Building Nukes For Dummies, No More Fish, and George "Ghengis Khan" Bush

To the left, on this oil painting, "Freedom of Speech", by Norman Rockwell, is depicted the view of what freedom of speech is supposed to be like in American lore. See the admiring faces focused on the broad shouldered chiseled featured young American man, standing, having made his point, excercising his rights. The crowd is white Middle America at its pinnacle.

The real Left, way to our left, has spent forty years scorning and dismantling this picture of an American ideal. Did this ideal ever actually exist? No, of course it did not, but the aspiration did. There really was a time, not very long ago when the cynics, defeatists and the moral submariners did not rule, dominate and dictate. The cultural submariners have taken us so down into the slime that every rivet in the superstructure of our society is threatening to pop under the pressure.

There is nothing out of bounds. A real good man like Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania is going down to defeat because he had the temerity to question the morality of a state judge allowing an estranged husband to deny food and water to his wife in a coma, when the parents of the girl wanted to care for her in their home. The press and media and public opinion vilified and politically destroyed a very decent and it seems anachronistic man. The public majority has changed.

The internet today, television and the declining print media, all beneficiaries of "Freedom of Speech" are filled with stories about web sites on nuclear weapons, the Iraqi connection to them, the depletion of all global fish stocks, how every country on the planet thinks George Bush is worse than Osama bin Laden, etc. It is the weekend before an election. Information and disinformational chaff, lies, rumors and rumors of rumors, lies, big lies and outrageous super hydrogenated trans acid fatty mega whopping lies abound. I woke this morning, as is my habit and read them all and do not know which of them to believe. They are all suspect to me. I do know this. Times have changed and so has most everything else, but the human lust for power and control has not. If you are tired of it all, well that is the idea. Your opponents wanted to grind you down and tire you out, beat you up, depress you and have you sit on your behinds. I offer one small piece of advice. Vote for good honest people that have demonstrated common sense and good judgment. Be able to look at them and support them, like the people in that George Rockwell painting look at that young man. It is not that corny of an idea.

The Nation Building Business

Law and order are essential to any society; in fact a prerequisite for a civil society.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 16 — American military units joined with Iraqi forces on Monday in maintaining a fragile peace between Sunni and Shiite communities in Balad, a rural town north of the capital where an explosion of sectarian violence over the weekend left dozens dead.

No people will tolerate this kind of insecurity. Personal freedoms and liberties will gladly be forfeited in the hope that the real existential threats are minimized. The Islamists understand this facet of human nature and are exploiting it across the Islamic world. From Somalia to Afghanistan, Islamists are providing a "secure" alternative to the death and corruption being visited upon the civilian populations. Never mind that in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Islamists are a huge source of the death and insecurity. Somalia seems to be a different matter as it was the competing war-lords and their kat-addled thugs which reduced that country to a chaotic cesspool.

People must be given a modicum of peace and security in their lives or they will turn to whatever power, democratic or otherwise that can provide that security.

In the aftermath of the reprisals, some residents of Balad asked why American troops had not intervened when the killings began in earnest on Saturday. One of the largest American military bases in Iraq, Camp Anaconda, which includes a sprawling air base that serves as the logistical hub of the war, is nearby.

“People are bewildered because of the weak response by the Americans,” said one Balad resident who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. “They used to patrol the city every day, but when the violence started, we didn’t see any sign of them.”

If news reports about Balad are true, this is a disgrace to the US. Lawlessness is gaining the upper hand in Iraq and unless civil order is quickly restored in Iraq, the militia violence will escalate into a full scale civil war ending only when one side has achieved dominance over the over. The question becomes how is a civil order imposed on a people accustomed only to submitting to the dictates of a brutal and ruthless dictator?

Unfortunately, due in large part to the constant cacophony of the anti-war critics including the charges of "American Imperialism," the "Democracy Project" may have been advanced prematurely. Regardless, we are where we are. Unless we want to take 10 steps back to a real military occupation with a military governor and 250,000 or 500,000 troops it has become a matter of police actions and criminal prosecutions. This means somebody, the US military or the Iraqi Army must take whatever steps are necessary to stop the kind of violence which occurred in Balad. The surviving perpetrators must then be brought to justice in an Iraqi court. Peaceful people trying to establish a just and civil society deserve no less and will turn to whoever can provide security and justice. And who can blame them?

The US Military doesn't like nation building, well who does? Unfortunately, that's the business we are currently in and since we can't find any business partners or suckers to buy it from us, we just have to keep it going or dissolve the enterprise and suffer the disgrace of failure.

I suggest somebody get serious about governing and I believe that the Germans left a trove of documents on "how to occupy." The Department of Defense can start with those if it needs an "Idiot's Guide."

Thank You, Mohammad Khatami, Ex-President of Iran.

He gave an interview to the BBC and a comment from that interview struck me and I think at the very heart of the reason for political correctness. Political correctness is firmly rooted in the argument of moral equivalency. It has to be so, because if all people, faiths or philosophies are not equivalent, then there has to be separate rules to either protect or restrict the differences. Eliminate the moral equivalency belief and you can start to entertain doubts about the value of "diversity". Open doubts about diversity and the demand for political correctness declines.

In an interview with the BBC Khatami discussed the US incursion into Iraq. Khatami said:
"This has been a terrible idea. You know, the Americans are suffering, and you will see the result of this mistake in the upcoming polls in the United States."

The idea that Western-style democracy could be "exported" to the Middle East was flawed from the beginning, Mr Khatami said.

"It's a great joke - the greatest joke that Mr Bush said, that he would like to export democracy to the Middle East...Democracy is not something to get exported."

Is this a soft prejudice of low expectations? If you or I made that argument, we would be called Islamophobic or racist. Now, of course Khatami would be against democracy, but the dismissive nature of the concept tells a lot about the beliefs and thinking in the area. If democracy is not something that can be entertained by Islamic people, why? Maybe the so called Islamophobes have recognized a reality that points to the incompatibility of Islam with the West. Maybe the Islamic faith and philosophy is incompatible with western style democracy. Is it?

By the way, This visit by Khatami is a propaganda tour to England to divide the UK apart from the US over the Nuclear sanctions issue. It is the first time since 1979 that a high ranking Iranian official has visited England.

Khatami labels US policy 'a joke'

WE Caught Him. He Caught US. He Had a Plan For Iraq. We Did Not?

Boris Johnson is MP for Henley, UK. He supported Blair and voted for the war in Iraq. He visited Iraq shortly after the collapse of resistance in Baghdad.

Today, in the Daily Telegraph, he tells a story that is tough to read. It is a recollection of an event that took place after the taking of Baghdad and the collapse of civil government in Iraq.

It is disturbing. It is damning. The consequences are being felt today, and will be for a long, long time.

Is Johnson correct? Was it that obvious and that simple? Is Sanchez correct in the previous post? These questions will be answered and someone will have some explaining to do. It will not be the US Military either.

His column ends with this:

..."And what we had failed to see in advance was that almost from the outset the Iraqis would blame us – and not just the insurgents – for every distress they experienced.

It is now commonplace for people like me, who supported the war, to say that we "did the right thing" but that it had mysteriously "turned out wrong". This is intellectually vacuous. It is like saying British strategy for July 1, 1916 was perfect, but let down by faulty execution. The thing was a disaster from the moment we invaded, and it wasn't poor old Rumsfeld's fault for failing to send in enough troops, or failing to do more "planning" for the post-war. No quantity of troops could have prevented this catastrophe; and the dreadful thing is that I think Saddam knew it.

A couple of years ago I had a chilling conversation with a very senior British general who was then intimately involved in our efforts in Iraq.

The trouble was, he said, that Saddam had thought it all through. He knew he hadn't a hope against the Pentagon, so he had a three-stage strategy. First he instructed his army not to put up much resistance to the Patton-like thrusts of the US army. Then, when Baghdad had fallen, he encouraged his soldiers to melt away to their homes and keep their weapons. The third stage, said this British general, was the one we had been embroiled in ever since: a guerrilla war, spiced with sectarian violence, to become gradually more intense until it became no longer possible for the allies to remain in Iraq.

And was he right in his analysis, this British general? Look at the place now. If Saddam had somehow managed to elude capture and stay in that hideyhole, people might now say he was on the verge of a sensational victory. Last time I was in Basra I was able to go for a run past the Shatt-al-Arab canal. You'd need a death-wish to do that today, and even in the massively fortified British compound the risk to life is so great that the Foreign Office has pulled most personnel back to the airport.

Of course we must resist the great national sport of wallowing in our own failures. Of course it is still true that some good will ultimately come, just as some good comes from all disasters. But we must be honest and accept that the price has been far too high, and that General Dannatt is right to say that our presence is making things worse.

As long as we are there, the terrorists know that they can maximise the damage to Bush and Blair by blowing up our troops, and so we incite the very violence we are trying to quell. We need to plan for withdrawal, and we need to understand why, why, why we were so mad as to attack Iraq without working out the consequences. That is why I want an inquiry. I want to interrogate our Government, and above all I want to hear from the Americans.

I want to find that tall, quiet American spook, and get him to explain to a parliamentary committee exactly why he thought there would be people in that Iraqi government building. And I bet most British soldiers would be interested to know the answer." - Boris Johnson, Daily Telegraph

. I remember the quiet day we lost the war in Iraq

Retired? Say it Ain't So!

The first plane I was ever on was a retired B-24. It was parked on a small country grass airport next to a drive-in movie. My father, who flew 25 combat missions in a B-24 took us for a Sunday drive in his 1949 Packard. He bought me an aviator's cap to celebrate the day and hoisted me up into the belly of the retired bomber. I did not want to disappoint my father but the 50 cal machine guns were missing, He didn't seem surprised that they were not there but it did change my plans. Unconcerned by the missing guns, he was pleased to tell me and my brothers about the plane and what he did on the plane. He would not talk about combat but did tell us English ladies served hot chocolate to the returning airman and US medics served pure alcohol to "clean the oxygen masks". I got the impression my father and his crew were more interested in cleaning the oxygen masks than the hot chocolate.

It seems that the B-24 should have been retired and a couple of other birds in my experience, the F-105 and more reluctantly the F-4 Phantom, but the F-117A? I have to get out more.
A little on the retirement party:

Holloman Hosts Stealth Tattoo

By Elva K. Österreich, News Editor
Article Launched:10/28/2006 12:00:00 AM MDT

COMMEMORATING THE FLIGHT — Holloman Air Force Base Commander... (J.R. Oppenheim/Daily News)
The last bandit stood Friday to celebrate the success of the Air Force wonder, the stealth F-117A Nighthawk.
In the air for 25 years, the stealth F-117A was recognized for its place in history with a 25 plane flyover during a ceremony at Holloman Air force Base.

Holloman's 49th Fighter Wing Commander Brig. Gen. David "Fingers" Goldfein is Bandit 703, or "the last bandit," because when he completes his F-117A training check-in, he will be the final pilot to sign off on the training.

"It's an honor," he said.

During the ceremony, Goldfein spoke about the future and the past. He gave a brief history of the plane as it began in the Lockheed Skunk Works in 1943 with an idea.

In 1982 the first stealth, earlier dubbed "the Hopeless Diamond," rolled out on the runway.

Goldfein introduced visiting Ret. Gen. Lloyd "Fig" Newton who was at Holloman in 1988 when the F-117-A rolled into history by being unveiled to the public from its top secret status.

"This is clearly an important day," Newton said. "The Nighthawk has played a vital role since November 1988. It has been a key part in all of our war plans, one of the first to be called on as a weapon of choice."

The large Holloman crowd and guests heard a roll-call of the F-117 personnel who have died over the years and then, 25 of the Nighthawks appeared in the distance, noisily approached the little park, and were gone in the southern sky. It was a gathering of Nighthawks never seen and one which will never be seen again.

Cheers, laughs and tears rippled across the attendees at the sight of the planes and the event was over.

Epilogue

Shortly after 911, I took an early morning flight from Atlantic City Airport, a dual use facility with the NJANG. Walking from my car to the terminal, I was welcomed with an instant neck hair raising rush by the unmistakable air-ripping, ass-hauling, afterburner-lit, sound of two F-16s roaring down the runway. "Son of bitch, son of a bitch", I said to no one, tears in my eyes, I love the smell of JP-8 in the morning. Adios amigo.

Why Failures in Iraq? Gen. Sanchez says, "Where do the policies come from?"

"Partisan politics have hindered this war effort and America should not accept this," Sanchez said. "The security of America is definitely at stake."

No matter who wins the election on Tuesday, the US military will be deeply engaged in a war going on into the fourth year. The Iraq war has been the focal point of this election season. This war was started with the stated knowledge that it is part of a long struggle. It was voted by the US Congress on a bi-partisan basis.

While it started with a broad US public support, that support was based on claims and reasons that have failed to be substantiated. Weapons of Mass destruction were not found and public support has eroded with the active criticism of of MSM and the political and social critics of GWB. All of this is true and all of this is irrelevant. The facts are that the US is in a predicament that has no simple solution. This much we know:

• The US will have to leave Iraq if the duly elected government asks or demands that it do so. In some ways this would be the simplest solution, but an unlikely one.
• There is no likelihood that the Iraqis themselves will willingly accept a strong central government by any dominant Sunni or Shiite leadership.
  
• There will be no significant assistance from any outside powers. The US will be doing well to maintain the existing and diminishing level of support.
• The dream of an Iraqi Democracy will remain a dream for the near future.
• No significant economic revival will occur under the present anarchy and violence.
• The American people do not have the stomach or patience to support a campaign that appears to be going nowhere.
• The US withdrawal under fire or leaving Iraq to chaos will be a disaster for US foreign policy and security.

That being stated, there are reasonable objectives that can be achieved.

1. The US should allow the natural separation of recognizable states within an Iraqi federal system. The number of states is not important and up to the Iraqis.
2. No US money should be spent for Iraqi infrastructure and development. Most of it is going to security and much of the rest is wasted by corruption. It is an Iraqi problem and they need to deal with or not as they choose. Let them build there own sewer systems.
   
3. The US must accept the existence of local militias. They are there and it is an Iraqi problem. The US should help guarantee the security between the states and against foreign powers and not be doing internal police work.
   
4. The US should provide military and police training to the individual states or the federal government as requested. It should charge the local or federal government for the service and let them pay the salaries and a reasonable cost of the training.
5. All parties should be put on notice that attacks on US Forces will be dealt with harshly and without regard to the source.

Here is how General Sanchez views the situation:

Military alone can't win in Iraq -ex-U.S. commander
01 Nov 2006 23:15:39 GMT
Source: Reuters

"SAN ANTONIO, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, retired from the Army on Wednesday, saying the military alone cannot secure a victory in Iraq.
"We have been saying since 2003 that we could fight there for years, if we continue to apply only the element of (military) power," Sanchez told reporters. "We can continue to kill people there for a decade and until you can sort out the political and economic issues in that country, we will continue to have an issue there."
The war in Iraq has come to the forefront of next week's U.S. congressional elections as Democrats try to wrest control of Congress from Republicans.
"Partisan politics have hindered this war effort and America should not accept this," Sanchez said. "The security of America is definitely at stake."
Sanchez, a native of Rio Grande City, Texas, commanded coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 until July 2004. Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison were abused during his tenure but an Army investigation exonerated Sanchez of wrongdoing.
Sanchez did not mention President George W. Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by name in criticizing U.S. political leaders.
"I'm a soldier and we have civilian control of the military," he said.
When pressed by reporters to answer who was at fault for the failures in Iraq, Sanchez said, "Where do the policies come from?"

Commander Kerry on Road to 2008 Presidential Drive. Democrats Not Amused.

What a difference a day makes in American politics. Yesterday morning Kerry put on a smart suit and tie, brushed his presidential hair and admired himself in that last glimpse into his mirror. Off he went to support Democratic candidates and pick up IOUs to be used for the beginning of the next presidential campaign. He had the money and the plan. He knew who the competition would be and he also knew that this would be the best possible chance for a Democrat to win and he was the Democrat.

But fate frowned on JFnnK. He made a stupid joke, or did he? Was it something sinister in his thinking or just a sloppy slip of the tongue? Well it makes little difference at this time. Give him the benefit of doubt and he is still a loser and out of the race. He made two errors. The first is the obvious, a condescending slap at those that should be his natural constituency. The second was his complete lack of grace in not admitting an error and compounded by a stubbornness and arrogance that is obvious to everyone but him.

Don Imus, trying to rescue him, threw him some softballs and Kerry went down swinging. He is out. All Democratic events have been canceled and Kerry will not be reporting for any duty at the next Democratic Convention. It is over. Done.

Islamic Trinity of Death. The Undeniable Link Between Islam and Terrorism.

The apologists for Islam rightly state that all Muslims are not terrorists, but neither can they deny the indisputable link between the institution of the mosque, the cleric and the radicalized convert or native born Islamic radical. Time after time, carnage after carnage, atrocity on top of atrocity, it is Muslims who are the instigators, perpetrators and just as likely the victims. Islam has not been hi-jacked by anyone, least not some radical faction. It has a corruption so deep in its DNA that no cosmetic surgery can change it. The avoidance of this painful and disturbing truth in the West has become comical in a macabre sense. Islamic gangs terrorize French cities and he BBC and French news reports describe them as "youths". They could be no less accurate if they called them biped mammals. Euphemisms are not going to make the obvious link between the mosque, the imam and the faithful go away. In time, every European country with a significant Islamic population will have to remove the veil of euphemism and face the consequences of this unholy trinity.

The conversation is beginning in Holland:

Did imam's sermon incite Van Gogh murder?
by Barry Thorne and Claire Cavanagh
31-10-2006

Mohammed Bouyeri, the man who murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh almost exactly two years ago is serving a life prison sentence, but now questions are being asked about whether the sermon of a Muslim cleric played a role in the crime.

During the ongoing trial of another Dutch terrorism suspect, Samir Azzouz, it's emerged that Imam Fawaz of the as-Sunnah mosque in The Hague gave a sermon condemning Theo van Gogh just a few weeks before his murder. A recording of the sermon exists and in it the imam is heard uttering a curse against the Dutch director for his film Submission, which is critical of Islam. The film had been shown on television shortly before the sermon.
Criminal bastard
In the recording of the sermon, Imam Fawaz calls Theo van Gogh a 'criminal bastard' and beseeches Allah to visit an incurable disease upon the filmmaker. He also condemns former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali who was involved in writing the script for Submission. The imam asks Allah to make Ms Hirsi Ali go blind and give her cancer of the tongue and brain.
Despite the claims in the recording, Ruud Peters, a professor of Islamic Law doesn't believe the imam's words are incitement to commit murder:
"I have a couple of arguments for that - the most important is that he [Imam Fawaz] says, 'the people who have insulted the Prophet Muhammad should die through the hands of God' - he was very specific in that… he says, 'leave it to God'."

Radio Netherlands
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