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

Category: Terror War

  • Kidnapping as a foreign policy

    So who’s surprised that the government who’s political leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hostage-taker and kidnapper nearly thirty years ago, is using that same crime today as a bargaining tool? 15 British sailors and marines have become a bargaining chip in Iran’s criminal behavior towards the rest of the world. The rest of the world that has tolerated and turned a blind eye to Iran’s sociopathic antics on the world’s stage for decades.

    The Washington Times reports that Iran will try the 15;

    The Iranian government will charge 15 captured British service members with “illegal entrance into Iranian waters,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said yesterday, raising the stakes in his country’s confrontation with an outraged British government.
        Mr. Mottaki told reporters in New York that the matter had already been referred to the Iranian legal system and that the 14 men and one woman, who were captured in the Persian Gulf on Friday, would stand trial.
        “Iranian authorities intercepted these sailors and marines in Iranian waters,” said the minister, who was in New York for an unrelated vote Saturday in which the U.N. Security Council imposed new sanctions against his government.
        British Prime Minister Tony Blair said “there is no doubt at all” that the seizure took place in Iraqi waters.

    The time has come to deal with Iran in the way that they’ve been begging to be treated all these years. They’ve participated in and paid for kidnapping across the globe to get their way, to fund weapons sales and to fill their coffers - their rogue behavior needs to have a steep price for the Iranians beginning today. In fact, a nice little bombing run on their nuclear facilities will give excellent coverage to a rescue raid (we all know that the Brits know where the sailors and marines are being held – the goat herders aren’t that good at disguising their activities). 

    The DC Examiner reports that China and Russia are putting pressure on Iran to comply with UN demands to stop uranium enrichment. I guess the other two sociopaths see where they can hurt by the fallout of a nuclear-armed Iran in a sanction-conflict with the rest of the civilized world. But Iran continues to suspend it’s pledges, according to the Washington Post/AP.;

    In New York, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said, “A few select countries don’t have the right to abuse the Security Council.”

    “The Security Council has to be aware of its own position and status,” he added. “Actions that are illegal, unwarranted and unjustified will reduce the credibility of the Security Council.”

    Mottaki said Iran has repeatedly sought negotiations with the powers that drafted the resolution against the Islamic republic: the five permanent council members — the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China — and Germany. But he accused those countries of lacking the political will to reach a breakthrough.

    Doesn’t even sound like a sane person who has been watching the news lately, does it? In another article, the Washington Post reports that Iran is feeling the financial squeeze from sanctions;

    More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September, according to Treasury and State officials.

    The financial squeeze has seriously crimped Tehran’s ability to finance petroleum industry projects and to pay for imports. It has also limited Iran’s use of the international financial system to help fund allies and extremist militias in the Middle East, say U.S. officials and economists who track Iran.

    So feeling the walls closing in, the Islamic Republic resorts to the only thing it understands; extortion using the lives of westerners as chits. There’s only one reasonable response to this barbaric behavior. The harsher the better. But, it’ll never happen – the Left and their usual hand-wringing and pleas for civility will stop it. And when the British sailors and Marines are beheaded on YouTube, somehow it’ll be George Bush’s and Tony Blair’s fault. The Left loves to make excuses for bloody tyrants.

  • Biggie as a fearmonger

    Zbigniew “Biggie” Brzezinski, National Security advisor to Jimmy Carter during the decade of National Security advisors with heavy European accents, decides to provide his worthless opinion in the Washington Post on the dangers of the PATRIOT Act and the general and vague dangers of having Republicans fighting terror that he calls “Terrorized by the War on Terror”;

    The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

    The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

    The only damage these three words have done has been propagated by the Left in denying that there is a terror threat. The Left’s pooh-poohing of the threat of terrorists against Americans is the greatest danger to our security.

    But the little secret here may be that the vagueness of the phrase was deliberately (or instinctively) calculated by its sponsors. Constant reference to a “war on terror” did accomplish one major objective: It stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue. The war of choice in Iraq could never have gained the congressional support it got without the psychological linkage between the shock of 9/11 and the postulated existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Support for President Bush in the 2004 elections was also mobilized in part by the notion that “a nation at war” does not change its commander in chief in midstream. The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being “at war.”

    So, by describing the war in simplistic terms that everyone can understand, the Republicans are coming for our children under the guise of fighting Islamists. Biggie continues on describing in simplistic terms why we should be afraid of our Republican government while he doesn’t provide one concrete example of the government’s abuse of it’s newfound power in those three magic words. He contends that by calling it a War on Terror, it somehow has the force of law. If that’s not fearmongerng, I don’t know fearmongering.

    If you wade through Biggie’s idiot rant about security checkpoints at the Washington Post, you discover that somehow security checkpoints in Washington are worthless symbols of this administration’s fearmongering. The Washington Post is a private company who sells it’s stock on the New York Stock Exchange – President Bush didn’t personally or indirectly erect the metal detectors in WaPo’s foyer. In fact, most of Washington was hiding behind metal detectors and security badges when I first moved to Washington DC in 1999 – more than two years before the evil Republican neocons attacked the poor Muslims, Biggie. That was when government employees were afraid of another attack by the Michigan Militia.

    The record is even more troubling in the general area of civil rights. The culture of fear has bred intolerance, suspicion of foreigners and the adoption of legal procedures that undermine fundamental notions of justice. Innocent until proven guilty has been diluted if not undone, with some — even U.S. citizens — incarcerated for lengthy periods of time without effective and prompt access to due process. There is no known, hard evidence that such excess has prevented significant acts of terrorism, and convictions for would-be terrorists of any kind have been few and far between. 

    Ya mean like these poor innocent muslims have been victimized, Biggie? How about how Arabs are inflicting their barbaric forms of justice on the rest of us? How many terrorists have we beheaded on video? Have we dragged any of the Guantanamo residents through the streets or hung their bodies from overpasses? Do you recommend that we just let the Islamofacists do what they please like they do in Thailand? And how about some examples of this alleged abuse of the civil rights of the people who don’t believe in civil rights anyway? Others can’t find examples either, Biggie, no matter how hard they look.

    Where is the U.S. leader ready to say, “Enough of this hysteria, stop this paranoia”? Even in the face of future terrorist attacks, the likelihood of which cannot be denied, let us show some sense. Let us be true to our traditions.

    Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. This from the guy who didn’t get exercised about 10,000 Soviet combat troops stationed 90 miles from our coastline to prevent us from reacting to the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The guy who let communist guerillas run rampant throughout Central and South America and Africa. The guy whose President was able to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on his inauguration day in full view of his constituency, but who’s successor, four years later, had to make the trip in a bullet-proof limosine because the Carter Clowns had made the world too dangerous for our leader to walk in his own country amongst the people who’d elected him.

    Why shouldn’t there be a reasonable attempt to protect our citizens, Biggie? Just because you don’t give a tiny rat’s ass, doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t. I don’t see how a reasonable person can even think that our government is a bigger threat to our citizenry than a culture that already plans our irradication. Honestly, I hope you’re next.

  • To my critics

    Because there’s a serious lack of serious news, I’m using today’s space to answer some of my critics who took offense that I criticized Richard Cohen in his piece entitled “Wasted Lives” in the Washington Post. According to emails, my being named Idiot of the Day of some low-traffic Leftist blog (I’m not providing links because they don’t deserve the traffic) and comments here, I’m naive because I suggested that Cohen and the Democrats’ other willing accomplices in the media shut up for a change until the war against terror ends. This stems from the fact that I don’t understand asymetrical warfare, according to an aspiring journalist who hid her identity when she joined This ain’t Hell and posted a link to this particular blog post on her own blog at Salon.

    Let me explain to this professional feminist a little about warfare. The objective of warfare is to defeat your enemy and to force your political will upon them. As was proven after the First World War, the only way to completely defeat an enemy is to crush him into dust and take away all of his stuff to teach him that there is nothing to gain from miitary operations against the rest of the world. We learned that particular lesson during our Civil War and introduced the concept to the world in the Second World War.

    The Europeans had a tough time learning that lesson because they were pretty much convinced that State leaders were all rational people, which led to the Napoleanic Wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Great War and the Second World War. After the first three, armies that had been defeated on the battlefield, went home, rebuilt their armies and arms and started where they had left off. In fact, Europeans are so clueless, the Germans attacked France through the Ardennes Forest four times between 1870 and 1944 and each time the French were surprised. So why, pray tell, would we bother to listen to them when it comes to fighting wars? What lessons could we possibly learn from the apparently retarded Europeans who do the same thing over-and-over in exactly the same manner expecting different results each time?

    I know the Left thinks it’s compassionate and enlightened to be merciful to our enemies. Look what being merciful to Saddam Hussein brought us. We let him escape with a large portion of his forces in 1991. Within weeks, he turned the remnants of his troops and tanks on his own population while we, the American fighting men and women who’d defeated Hussein’s Army, stood in mute disbelief along the Euphrates River watching the terror he’d wrought on the horizon. But we knew it was coming, we understand the consequences of not finishing a fight. In fact, when our commander announced on our radios that the ceasefire was in effect at about 8 am, February 28th, 1991, I turned to my Lieutenant and prophetically remarked “Our kids will be back to finish this”.

    At that moment, we were still receiving fire from an entrenched enemy force. We just turned and drove off while Iraqi bullets richoceted off of our turrets. It took twelve years for US troops to pick up where we left off.

    Well, I said all that to say this; war has objectives, it doesn’t happen in some vacuum of history like some arbitrary natural disaster. The war of the jihadists is a war against civilization. They prey on the sympathy of of reasonable people – but the jihadists are not reasonable people. Jihadists think that reasonable people are weak tools that they can manipulate to defeat a stronger, more rational foe. Jihadists live for headlines, they declare victory when reasonable people try to reach reasonable agreements with them. And because they’ve declared their victories, and consider themselves the victors, they feel as if they don’t have an obligation to live up to their end of the bargain. – and so the war continues.

    When Mr. Cohen calls our troops’ deaths “wasted lives”, the jihadists revel in it. If the media and the Democrats got behind the war, got behind our troops, if the Left decided that winning this war was more important than winning the next election, there’d be no small victories for the jihadists. In fact, I’d bet that if ya’all’d been behind the war from the start, it’s be pretty much over. Why do I think this? Look at how quickly Qaddafi surrendered his weapons of mass destruction when this administration launched attacks against Hussein in 2003. Look how willing Arafat was to negotiate with Israel after the Gulf War – and then look at how arrogant he became during the Rye negotiations eight years later, when the Clinton gang tried to give him everything under the sun.

    Without the purely political wrangling carried out on the front page of the newspaper everyday, there’d be nothing to win, asymetrical warfare be damned. Your asymetrical warfare is just a term used by pseudo-intellectuals to compound the sense of the uselessness of war, the immutable laws of total warfare remain in effect. The jihadists are only encouraged by your defeatist language. It’s you who doesn’t understand asymetrical warfare – all your handwringing and empty platitudes are exactly why the jihadists continue to fight. They have no real ideology to defend, no treasure to protect, no land or resources particularly worth our trouble. If you take away the possibilty of his victory, what cause has the enemy to fight and die?

  • Democrats rush to surrender

    Yesterday, the Democrats, who’ve proved that the only thing they’ll fight for is surrender, squeaked out a 218 – 212 vote victory over common sense. If they’d spent as much time trying to figure out a successful way of winning this war against terror as they spend trying to surrender to the jihadists, we might have already won this war.

    With Code Pink’s shock troops safely behind bars, Nancy Pelosi announced;

    “Proudly, this new Congress voted to bring an end to the war in Iraq and took a giant step in that direction,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said after the bill passed by a 218-212 vote. 

    I’m glad they did it proudly, because that’s way they’ll be sent home next year. Now that they’ve pandered to the fickle whims of their most vocal supporters instead of the American people, when this war ends successfully (despite Democrats’ best efforts to the contrary) the American people are going to remember who tried to dick over the troops.

    And then good ol’ Geoge Bush, the one I voted for twice, not the one who’s been caving in lately, found his cajones again;

    Within minutes of passage, Bush denounced the bill as “an act of political theater” and an abdication of responsibility, sternly repeating his pledge to veto it.

    “These Democrats believe that the longer they can delay funding for our troops, the more likely they are to force me to accept restrictions on our commanders, an artificial timetable for withdrawal, and their pet spending projects. This is not going to happen,” the president said. “The Democrats have sent their message. Now it’s time to send their money.”

    Which is exactly right. The Democrats, suffering from the Bush Derangement Syndrome, have completely neglected the fact that is a real shooting war, and a bunch of fat old bags dressed in garish pink feather boas shouldn’t be running our foreign policy.

    More on the President’s reaction from Crotchety Old Bastard.

    So what did Code Pink’s antics get us? According to the DC Examiner;

    The $124 billion House legislation would pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this year but would require that combat troops come home from Iraq before September 2008 – or earlier if the Iraqi government did not meet certain requirements. Democrats said it was time to heed the mandate of their election sweep last November, which gave them control of Congress.

    “The American people have lost faith in the president’s conduct of this war,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The American people see the reality of the war, the president does not.”

    It’s the Murtha Slow Bleed Plan in drag. And the usual Nancy Pelosi hyperbole. I suggest that Democrats didn’t see last weekend that more anti-anti-war protesters showed up in DC than anti-war protesters. And that’s the reality of American support for the winning of this war that Democrats refuse to see.

    Curt at Flopping Aces reminds us of the swamp draining pledge Democrats just won’t keep.

    Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette’s MilBlogs describes the impact on our forces from this ill-conceived brainfart legislation.

    Sidebar; In researching this, I discovered that I probably haven’t been paying attention as well as I should. It seems that the commander of Combined Forces in Afghanistan, LTG Karl Eikenberry was my very first platoon leader back when I was a fuzz-faced private E-2 with five jumps. Who’d athunk it back then. Jeez, I’m old. Rock on, sir! 

  • Herding cats in the Democrat caucus

    According to the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman, the Democrats are having trouble wrangling enough votes in their own majority to get their pork-laden Iraq war spending bill;

    One of the Democrats’ chief designated vote counters, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), is actively working against the Iraq war spending bill. The leadership’s senior chief deputy whip, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), spoke passionately against it on the House floor. And one of the whip organization’s regional representatives, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), is implacably opposed.

    The disarray in the House whipping operation ahead of tomorrow’s expected vote on the bill is putting a harsh spotlight on House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who has the task of rounding up the 218 votes needed to pass the $124 billion measure, but who has not even kept his organization in line.

    The article goes on to explain away Clyburn’s shortcoming as being “too nice” for the job. Or maybe it could be that the Democrats have come to the realization that many Americans don’t support their “slow bleed” tactics and their useless spending habits.

    Christina Bellatoni of the Washington Times chronicles the House’s inability to get their agenda to the president’s desk;

    None of the elements of the newly minted Democrats’ congressional agenda have made it to President Bush’s desk, and the prospects of signature bills such as federal funding for stem-cell research or homeland-security improvements becoming law any time soon are doubtful.
        Much of the Democratic agenda — dubbed “Six for ’06” — sailed out of the House with bipartisan support, but all of it has stalled in the Senate as leaders scramble to deal with the Iraq war.
        “I don’t think they’ve gotten anything done,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio said of the Democrats. “How many bills have they sent to the president? None? Somewhere around there.”

    So I can guess what’ll happen next; the Democrats will blame the voters for not sending more Democrats to Congress. Just like their excuses for everyting they can’t accomplish, it’s Americans’ fault Democrats are bumbling boobs with a vacant intellect and a dying political philosophy.

    They didn’t tell voters what their plan was before the election and they’ve let themselves be sidetracked by meaningless investigations in their haste to make points with the Bush Derangement Syndrome crowd. Democrats enjoy press conferences more than they enjoy doing their job (not that the Republicans were too much different after the “Republican Revolution” got their Contract with America completed).

    They’re more interested in pandering to the diverse pack of malcontents that put them in office than doing what’s best for the nation. A constituency reminiscent of the bar scene from “Star Wars”.

    But, in truth, I’m damn awful glad they’re ineffective and useless. That means I get to keep more of my own money for now.

  • Courage and resolve

    The President called for courage and resolve to end our fight against jihadists in Iraq according to Jon Ward of the Washington Times;

    President Bush yesterday told the country — on the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — that America can still achieve victory there, while Democrats in Congress said the United States has already failed.
        “Four years after this war began, the fight is difficult, but it can be won. It will be won if we have the courage and resolve to see it through,” Mr. Bush said in an eight-minute speech from the Roosevelt Room in the White House.
        Mr. Bush, who decided over the weekend to mark the Iraq war’s fourth anniversary, said that his plan to send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq and Afghanistan must be given “months, not days or weeks” to succeed.

    Not understanding either word, Dingy Harry Reid ran over three Congressional pages to get to a microphone;

        But Democratic leaders in Congress said they want the roughly 140,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq to begin leaving soon.
        “After four years of failure in Iraq, the president’s only answer is to do more of the same,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat. “To succeed in Iraq, we must have a new direction.”

    So what’s your recommendation, Harry? I haven’t heard any plan other than immediate and unconditional surrender to al Qaida from the Left.

    While Steny Hoyer “slavishly” parrots the party line about a time schedule;

    “Many of the same Republican leaders to plead about time frames were saying we need an exit strategy in Bosnia before we go,” Hoyer said.

    And, Slavish Steny, the Democrats also had an opinion counter to the one they hold now on time schedules for withdrawal. Where are the Democrats on a time schedule to withdraw from Bosnia and Kosovo today?

  • WaPo’s Cohen “Wasted Lives”

    For some reason, Richard Cohen thinks it’s OK to call American lives “wasted because he prays at the altar of John McCain and Barack Obama. In the Washington Post this morning, Richard Cohen, runs a piece entitled “Wasted Lives“;

    Back when I was in the National Guard and fearing a call-up for the war in Vietnam…

    Whoa, whoa, wait…one of the members of the press was in the National Guard during Viet Nam? To hear them yammer on about President Bush and Dan Quail, I always thought journalists all spent that entire war on patrol in the Mekong Delta armed with only a spear and living off of field mice turds. Oh, sorry, please continue, General Cohen;

    It is painfully hard to say — and even harder to write — that the lives lost in Iraq were wasted. It sounds like a judgment on the dead when it is meant, of course, as an indictment of the living: America’s political leadership. But some sort of finger has to be pointed at the president and some sort of reminder offered that it is not just a policy that has failed but that people have been killed or wounded. This is the real cost of a war that need not have been fought.

    What is not painfully hard to say nor write, Mr. Cohen, is that you’re an idiot and your life has been wasted. Of course you want to point your finger at the President, but how about pointing a finger at your-damn-self and all of your fellow journalists – just for a change. Wasn’t it the journalists that forced an end to the first war against Saddam Hussein with idiot reports and photos about “The Highway of Death”? Wasn’t it the journalists who trumpeted that Clinton’s asprin factory bombing was a blow against terrorism, and his bravery at firing off a cruise missile at Iraq’s Defense Ministery, how brave and bold Clinton was for withdrawing our troops from Somalia with their collective tail between their collective legs. And now you have the temerity to champion the same strategy that led us to 9-11;

    The way to protect our soldiers is not to double our losses but to agree on a sensible withdrawal policy. Particularly for the Bush administration, all this concern for the troops comes a bit late and smacks of insincerity. The war may not have started with a lie, but it seems it will end with one.

    Yep, the lie told about an honorable exit from Iraq before the job is finished – told by you and your journalist buddies.

    “When members of Congress pursue an antiwar strategy that’s been called ‘slow bleed,’ they’re not supporting the troops, they are undermining them,” Cheney said last week. Bush, who is a softer, gentler Cheney, has said substantially the same thing. “I think you can be against my decision and support the troops, absolutely,” the president said last month. “But the proof will be whether or not you provide them the money necessary to do the mission.” In other words, the only acceptable way to support the troops is, paradoxically, to put more and (it seems) more of them in danger. The present “surge” threatens to become an open-ended escalation. The war goes on.

    What makes this “surge” an open ended escalation is the refusal of the media and the Left to shut up and stop encouraging the jihadists. I’m not saying you should shut up for all eternity, neither is the Vice President. Just shut up long enough to make the jihadists at least think there’s no way out, no way he can win the war.

    Unless, of course you want to “waste” more American lives.

  • Republicans find their voice in the Senate

    I see from MyWay (AP in drag) that the Senate Republicans have figured out which side of their bread is buttered;

    In the Senate, after weeks of skirmishing, Republicans easily turned back Democratic legislation requiring a troop withdrawal to begin within 120 days. The measure set no fixed deadline for completion of the redeployment, but set a goal of March 31, 2008. The vote was 50-48 against the measure, 12 short of the 60 needed for passage.

    I guess the Congressional Democrats are valuing rhetoric over substance;

    Anti-war Democrats prevailed on a near-party line vote of 36-28 in the House Appropriations Committee, brushing aside a week-old veto threat and overcoming unyielding opposition from Republicans.

    “I want this war to end. I don’t want to go to any more funerals,” said New York Rep. Rep. Jose Serrano.

    I called Representative Serrano’s office and I asked the young lady how many funerals of his constituents who died in Iraq he’s been to - she couldn’t tell me. When asked if he’d been to even one, her answer was “One is too many, isn’t it?” So you tell me how many he’s attended. Sounds to me like he may or may not have attended one funeral. That wasn’t even worth the bandwidth it took to post.