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

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • US to station 13k troops in Kuwait

    So it’s back to the nineties when we had 5000 troops stationed in Kuwait to be a speed bump in the event that Saddam Hussein tried to to retake Kadhima, his 19th province, because we didn’t have the guts to remove him in 1991. The Associated Press reports that this Administration plans to station almost three times the size of that force there to react to military emergencies in the Gulf region based on a John Kerry-inspired study.

    Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., who asked his staff to conduct the study, said in a statement: “This is a period of historic, but turbulent change in the Middle East. We need to be clear-eyed about what these interests are and how best to promote them. This report provides a thoughtful set of recommendations designed to do exactly that.”

    I’m not sure it’s particularly smart to put US troops in a region that is as unstable as the Gulf States have been without a clear mission, except to train. The report specifically mentions our interests in the outcome of the Arab Spring uprisings. Do we plan to be able to inject “boots on the ground” to prop up the Gulf monarchies or will they be employed on behalf of the rebels?

    The Left is fond of preaching about how our presence in the region creates terrorists – bin Laden’s big complaint was the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia. I don’t particularly subscribe to that theory, mostly because the Left are basically idiots with big mouths and buy in to easy memes. But, how could the Obama Administration explain this particular decision to his base?

    And, it might not create terrorists, but it will create targets for terrorists. Khobar Towers and the Marine barracks in Beirut make appropriate examples. Democrats are always willing to make speed bumps out the troops, but they’re never willing to let them fight wars to a successful and victorious conclusion.

  • Plouffe: Republicans want more war

    Old Trooper sends us a link from Politico in which David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign adviser and current senior adviser in the White House, declares that Republicans want more war;

    Host George Stephanopoulos pressed Plouffe on his statement, asking “more war? Where are the Republicans calling for more war?”

    “Well, listen, the point is, George, our opponent and many in Congress criticized our decision to end the Iraq war,” Plouffe said. “I think Gov. Romney called it a tragic mistake, oppose a timeline in Afghanistan. So — and, by the way, you know, that also has fiscal and economic consequences, because we have to focus on rebuilding this country. And that’s what the president wants to do, is take half the money from ending the wars and focus on rebuilding this country.”

    First, it’s probably impossible for anyone to want more war than Obama, given his policies with Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Libya, Egypt…who else? Oh, yeah…Africa. And Plouffe is conflating the calls for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan with a thirst for war. Republicans wanted a conclusion to the war in Iraq, not a sudden withdrawal which results in hundreds of deaths of Iraqis because we didn’t end the war, we just up and left. And we’re about to make the same mistake in Afghanistan. The Obama Administration was unwilling to fight the war to a successful conclusion, so they’re just picking up and leaving.

    And, by the way, where is “half the money from ending the wars” coming from, Dave? You can’t count on that money being there, just because the Administration plans on being spent somewhere besides the war. It sounds like that vacuous anti-war bullshit. Is the campaign slogan for the administration this year going to be “Make Love Not War”, too?

    Yeah, I want the troops home, too, but not if we have to send the next generation to finish what this administration is unwilling to complete now. Like this generation had to do for my generation.

  • 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

  • The world disapproves of drone strikes. So? Who cares?

    Stars & Stripes reports that a Pew poll of twenty nations reveals that 17 of those nations disapprove of US drone strikes in Afghanistan;

    Even long-time American allies like Britain, Germany and Japan have majorities that disapprove of the drone strikes, at 47, 59 and 75 percent, respectively.

    The strike tactic is extremely unpopular in Muslim countries, where most of the bombings take place.

    And this is important how? The targets of drone strikes (the Muslim countries) unsurprisingly don’t like having missiles fired at their goat-roping asses and the folks who don’t have much skin in the game don’t approve. Who even thought this poll was important enough to waste time on? I could have told them what the results would be before they made the first phone call, or smoke signal or whatever they used to get the opinions of these morons.

    The U.S. was the only country with a positive percentage, at 62. More specifically, 74 percent of Republicans approve of the strikes, compared to 60 percent of independents and 58 percent of Democrats.

    Since it’s our troops whose lives are being protected by this particular strategy, that’s the only part of the poll that matters. Who gives a tiny rat’s ass what Turkey or Egypt says?

    And, oh, not that it matters much to me, but in the last election, we were told that if Obama were our president, the rest of the world would love him and respect us more as a result. Well, four years later, it seems that those same countries who want to see more American casualties don’t seem to like Obama as much as we were led to believe, according to that poll.


    Like I said, I don’t particularly care how the rest of the world perceives us or our policies (we’re Americans and we’re supposed to have policies that benefit us and piss off the rest of the world – that’s kind of the purpose of a federalist government), but to those of you who are more enlightened than me, what with me not being a world citizen and all, it might be important.

  • The rush for the exits in Afghanistan infects Congress

    Lance Bacon at Military Times writes about how a bi-partisan group of Congressmen have enlisted Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who we talked about a few months ago when he wrote a paper about our failures in Afghanistan. A commenter or two warned us that Davis was planning a coup like this back then and weaseling himself a reputation in Congress.

    Our ultimate failure in Afghanistan became a self-fulfilling prophecy the moment that this administration decided that our only strategy was withdrawal.

    [Maj. Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan] slammed Karzai in a Politico interview after the Afghan president said his nation would side with Pakistan in a war against the U.S.

    “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Politico quoted Fuller as saying. “I’m sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion and now you’re telling me, ‘I don’t really care’? … They don’t understand the sacrifices that America is making to provide for their security.”

    What exactly would anyone expect Karzai to say? Our rush for the exits only proves that we aren’t reliable, and no one can depend on the US to stick it out for the duration. That’s not to say that the troops won’t do their level best, but this is a failure of the civilian “leadership” if that word can be applied in any reasonable form to the relationship between the politicians and the trigger pullers. Because leadership, as the term is normally used in our language is noticeably absent.

    Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said he trusts the president’s commitment to the 2014 withdrawal. Still, he said the failure to bring the bipartisan resolution to the floor was “an historic act of political cowardice.”

    “Ten years later and $533 billion spent on the war in Afghanistan, it remains clear there is no military solution,” Lee said. “The American people have made it clear that the war is no longer worth fighting… It is past time for our policy to catch up with the American people.”

    There wasn’t a military solution when the anti-war Left decided that to be true and thrust that strategy on the troops.

    The American people have reached the same conclusion as the Afghans – if we’re leaving Afghanistan and that’s our only goal, sooner is better than later. Who wants to be the last to die so this president can look like a fierce war president?

  • Switchblade drones get law professor’s panties bunched

    The LA Times (yeah, I know we’ve been linking them a lot today) writes about the new “switchblade drones” as depicted in this video;

    Well, it seems that some goober law professor, Naureen Shah, associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at Columbia Law School, has to pull the knotted panties out of her crack because she’s worried that some soldiers on the battlefield might have to make a decision about killing an enemy fighter;

    She pointed out that when a drone strike is being considered there are teams of lawyers, analysts and military personnel looking at the data to determine whether lethal force is necessary. But the Switchblade could shorten that “kill chain.”

    “It delegates full responsibility to a lower-level soldier on the ground,” she said. “That delegation is worrisome. It’s a situation that could end up in more mistakes being made.”

    I guess it’ll be the first time a soldier will have massive destructive firepower and the decision making responsibility to apply that firepower to the battlefield. It’s as if a soldier has his own tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle…oh, wait…. Dingus.

    Arms-control advocates also have concerns. As these small robotic weapons proliferate, they worry about what could happen if the drones end up in the hands of terrorists or other hostile forces.

    Yeah, I’m sure the learning curve for the thing is so shallow that any goat farmer can start dropping them wherever he pleases without even scraping the dung off his sandals first. Well, right after he learns how to wear socks.

    Just give it to the troops, they’ll know what to do. I’m so tired of all of this hand-wringing about the troops. They did fine in World War II without the president whispering op orders in their ear.

  • Sanger defends Administration leaks

    The LA Times reports on the defense that David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, spoke about on CNN yesterday of the leaks that the Obama Administration supplied him with;

    “Did I talk to a lot of people in the administration? Of course,” [Sanger] said, as would be expected when writing a book about national security.

    Sanger contended that how Obama conducts himself in the theater of international military action is key for the public to know, and is a necessary story for the media to report on, regardless of the secrecy associated with national security issues.

    What? Want to spend a moment thinking about that statement, Dave? There’s a reason that we call them “secrets” and “national security” and the use of neither rhyme with the New York Times nor does anyone usually equate publishing secrets in the New York Times as part of our national security. And, “he doubted that any politically motivated leaks were involved.” Why else would the Obama Administration leak secrets to the New York Times, if it’s not politically motivated? Otherwise we could still call them secrets. Are they leaking any failed operations to the New York Times?

    “Can we debate them out in the open? Of course,” he said.

    Then they’re not secrets, are they? The Roosevelt Administration saw no need to debate our secrets during World War II and I’m pretty sure that the editors of the New York Times of that era would agree. How about we let our secrets remain that way until whichever war we’re fighting ends, so we don’t intentionally get mired in the morass that the media made of this last war with their “open debate”.

    And how about someone put a muzzle on the leaks out of the Obama Administration and let them debate the issues instead of smokescreening their failures.