02.16.10
A great development, but there are some considerations that merit discussion
Michelle Malkin lauds the capture of the Taliban biggie, but has some questions and observations.
01.23.10
And while the Taliban is rocking Kabul with missiles and small-arms fire
. . . our SecDef says that they must have a legitimate role in the political life of Afghanistan.
10.12.09
Every once in a while, Diane Feinstein has a moment of clarity
The latest being this morning.
10.08.09
Going into a world war with a flower child as our commander-in-chief
Iran is supplying the Taliban in Afghanistan with surface-to-air-missiles, EFPs, grenades and money.
Which makes TCM’s latest pronouncement on the region look supremely idiotic, pathetic and disgusting.
As soon as a theater in the current global conflagration gets too hot, the FHers decide it’s no longer necessary
The Washington Post, no organ of hawk policy, says in an unsigned editorial that after some of its editors met with Pakistani foreign ministry officials last week, they got a clear picture of just how distressed Pakistan is over TCM’s dithering about Afghanistan strategy.
This Joe Biden-led push for the ironically named “Pakistan First” approach fails to take into account the transnational threat the Taliban poses in that region. One must keep after al-Qaeda, but the Taliban would provide the host animal upon which the jihadist fleas would hitch a ride.
10.05.09
The invention of smokescreen terms can com back to bite you
Such is the case with the phrase “necessary war,” which was coined to make a distinction between US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. TCM was big on calling Afghanistan a “necessary war” as recently as three weeks ago. Now, not so much, even as troops continue to die.
Michael Barone says that all wars are a choice, a decision. Some prominent Americans in the 1930s were saying we could live with a Nazi or Japanese empire. Some are now saying that about a nuclear Iran. (See my post on Fareed Zakaria.)
It makes for a different wolrd than the one we currently live in if we opt to go along, get along, but, hey, maybe the alligator will eat us last.
09.23.09
The second worst thing
There’s something odd about Afghanistan having become such a controversy, with deteriorating conditions in that country and waning support for our effort there over here, isn’t there? It was the “good war,” the “necessary war,” the one FHers – including TCM – always held up as the alternative to that exercise in “imperialism” and caprice: our toppling of the Baathists in Iraq.
General McChrystal’s assessment is stark. A resolute defeat of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban is going to take an effort we have not yet mustered. A large number of troops, a long time and a thorough understanding of the lethality of jihadism will all be necessary ingredients.
They probably won’t be applied to the situation. TCM, SecDef Gates, the H-word Creature and other regime figures are speaking of reevaluating strategy even as the enemy is giving us hell like we haven’t seen in our eight years of this effort. Political considerations are no small part of this. TCM knows that the moonbat-and-sprout-muncher contingent comprises a significant part of his base, one which can seal his doom if it turns on him. This bunch hates war more than it loves preserving even its own hide; such is the magnitude of its perversion.
So the likelihood is that the Afghanistan will become a quagmire and then fairly quickly descend into defeat – which probably means the Taliban officially taking back over, another, deeper round of destabiliation of Pakistan, a fresh array of opportunities for al-Qaeda, and a generally weaker hand for the United States in world affairs. Take a moment to ponder the endgame of that set of circumstances.
The last war the US and its allies won resolutely was World War II, in 1945. The Korean “police action” ended in a 1953 armistice, the terms of which still make for no small portion of our current troubles. The Vietnam war ground on for years when it didn’t have to, and concluded with the humiliating specter of terrified Vietnamese citizens clinging to the blades of US helicopters lifting off from the US embassy rootop in Saigon, even as the North’s tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace. Desert Storm pried Saddam’s fingers off Kuwait, but left him in power, for another decade of making a fool out of the United Nations, appealing to the corruptability of our ostensible allies in Europe, feeding its own citizens into shredding machines and playing cat-and-mouse with the world regarding the state of its WMD program. The Balkans and Somalia were situations that sputtered to humiliating, sloppy conclusions. We stared down the Soviet Union, but socialism of a Marxist variety still breathes down our neck in the personages of the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il, and, internally, the TCM regime.
Hence, we’re still beseiged by threats. That’s what happens when victory is less than decisive.
“Well, just what does decisive victory look like in an age of unprecedented lethality?” is a legitimate question to ask.
We had a considerable capacity for lethality in 1945, the last time we brought enemies completely to their knees. What we did to achieve what we had to achieve was ugly beyond anything humanity had conceived before it witnessed it. In Germany, it involved razing cities, most notably Dresden, home to some of Christendom’s most exquisite and historic architecture. In Japan, the metropolitan flattening was done with a device that had been tested for the first time the previous year in the US desert southwest, a weapon of such apocalyptic magnitude that its very existence has loomed in the background of the entire world’s daily life ever since.
I look at photographs of mushroom clouds – from those Japanese bombings, but mostly from various above-ground tests that have been done over the years – the way I look at other kinds of pictures of horror in process: F4 tornadoes looming over housing subdivisions, airplanes in mid-crash, sinking ferry boats. What such agents of utter destruction introduce into the human experience is about all a human mind, heart and soul can bear, maybe more that they can bear but for the grace of God.
I no sooner write the previous paragraph than I’m aware of the difference between the other phenomena I cite and nuclear explosions. The tornado is an act of nature, purely a matter of physics and statistical odds. The ones involving man-made modes of transportation – airplanes and ferry boats – are almost always accidents, owing nothing to the ill will of those who assume prime responsibility for the safety of all involved.
Then there is the nuclear weapon. Is an act of evil committed any time one is detonated?
I’ve written about this before, most recently in my last newspaper column. My conclusion is that, in unleashing the necessary force to subdue one’s enemy, motive is everything. There are two basic motives for taking conflict to that level: to commit evil, or to stop it. The decisive level of force itself is morally neutral.
I’m not oblivious to the possibility that I’m coming across harsh or extreme to certain types of readers here. I’m writing frankly about a harsh and extreme subject. What I am seeking to get to in doing so is a solid sense of where the good lies. One has to pursue that, or we’re talking about a world founded on nihilism, in which there is no ultimate good. The logical extension of such a worldview is the futility of any effort to foster good. That requires cynicism, and I have sworn off cynicism with utter resolution.
What will be necessary to win in Afghanistan is resolve and the supporting material wherewithal of a scale the modern American mostly doesn’t consider. It will take that. I’m not speaking of any specific type of weapon or warfare; I’m no expert in that. It must be sufficient to ensure that the enemy can fight no more, though.
Every one of us, every human being on earth, ought to be horrified of war and never forget its cosmic seriousness. It is perhaps the second worse circumstance we can find ourselves in. The first is living in a world in which evil has prevailed.
09.22.09
Giving the boss cover to vote “present”
The H-word Creature says “other military experts” dispute General McChrystal’s assessment of what’s needed to avoid failure in Afghanistan. Would she care to name them? Do any of them have the job responsibility of giving an accurate asesment of the situation?
What stunning arrogance.
You think about this and her recent comments on the TCM regime’s betrayal of Poland and the Czech Republic (and general endangerment of the West, a common trait with the regime’s handling of Afghanistan) and a pattern begins to emerge. I actually don’t think it’s so much a matter of being TCM’s lapdog, which would be out of character for her. She’s passionately on the same page. She really thinks there is some clever alternative to what the strategically obvious necessities are. It all stays very much in the realm of the general and the broad, though (no pun intended – well, maybe a litle bit). As with sweeping declarations of “rights” to life’s agreeable possibilities such as health care and a job and clean water, there’s the sense that slogans can bring about utopian results where detailed plans of implementation are utterly absent.
Is there a level on which Freedom-Hater policy isn’t a complete train wreck?
09.19.09
In case you thought TCM knew what he was doing in Afghanistan . . .
. . . this news story will set you straight.
09.12.09
Real love of freedom
I just went to a little send-off for our dance instructor’s son. He’s a Marine who will be deployed to Afghanistan next week. It was at the studio. Finger food and bottled water.
A gangly, soft-spoken young man. His high-school buddies were there, along with relatives and some of the other dance students.
I told him three things:
1.) You’re a very special type of human being to take this time out of your life to defend our freedom.
2.) We’re counting on you coming home as soon as possible.
3.) Win. Defeat the jihadists so thoroughly there’s no chance of their rising up again.
I know his mom is harboring some big-time anxiety, even though she keeps a pretty chipper demeanor.
When I told him he was a special type of human being, he chuckled and said, “Well, some might say we’re stupid.” I told him that he’s allowed to indulge in self-deprecating humor, but that nobody else should accord him anything but the supreme respect.
He was in junior high when he decided on this path. It was eight years ago this month.
03.19.09
Vulgarity works
Totalitarian socialists in past times at least had a sense of style. Those little caps that Lenin and Stalin wore. The simple little suit that Mao made his trademark. Fidel’s fatigues. The brand-identifying red-and-black color scheme of the Sandinistas.
The Freedom-Hater regime with its fingers currently on America’s throat have nothing so snappy. Its mode of dress is really not so different from the rest of us. What they rely on to advance their quest for public acceptance is pure vulgarity. Blatant lying and perversion is paraded before the nation’s television cameras with utter confidence that no one will give a damn.
Consider Barney Frank, he of the prostitute boyfriend who ran a zoo-sex ring out of Frank’s basement, he of the romantic involvement with a Fannie Mae executive while he sat on the committee overseeing the lending firm’s compliance with government requirements, he of the wads of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s lobbying arms.
Now this slug posing as a human being grills the head (since last September) of AIG, who was picked for the job by the damn government, when he was minding his own business running Allstate, demanding names of bonus-taking AIG executives. When Mr. Liddy expressed reluctance to provide such names, citing death threats in general and specifying one mentioning piano wire and the executives’ families, Frank dismissively and smugly respond that “everybody gets death threats.”
Then he has the gall to write a Huffington Post piece attempting to make his career in financial oversight look like some kind of crusade for fiscal responsibility. It’s full of convenient omissions, glossings-over, and uses of vague terms. Why, for instance, did Republican legislators and President Bush object to the bills Frank says he so passionately pushed? It’s hard to buy the premise that, per se, Pubs were against help for faith-based non-profits, for instance. If that’s all there is to that one, I’ll be the first to drop my jaw in shock.
But his record of lying about the state of health of Fannie and Freddie (”I don’t see anything to report that raises safety and soundness problems”) and his current attempt to smokescreen the W administration’s repeated attempts over eight years to reform these organizations is there for all to see. And therein lies the vulgarity. He doesn’t give a flying flip. It’s fine with him if the whole world knows the naked truth. He’s got the committe chairmanship and the access to the media. He can forge ahead with his designs and his Stalinist show-trial antics and no one can touch him.
On a different subject involving a different Freedom-Hater, vulgarity was on full display yesterday in San Francisco yesterday. Nancy Pelosi, speaking in St. Anthony’s, a Catholic church, when she is on the outs with her archbishop and indeed the Pope for claiming that the Church is cool with killing people who aren’t born yet, said that raids to enforce the nation’s immigration laws are un-American.
Words fail one.
Then there’s TCM’s appearance on The Tonight Show, debasing the office he holds even more than he already has.
There is a level on which we the citizenry are complicit in all this. Vulgarity works. What does that say about our present state?
06.28.07
Amnesty dies again
The Senate couldn’t revive the Kennedy / McCain / W exercise in crass-manipulation-of-feelings-over-principle-and-security.
I started to feel pretty good about it yesterday as various Senators frantically tried to concoct amendments and get backing for them. So much stuff got tacked onto the basic amnesty, pulling it every which way, that the basic patty-cake-with-lawbreakers at the core of the thing could no longer stand the strain and wound up in tatters.
Okay, now all you members of that august chamber: debate the truly important stuff, like the height of the fence and the gauge of the wire on top of it.
Of course, the MSM is playing up the defeat-for-Bush angle. Appropos of my post below, “The Mind of W,” it’s a strange new world when my reaction to such headlines is “And a damn good thing, too!”
06.01.07
Somebody go upside these clowns’ heads – fast!
The Republican National Committee has let go its entire staff of phone-bank people as donations drop faster than your jaw. And nobody’s buying RNC chief of staff Hathaway’s explanation about outdated equipment.
Is there a more reliably red state than Arizona? That’ won’t be the case if the process of the GOP there continuing its hari-kiri goes unabated.
Damn it, listen to us! Seal the border. We can worry about how to humanely take care of the existing problem once we’ve stemmed the invasion.
05.31.07
Fred!
Finally, BN has somebody to enthuse about, rather than make excuses for their shortcomings. (Okay, Fred got on board with McCain-Feingold, but as far as I know that’s the goofiest move he’s ever made.)
We’ve got the real deal here. An utterly human, personable, seasoned, brilliant, principled, articulate and unafraid statesman.
In descending order, if it can’t be him, BN gets stoked by -
- Romney
- Giuliani
-Hunter
-Brownback
The things you gotta ask yourself are:
- who is realistically electable, and
- who can make mincemeat out of the H-word creature in a debate and show her for the socialist phony she is.
These people qualify in descending order on the first count, but any of them could handle the second requirement. One, though, could do it grandly, in a way that would have all Americans with intelligence and integrity levels above the level of slugs leaping out of their armchairs and pumping their fists into the air.
The number one fan of the man from Tennessee!
05.17.07
Bad, bad, bad on every level
The immigration bill that passed the House and is about to do likewise in the Senate is a kiss of death for -
- the Republicans in 2008, as a critical mass of its base stays away from the polls in disgust
- the notion of law and order
- our national sovereigny
- the survival of the West, ultimately.
We can now see what happens to those afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome in its late stages: Their ravaged souls emit a foul odor that is strangely attractive to Freedom Haters, who then swarm around them and devour them.
