s still under construction but Captain Bailey will see she becomes shipshape in short order. Shake loose with a few bucks to help a very worthy group of warriors in their very worthy cause.

    In my six years of Army service I was never a special operator although I did serve with a Special Forces detachment in Vietnam for a few weeks on a classified assignment. However, I do share a common experience with all of them: that of looking up and seeing that parachute canopy overhead and below the good green earth between my boots.

    Airborne!

  • Top Gun’s Tough on Lizards Too…

    When the issue of the dunes sagebrush lizard first became a hot topic last year, it was widely believed in the oil industry that the environmental movement had such a strong and sympathetic ally in the anti-fossil fuels Obama administration, that the southwestern oil fields the little critter calls home were doomed. Many in the currently booming Permian Basin of West Texas and Southeast New Mexico were predicting that another era of economic prosperity was about to be driven off the cliff, this time not due to the dropping price of crude but rather by any insignificant little reptile that few locals had ever heard of, much less seen.

    Yesterday, sanity seems to have prevailed when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that this elusive sub-species which exists only in the habitat provided by the shin oaks of this desert region, would not be added to the list of endangered species. NewMexicoWatchDog.org quotes Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, “This is the right thing for conservation, and the right thing for the economy.” Congressman Steve Pearce, who fiercely fought the listing from the outset, is quoted in the same article,

    “While it was a long and emotional process, in the end, Washington listened, and the lizard will not be listed. This is a huge victory for the people who have tirelessly fought to save regional jobs and our way of life. I extend my gratitude to the New Mexicans who came to the table, and through good faith efforts, voluntarily protected the lizard’s habitat.”

    So why am I, one of those whose economy was directly threatened (prosperous oil industry folks are the primary tourist base and wealthy vacation homeowners in our little mountain resort community) not shouting “Yahoos!” and “Attaboys!” at the Obama administration for making the right call on saving our fossil fuel industry? Perhaps it’s because the cynicism developed over seven decades (well, truthfully, only four-I was a borderline airhead liberal optimist for the first three) has me wondering how this decision might have gone were Barack Obama not facing an increasingly difficult re-election. While I’m encouraged by the obvious growth in office of someone who formerly only threw people under the bus to a new resolve to totally obliterate them, I’m still skeptical. We’ve seen the recent, controversial leaks indisputably timed to show what a resolute tough guy our commander-in-chief is when fighting threats against America. Are we now to conclude that same awesome resolution extends to a reptilian menace to our petroleum dependent way of life out here in the Great Southwest as well? Is Lord Axelrod attempting to communicate to the oil-stained wretches of the Permian Basin a message?
    “Yo! Oilfield trash! Top Gun’s got yo’ six!”

    Perhaps the disappointed environmentalists who fought to shut down the industry to protect this dunes sagebrush lizard should dispatch forthwith a squad of binocular-equipped volunteers to be dispersed among the shin oak groves. Hellfire-armed drone watch, don’t you know?

    Lads…be especially vigilant on Tuesdays…

    Crossposted at American Thinker