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

Category: Terror War

  • Obama at the VFW (UPDATED)

    I just caught snippets of Obama’s speech at the VFW this morning and I just want to make some comments to clarify that which he has muddied.

    Obama claimed that he opposed the war in Iraq at a time when it was politically difficult for him to do so. That’s Horseshit. It hasn’t been politically difficult for anyone to oppose the war in Iraq since 1990. The entire Democrat caucus held GHW Bush hostage for tax hikes while troops were on the ground in the Middle East facing Hussein’s armies. I remember three congressmen standing on the roof of one of Saddam’s palaces and say that Hussein was more trustworthy than President Bush while they opposed the war in Iraq. At no time in our recent history has it been politically difficult to be against any war.

    Obama claimed that he knew that the war in Iraq would give rise to Islamic extremism in the region. What gave rise to Islamic extremism was the cowardice and the inability of the Left in this country to recognize the danger in the Middle East and the lack of commitment to dealing a deadly blow to that danger. Hussein handed out copies of Black Hawk Down to his military chiefs to convince them that Americans could be beaten by resisting long enough…because he knew, like the Taliban and al Qaeda know, that our weak link is the vocal and cowardly anti-war at any cost Leftists. Like Obama.

    The only time the Left shows even a hint of bravery is when they’re being cowardly.

    UPDATE: Ok, I’ve had a chance to do some more research and look at a partial script at WSJ’s Washington Wire, so I’m updating my thoughts.

    While Obama did oppose the war in the beginning, he did it from Chicago, not from Washington. How “politically difficult” was it to be against the war in Chicago?

    Today he accused McCain of distorting his record on the war;

    “Yesterday, Senator McCain came before you. He is a man who has served this nation honorably, and he correctly stated that one of the chief criteria for the American people in this election is going to be who can exercise the best judgment as Commander in Chief. But instead of just offering policy answers, he turned to a typical laundry list of political attacks. He said that I have changed my position on Iraq when I have not. He said that I am for a path of “retreat and failure.” And he declared, “Behind all of these claims and positions by Senator Obama lies the ambition to be president” – suggesting, as he has so many times, that I put personal ambition before my country,” Obama told the crowd.

    In 2004, while he was making a run at a national office in the Senate, he told a Chicago reporter “There’s not much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage” on July 27th, 2004 (John Kass “Obama’s a Star Who Doesn’t Stick to the Script“, Chicago Tribune, July 27, 2004). Now, I don’t think George Bush opposed the war in 2004. Obama claims he was taken out of context, but read the article yourself.

    After Obama’s speech, McCain’s staff sent this message to the press in attendence;

    “Unlike Barack Obama, John McCain doesn’t have to compensate for a lack of credibility on the international stage with inflammatory and public threats against American allies. The American people know that John McCain will hunt down terrorists wherever they are, and have a choice between strength and experience versus Barack Obama’s rhetoric and theatrics,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.

    But you’ll probably only hear that on the blogs.

  • Pretzel Logic

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    Impeachment seems to be slipping through their fingers, Nancy Pelosi has abandoned them on defunding the war in Iraq. Even their last hope, Barack Obama admits that maybe he won’t pull troops out of Iraq as soon as everyone hoped. So what’s the Left to do? Well, it seems they’re trying to rally State governments in order to stop augmenting our armed forces with National Guard troops. Several organizations link to a central page at Liberty Tree which touts itself as a “Foundation for the Democratic Revolution” and another named Peace Action. This whole movement seems to have started in the most logical of places – Vermont.

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  • VFF Goes Back to Iraq

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    In the mad rush among the media to ignore the success in Iraq, you may have missed this. Since Barack Obama went to Iraq and declared that he had personally defeated our enemies there and made it safe for US troops to wander about freely, the press is only interested in reporting sporadically on the infrequent deaths of our troops there. Since the media has largely ignored the truth from Iraq, and the significance of our resolve in Iraq, Vets For Freedom has sent eight Iraq War veterans “Back to Iraq“.

    Pete Hegseth, David Bellavia, Joel Arends, Erik Swabb, Kate Norley, Shawn Bryan, Daniel Bell, and Ben Hayden wrote a joint mission statement in the Washington Times last week explaining their reasons for going to Iraq;

    We will each return to the cities where we served previously, providing a direct before-and-after assessment from the ground. Places like Ramadi, Baqubah, Samarra, and Baghdad, last experienced at the height of violence, will get a fresh look from experienced eyes.

    We will assess the depths and sustainability of recent gains, and plan to objectively ask the tough questions – of Americans and Iraqis alike – about the future of America’s involvement in Iraq.

    […]

    America’s veterans, their families and those still serving deserve honest answers to these difficult and complex questions. We intend to do our utmost to provide them.

    The initial dispatches have been coming in from those eight intrepid veterans and, if you’re truly interested in what American determination can accomplish, read each and every one.

  • Iran begging for “it”

    Offered “a very generous” set of incentives to discontinue their pursuit of nuclear weapons, Iran has unsurprisingly rejected the UN’s plan to mediate the crisis. Thus, causing the UN to get scary stern;

    Spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said there was consensus in the group that Iran’s latest reply to the offer was “very disappointing” and “a stalling tactic” that had left the group with no option other than to seek new sanctions.

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  • Gitmo’s poets

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     Debra Burlingame writes in the Wall Street Journal about Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, a former Guantanamo detainee cum homicide bomber in Mosul last March. His poetry was included in the book “Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak,” (Iowa University Press, 2007) and read for a Guantanamo “teach-in” in 2006;

     In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. [Marc] Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as “gentle, thoughtful young men” who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future. “One thing you won’t hear is hatred,” he said, “and the reason you won’t hear it is not because I edited it out, it’s because it’s not there in the poetry.”

    Two years after the “teach-in”, that gentle, thoughtful young man drove about 10,000 pounds of explosives into an Iraqi army compound and detonated the truck killing 13 and wounding scores of others leaving a smoldering 25-foot crater where his “gentle, thoughtful” personage evaporated.

    Burlingame reports that his father knew what kind of person he was;

    The bombings carried out by Al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaiti nationals have stirred a public outcry from their fellow citizens. Al-Ajmi’s own father has reportedly threatened to sue the government of Kuwait for issuing his son a passport and failing to live up to the terms set forth in the transfer agreement with U.S. State Department as a condition of his release. Kuwait’s negligence and the State Department’s failure to follow up have resulted in calls from the public for the detainees to stay right where they are and for Guantanamo to stay in operation.

    Their own countries are calling for them to stay put in Guantanamo;

    “We cannot romanticize them into fallen heroes of Western neo-imperialism,” wrote Shamael Al-Sharikh, a columnist for the Kuwaiti Times, in an article advocating that Guantanamo stay open, “because we are as much potential victims of terrorist attacks as [Americans] are.”

    My regular readers may remember the video interview I did last month with  a member of Amnesty International who kept claiming that these detainees have “human rights” – rights they won’t afford their victims. The courts and the lawyers and the whining-ass Amnesty International don’t understand that this isn’t a question of legal rights…it’s war. Even though we can’t bring our spineless politicians to that realization, the courts, whose main function it is to protect the People of the United States should arrive at that conclusion. Except our court system has taken on the personae of it’s sleaziest members and become ambulance-chasing shysters afraid they’re going to lose some business if they let the Executive Branch fight the war without their interference.

    There are no legal issues. These aren’t people who were picked up drunk on the street and shipped off to Guantanamo to populate some prison farm or sweatshop factory…these are folks scooped up from the front lines of the battle. Guantanamo didn’t turn them into suicidal maniacs…their culture did that.

    At least three who’ve been released have gone on to commit suicide attacks, at least four others have been killed in battle on the wrong side after their release. The more civilized elements on the Arab Street are beginning to see the benefit of removing these criminals from the world’s stage, how long before the Left puts our safety and security ahead of their petty politics and fund raising schemes?

    UPDATE FROM TSO:
    I actually shared some emails with Mr. Falkoff in June of last year when this book came out, I find what he said interesting now.

    My Email to him:

    From: TSO
    Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2007 1:43 PM
    To: mfalkoff@niu.edu
    Subject:     I’m absolutely overjoyed that I took a year and a half off of law school to go to Afghanistan, watch friends of mine die, put my life on the line to capture these guys, and then you go and make money off their defense and publish their poetry. Looking forward to you publishing the letters home from SSG Craig Cherry and SGT Bobby Beasley.

    Sheer asshattery.

    TSO
    Combat Infantryman
    3L

    And his response to me:

    From: Marc Falkoff
    Date: Thursday, June 21, 2007 3:37 pm
    Subject: RE:
    Dear Mr. TSO,    I am very sorry to learn of the deaths of your friends.

    You should know that none of the 17 men whom I represent has been accused of fighting or harming our troops. Nor were any of them taken into custody by Americans. Most were taken into custody in Pakistan, by Pakistani personnel, after they crossed the Afghan border trying to return to their families in Yemen.

    I understand that you may be disinclined to believe me. My only request for years has been to get my clients their day in court, where they will have an opportunity to prove their innocence. To date, none of my clients has been charged with crime, and none has been convicted of anything. One, in fact, was released from Guantanamo earlier this week, and is now home in Yemen.

    Neither I nor any of the detainees will make a penny off of the poetry book. We long ago arranged for all profits, if there are any, to be donated to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human rights law firm.

    Respectfully,

    Marc Falkoff

    Wonder if the client released in his email is the one that was peacefully blowing people up in Iraq?

     UPDATE x2, nope, a different guy.

  • Chutzpah

    Consuming my daily dose of events and news, I stumbled over an opinion column in the Washington Post that stopped me dead in my tracks. Not because of it’s content…I didn’t even bother to read it…but because of it’s author.

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  • Obama still hasn’t learned his lesson

    How soon they forget. Barack Obama and the Democrats have forgotten how we spent billions of dollars in the eighties keeping Saddam Hussein in his box. How many times were our aircraft enforcing the No-Fly Zone attacked by surface-to-air missiles? At least twice, Hussein rattled his saber during the 90s and caused the Clinton Administration to send troops to Kuwait to man the prepositioned equipment we had there to protect the Kuwaitis. Not to mention missile attacks on Iraq proper to punish his assassination attempts or destroy his weapons labs.

    Iraq was the right war, but at the wrong time…Hussein should have been punished in 1991 when COB6 and I sat near the banks of Euphrates poised and equipped to rumble into Baghdad. But, Obama still insists it was the wrong war;

     “Our military is stretched extraordinarily because of trying to fight two wars at the same time, and so my job, as the next commander in chief, is going to be to make a decision what is the right war to fight and how do we fight it. And I think that we should have been focused on Afghanistan from the start,” [Obama] said.

    Two wars? Afghanistan and Iraq are part and parcel of the same war. Remember that some al Qaeda fighters busted ass for Iraq when the Taliban fell – including al-Zarqawi the first leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. All of these motor-mouths who claim we should have focused on Afghanistan instead of Iraq, I’d like them to tell me how we should have focused on Afghanistan more. They easily criticize how our resources should have been in Afghanistan…what resources? How, exactly, would they have done it differently? I’d like to see an alternate plan.

    President Bush criticized the Democrats for shooting off their mouths in the 2004 election without offering any alternatives…they still take the easy path and no one demands from them answers to the questions their empty platitudes raise.

  • ZBiggy; Long-distance analysis

    Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ZBiggy to those of us who suffered through his tenure as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, has decided that an injection of additional troops into Afghanistan puts the United States in danger of being like the Soviets in the 80s in a HuffPo interview. Keep in mind, Biggy has never set foot in Afghanistan and he admitted in 1998 that his policies in 1978 may have triggered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

    And it’s with a similar perspective that Brzezinski now doubts the that the answer to what ails Afghanistan is more troops. “I think we’re literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy,” Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. “When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets.”

    However, Brzezinski noted that just as the Soviets were able to delude themselves that they had a loyal army of communist-sympathizers who would transform the country, the U.S.-led forces may now be making similar mistakes. He said that the conduct of military operations “with little regard for civilian casualties” may accelerate the negative trend in local public opinion regarding the West’s role. “It’s just beginning, but it’s significant,” Brzezinski said.

    This is the same guy whose reticence to support the Shah of Iran brought on the problems that come with the Islamic Republic these days. His reticence to support the Nicaraguan government brought on a communist regime there and fanned the flames of communist insurgencies in Central America. His weakness on basic national defense issues encouraged the Soviets to station a combat brigade in Cuba – ninety miles from our shores. And of course, because he was willing to half-way support the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, the Soviets invaded assured that the weak Carter crew would do nothing to prevent their centuries-old dream of securing warm water ports.

    Now, with an analysis based purely on reportage from left-wing sources apparently, he accuses us of attempting a Soviet-style occupation. He goes on with even more hyperbole about the coming of World War IV;

    “Well, if McCain is president and if his Secretary of State is Joe Lieberman and his Secretary of Defense is [Rudolph] Giuliani, we will be moving towards the World War IV that they have been both favoring and predicting,” he said, calling that an “appalling concept” (and adding that by their lights, the Cold War counted as World War III).

    Well, dumbass, if the Cold War was World War III, why didn’t you act like it was a world war? We faced a modern army in Europe with our own Korean War-era equipment, the military was woefully underfunded and underpaid and every threat was met with surrender and weakness. Acting as if those things never happened, ZBiggy drives on with his yammering;

    Asked who he would like to see in a potential Obama cabinet, Brzezinski said: “I think [Sen. Chuck] Hagel. I would like to see a bipartisan cabinet. I think we need one very badly — and we did well in the Cold War when we had one. I would say Hagel and [Sen. Dick] Lugar would be very good Republicans [for Obama].” He also cited Sen. Joe Biden as a potential Secretary of State, in which case it would also be possible to “keep [Secretary of Defense Bob] Gates in the job for a few months.”

    Any credibility this doofus ever had evaporated in December 1988 when the wall in Europe came down. And when did his “bipartisan cabinet” ever do “well”? Point to one damn thing, ZBiggy.

    And the ignorant HuffPo masses fall right in line begging for Chuck Hagel to be Obama’s VP and lauding the Taliban for ending the opium trade. Crackpots with crackpot views of the world.