al-Jadida
Mudville Gazette's coverage of a car bomb that killed dozens of children in an attempt to take out a US checkpoint is many things at once. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds) It is a human tragedy; a horror story; a commentary on the nature of the "militants" so beloved by the Left; but it is also the Pro and Contra debate of our age written in blood.
Near the charred, shrapnel-scarred bombing scene women draped in black abayas wept as they walked by, and dazed children with tears in their eyes wandered amid bits of metal and bloody human remains. A pile of children's slippers lay on the street. "My cousin Mustafa was killed," said 11-year-old Mohammed Nouredin, gesturing toward a blackened engine block in the middle of the street. "That is part of his bicycle. His coffin was sent to Najaf," the traditional burial ground for Iraqi Shiites.
That's part of it. I can't bring myself to repeat the rest. There are those who, after the London bombing, had convinced themselves that all Muslims were enemies of civilization. There are sound arguments for that: the existence of the Jihad, the silence of most Islamic clergy. But what of the children? What of the Muslim children who are the targets of these "freedom fighters", "resistants" or "militants", whichever the BBC prefers to call them? In what category do they belong? The empirical fact is that no group has been killed more often and more brutally by the "Jihad" than Muslims themselves. During the French Algerian war several times more Algerian Muslims died than French. Anyone with a calculator can see the same is true in Iraq. One of the targets of the London bombing was a subway station frequented by British Muslims. The first objective of terror, indeed of the Terror, and the first objective of the Jihad is to maintain internal control over its base. For as long as internal control can be maintained, a terrorist movement need not defeat its armed enemy. It will never lose; hence in the estimation of the Peace generation, it will always win.
Logically, a large part of the War on Terror will consist of creating an insurgency within the insurgency. Fighting Islamic extremism must comprise organizing a revolt against Islam's internal oppressors. That would include waging intellectual war against Islamic fundamentalism within its own theological context -- a reformation -- it will include creating clandestine cells to strike at the gangs which beat women and intimidate men within the community. It will require all the skills of a resistance fighter struggling against bearded Big Brother. The Left has a word for such people: "Uncle Toms". That is how they've already characterized Hirsi Ali. That is to be expected. But many conservatives have also been blind to the urgent requirement of creating a liberation movement within Islam, in part because they half believe all Muslims are themselves the enemy; in part because they despair of Muslims ever rising up against the medieval institutions which constrain them; in part because they haven't thought about it. But they should. That pile of bloody children's slippers on an Iraqi street is a tally of spirits who were created to be free.
posted by wretchardthecat at 7/13/2005 05:49:00 PM
208 Comments:
The answer has always laid with the Indigs. No Army of Occupation can control a Popular Insurgency, w/out excessive force. With neither the cultural tools or language skills the Marines & Soldiers make poor policemen.
Only the indigenous people can control their future.
Give them the tools, then get out of their way.
Desert rat, in what way would you characterize al Zarchawi and his clan as a "Popular Insurgency"? It seems the strategy for defeating a popular insurgency must be quite different than a strategy for defeating a bunch of interlopers.
Wretchard, I've looked (though not hard) and it's not obvious to me how the left is characterizing Hirsi Ali as an "Uncle Tom". Can you cite some examples?
I would not cast Z as an Iraqi insurgent. He and his crew are just a small part of the challenge in Iraq.
When the Sunni population disengages from the fight, through politics & economics and rejoins the Government, in a diminished capacity, the Insurgancy will be over.
As in the KSA, aQ gangsters may still run loose in Iraq, but it will be Iraqis that bring him and his network down. They may still need our help in the ensuing firefight.
If the Iraqis cannot get the aQ cells identified and isolated, chances are we never will.
The new Iraq can be the fertile field for the reformation of Islam. The Iraqis will have suffered more in recent times at the hands of the jihadists than anyone else in the Muslim world; they will thus have earned the moral authority to speak up for a reformed and modern version of Islam. Further, with American support and the experience of their own current civil war, they will come out of the present troubles with the most highly trained, experienced, and capable military force in the Islamic world, should they need that to defend or enforce their point of view.
But mostly it will be their moral authority that will allow the Iraqis, both secular and religious, to argue for a new, modern Islam.
The irony is that the jihadists have elected to use the media as their main tool. This is already backfiring fatally on them. They, assisted by television images and the internet, are dragging themselves and bin Laden's former stature in the Islamic world down into a wasteland where it will never recover. There a new beginning can sprout, starting in Iraq.
Jason, for some quick links go to this copy of a Yahoo news article entitled "Dutch Muslim Culture Wars". Some excerpts:
Hirsi Ali's many critics contend that far from being a revolutionary, she brings a message that the West is all too willing to hear. They say that in calling for European governments to protect Muslim women from Muslim men, she and her admirers recycle the same Orientalist tropes that the West has used since colonial times as an excuse to control and subjugate Muslims. "White men saving black women from black men--it's a very old fantasy that is always popular," Annelies Moors, a University of Amsterdam anthropologist who writes about Islamic gender relations, said dryly. "But I don't think male violence against women, a phenomenon known to every society in history, can be explained by a few Koranic verses." ...
Karima Belhaj is the director of the largest women's shelter in Amsterdam. She's also one of the organizers of the "Stop the Witchhunt!" campaign against what she sees as anti-Muslim hysteria. On the day we talked, she was despondent. Arsonists had set fire for the second time to an Islamic school in the town of Uden. A few days later a regional police unit warned that the rise of right-wing Dutch youth gangs potentially presents a more dangerous threat to the country than Islamist terrorism. "The rise of Islamism is not the problem," Belhaj said. "The problem is that hatred against Arabs and Muslims is shown in this country without any shame." With her message that Muslim women must give up their faith and their families if they want to be liberated, Hirsi Ali is actually driving women into the arms of the fundamentalists, said Belhaj: "She attacks their values, so they are wearing more and more veils. It frightens me. I'm losing my country. I'm losing my people." ...
If Belhaj was sad, another "Stop the Witchhunt!" organizer was angry. Like Belhaj, Miriyam Aouragh is a second-generation immigrant of Moroccan background. A self-described peace and women's activist, Aouragh was the first in her family to attend university. She's now studying for a PhD in anthropology. She scoffs at the idea that Hirsi Ali is a champion of oppressed Muslim women. "She's nothing but an Uncle Tom," Aouragh said. "She has never fought for the oppressed. In fact, she's done the opposite. She uses these problems as a cover to attack Islam. She insults me and she makes my life as a feminist ten times harder because she forces me to be associated with anti-Muslim attacks."
"Uncle Tom" is precisely the phrase the Left has used to characterized Hirsi Ali.
Here's how the BBC described what's going on in Iraq these days - in an article on the attacks which killed all those CHILDREN:
"Hundreds of Iraqis have died in attacks by militants opposed to the US presence and to a Shia-led government that took charge in Baghdad earlier this year. "
And they have the AUDACITY to use that "sanitized" phrase - which is so sanitized that its disconnected from reality - in this report:
At least 26 Iraqis, almost all of them children, have been killed by a car bomb in south-eastern Baghdad. A US soldier is also said to have died in the blast. Another three US soldiers are reported to have been injured. A car laden with explosives drove past a US army vehicle and blew up as troops handed out sweets, a witness said.
NOT CALLING a terrorist a terrorist (or putting the words in between quotations marks)is a display of EXACTLY the kind of BAD-THINKING which leads to BAD POLICIES such as:
banning profiling;
leaving borders defenseless; and "fighting with one hand behind your back."
FACT: there are many MILITANTS who DO NOT COMMIT MASS MURDER OF CHILDREN.
THOSE WHO DO COMMIT MASS MURDER OF INNOCENT CHILDREN ARE NOT MERELY MILITANTS; THEY ARE TERRORISTS!
PEOPLE WHO COMMIT INDISCRIMINATE MASS MURDER OF SOME CHLDREN - IN ORDER TO INFLICT FEAR - ( = TERROR) - OF CONTACT WITH THE US MILITARY ON OTHER CHILDREN are NOTHING BUT TERRORISTS - BY EFFING DEFINITION!
It's long passed time that the Left (which dominates the BBC in the UK as they do the entire MSM in the USA) accepted that our ENEMY in this WAR is the most brutal and evil we have EVER FACED - and that they are TERRORISTS!
And it's long-passed time they stopped apologizing for the ENEMY and their EVIL CREED and either joined us - or shut-up the eff and got out of the way.
If you cannot call the folks who blow up INNOCENT CHILDREN terrorists, then you have no integrity, and no courage,
and no business reporting the news!
I think perhaps it's time that the British government sold the BBC to al Jazeera. The BBC workers would be very comfortable there, and it would save the British taxpayers a lot of money!
Children are a minority within a larger population. Shi'ites, while a majority in Iraq, are a psychological minority because the Sunnis held the power...so we have the deaths of children of a lower caste.
OTOH, the deaths of children are hard-wired into the human brain as a tragedy, a death of our future. Thus, perhaps the Shi'ites will rise up, will refuse to be bullied further...
One generalization about Iraqis is that they love their children dearly. So perhaps they will turn.
This quote tells an interesting tale
"..."Why do they attack our children? They just destroyed one U.S. Humvee, but they killed dozens of our children," he said as women screamed, slapped their faces and beat themselves over the head. ..."
The just destroyed one Humvee...
Here is a native, lamenting the amount of damage to US was insufficent grounds for the collateral damage done.
If US loses had been higher... well then the sacrifice could well have been worth it.
Pape may just well be right
"...would include waging intellectual war against Islamic fundamentalism within its own theological context -- a reformation --"
That 'reformation' began May 23, 1844 (1260AH) when the Forerunner of the Lord of Hosts was recognized and adored by humans.
His time on Earth was brief, and His coming released POWERFUL energies into the world of humanity. So disturbed were the mullahs and imams of Iran and Iraq that they had Him publicly tortured, then publicly killed (July 9, 1850)
WHEN there is a public examination of Him, His coming, His teachings and their relevance to 100 million Muslims, another billion Christians will be enlightened in the ensuing public examination of the fulfillment of Jesus' 3 promises and Isaiah and Ezekiel's promises...
The Lord of Hosts is not only the Promised One for Jews and Christians and Muslims, but also the Buddha Amit-Abha for Buddhists and the Promised Avatar for Hindus.
His coming is the one dynamic which can release humans from the left-right/us-them paradigms and conventional strictures now crippling the institutions and societies of humankind.
The al-Jazeeras and other Islamic news organs don't want to even RUN a story on The Glory of God, because in Arabic, it comes out too clearly, too obvious and to powerfully: Baha'u'llah (The Glory of God)!
If it commits brutal offenses such as this, what is the source of al Qaeda's strength? The answer, I think, it that al Qaeda's form of jihad is the product of more than 70 years of ideological development. That ideology has appeal for all kinds of reasons rooted in ancient Arab and Muslim failures, including their failure to found legitimate governments and engage successfully with the modern world. But the ideology of jihadism also -- perhaps primarily -- succeeds because it competes against essentially nothing. There is no meaningful competing ideology in the Arab world, which sustains its rulers in the barren soil of monarchy or rank authoritarianism.
Just as communism's intellectual roots stretched back decades before the establishment of the first communist state, jihadi ideology is a coherent and highly developed political philosophy with roots long ante-dating the state of Israel, Western dependance on Middle Eastern oil, the presence of American soldiers in the region, or the first jihadi state -- the Taliban government of Afghanistan. As was the case with communism, it will take a long time to discredit and destroy this ideology.
How, then, do we destroy both al Qaeda and the jihadi ideology? The answer is, just as Wretchard suggests, that "we" -- meaning the West -- cannot. Just as the citizens of communist regimes did more to destroy communism in the end than the United States, only Muslims, and particularly Arab Muslims, can destroy the jihad. They will do so only when it is worth their great personal sacrifice to ruthlessly pursue the people in their own world who promote this ideology. (And in case it needs to be said, a settlement between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel will not motivate that sacrifice, and neither will the withdrawal of American soldiers from Arab lands.)
As with the decades-long war on communism, the war on Islamic jihad requires strategy that both contains the advance of the jihad as much as practical and motivates its most direct victims -- in this case Muslims -- to destroy it from within (as the Russians and the Chinese have both, in quite different fashion, destroyed communism). Containment, in this case, requires passive strategies (such as homeland security) and the active participation of the existing governments of the Islamic world. American strategy -- including, in my opinion, the war in Iraq -- has been constructed around coercing those otherwise uncooperative governments into that active participation. The demands of containment require us to coerce and cajole fundamentally hideous governments, including especially Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (as well as other tactics, such as our flowering alliance with India and our careful diplomacy in Central Asia) have put us in a position to do that.
Unfortunately, steps we take to coerce the autocracies of the Muslim world also make us less popular among the Muslim masses. This is not different from the Cold War, in which active American efforts to contain communism -- the Cuban embargo, the military defense of South Korea and Vietnam, support for the insurgents in Angola, support for Taiwan, and support for Israel in 1967 and 1973 -- enraged the otherwise oppressed populations of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and so forth. As we learned during the Cold War, containment alone cannot dispose of an enemy founded in a well-articulated political philosophy. We therefore must combine containment of the jihadis with a long-term plan to motivate the Muslim world to discredit and destroy the jihad from within. This is the purpose and promise of the Bush Administration's "democratization" strategy.
Muslims need serious motivation to discredit and destroy the jihad because the jihadis are extremely dangerous and ruthless people. They have demonstrated their capacity for breathtaking brutality not just on September 11 and in the Sunni Triangle, but across the world over a period of at least twenty years. None of Western coercion of Israel, the retreat of the United States from the region or promises of Western aid or free trade will provide that necessary serious motivation. The only way to inspire Muslims to fight the jihad is to invite them to embrace a competing ideology that can fill the empty void of their civil society and give them something in defense of which they are willing to risk war with the jihadis. Moderate Islam -- the widely-proclaimed "religion of peace" -- might have filled that void, but it has not thus far and shows no prospect of doing so any time soon. The idea of popular sovereignty -- the philosophy of John Locke, if you will -- is the only political philosophy available in the West that holds any promise of competing with the evil coherence of Islamic jihad. It is also a wonderful thing to fight for.
The "democratization" of the Muslim world, therefore, is critical to the destruction of the jihadi ideology for at least three reasons. Least important is the reason most often given -- that it will "drain the swamp" of Muslim rage that festers under the heel of Muslim authoritarian and monarchical regimes. Far more importantly, popular sovereignty is an ideology that can compete with radical Islam. Indeed, with the death of communism, which was a sort of perverted version of popular sovereignty, it is the only ideology that can compete with radical Islam. Finally, and most importantly, democratic governments are governments worth fighting for. Generally speaking, Muslims are not going to turn in the jihadis in the back of the mosque because a monarch or a dictator threatens them or gives them money. They will, though, if those jihadis threaten an idea that they hold dear. Moderate Islam has failed to supply that idea. Communism is dead. The only alternative is the guiding light of the Englightenment, the idea of the social contract. John Locke will fuel the counterinsurgency within Islam.
Sorry for the long comment, but I thought it was germane. I also confess that I have written the same argument in a somewhat longer form previously.
These people obviously think the War is an Insurgency against our occupation, not a Holy War against infidels.
These victims are Shia and Christen children and as such, Infidels to the aQ wahabbists.
The victims parents, quoted, do not percieve this to be the case, however. Interesting that they see aQ as fighting US, not them.
ah yes, the children...
let's remember the kids targeted by arafat's minions..
the school buses targeted by the palestinians...
the babies that the palestinians targeted to kill...
...............
ah yes the children...
in the iran-iraq war remember the children USED as human mine sweepers?
how about the children brain washed to want to die for allah by the PA/Hamas/hezbollah?
these are all victims of islamo-nazis
then the children of iraq...
pretty sick people these islamo-thugs..
the leaders send thier kids to france to live, while they brainwash people to murder themselves....
ah the kids....
Chechnyian rebels attack Russian School. I forget how many children died there.
One of the skills of a good clandestine organizer is the ability to create the feeling of "us" versus "them". And they only way to do that is not through words, but by creating confrontational experiences: that is, starting a fight. Operationally, this means creating Shi'ite cells to fight the AQ; creating Iraqi government bodies to fight the AQ. Creating cells in Western society to fight the AQ, through legal means, or at least not-so illegal means in the case of the West. Once people get hurt, as must happen, it becomes personal. The rebels become "we" and Muslim fundamentalists become "they".
Unfortunately we are outsiders. The classic first step of the organizer is submergence. You have to "integrate" with the people you want to organize. Then you stop being an outsider and start becoming an agitator. Muslim societies are highly resistent to this process, but not invulnerable. However, what one needs to create resistance cells is a cadre of really tough guys, preferably Muslims themselves, who are willing to do whatever it takes to fight.
We talk about the thousands of Al Qaeda who trained in Afghanistan. We should have the same kind of training camps producing counter-cadres. It is possible to produce a lesser kind of cadre, such as bloggers or intellectuals who we would encourage to simply think. That is crime itself under radical Islam. So much the better.
There's a necessary military component to the War on Terror. But there should also be an organizing component, a subversive component, a liberating component to it. We are the revolutionaries.
Okay, okay. Wishful thinking.
my fear?
the governments of the west will not have the will to fight, leaving the fight for the uneducated masses to handle...
Look for xeniaphobia/nationalism to sweep into europe, europe who murdered it's assimilated jews, now have a minority population who refuse to assimilate... the holocaust looks small as to what i fear may happen...
Wretchard--
When I think back on Kennedy's call and then massive effort to "beat the Russians" at the space game, I wonder why we don't have a similar "beat the terrorists" competition? Why aren't there cadres of students learning Arabic?
Is it because academe is already lost, is ceded enemy territory?
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Good points, Wretchard. I wonder, though, what are your thoughts about this? The idea of Al Jazeera spreading its propaganda within the Anglosphere, while our own broadcast media are unwilling and unable to provide any alternative, must be seen as a major obstacle setback in this effort you describe (not to mention its potential effects in the Far East).
We are clearly in the middle of a war of ideas. The key alliance that radical Islamism has made in this theater is with the Left. In the intellectual war we are facing the Riyadh-Berkeley axis, so to speak. And that axis includes a large part of the "Mainstream Media".
It's no use bewailing the stand the MSM has taken. We must face the facts and plan on carrying the message forward without them. We have the Internet, but it's not enough. So we must take a leaf out of the most successful propaganda arm in the world, which is the Left itself, and create all kinds of fora, from public speaking to legal advocacy to whatnot to carry the battle of ideas forward. Remember we are in a fight for our lives and for the soul of Western civilization, all that we are, so we have no choice.
But most importantly, we must learn to organize, especially among the enemy. The Left is able to burrow into the very heart of the Establishment. Pay them back in their own coin, with interest.
If we can get Al Jazeera outlawed, so much the better. If that's impossible we must infiltrate it and use it against its creators. Were I an Al Jazeera correspondent, I'd cover the massacre of children reported above and hope the editorial board suppresses it. Beat them to death with their own book.
There is also the issue of Saudi support for Wahhabi "education" in Pakistan and in mosques closer to home. I am losing patience with the Bush approach to Saudi Arabia, although I am intrigued by this. Can you imagine what would happen if the Saudi regime were to crack open, and be seen to be hollow?
Jason,
quite a bit of the left, at least the European left, has blamed her for her situation, not the Islamists.
Westhawk,
I don't think that the Iraqi military will be better than the Egyptians, Iranians, or Turkish militaries, to name at least some.
Monty,
One of the unnoticed victories of the War on Terror is how much more we "know" about Islamic society today than four years ago. And we "know" in terms of human experience. All the guys who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan or elsewhere -- even the guys who just write or comment on blogs (can't get any lower than that, can you) -- are operating on a different level from September 10, 2001. We are veterans of a sort, each in our own ways.
Very well, time to take things to the next level. Now there are thousands of Americans who understand at least some Arabic, know their way around in some rudimentary way. It's an asset waiting to be used. We know how to drop a bomb to within a few feet of target. But now we need to build up other skills. As a result of the last four years, we now "know". The next step is to apply what we know.
"These people obviously think the War is an Insurgency against our occupation, not a Holy War against infidels.
These victims are Shia and Christen children and as such, Infidels to the aQ wahabbists.
The victims parents, quoted, do not percieve this to be the case, however. Interesting that they see aQ as fighting US, not them."
At the risk of overreaching, I think that's because they've been convinced via decades of anti-West thought that this is a defensive war, prompted by Western imperialism and enslavement of Muslims in seperate actions around the world. Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, China, the Phillipines, are all interconnected. We're fighting a global insurgency, of which Al Qaeda are the stormtroopers/force multiplier. In some cases, they're probably even in the right [i.e. Chechnya and Xinjang], but they see all of it as a global effort to keep them down.
Monty, good post.
President Bush has gambled that given a choice, Arabs will opt for democracy; he and his allies have stated time after time that the majority of Muslims wish for peace rather than war. And yet we wait in vain for this mass of Muslims to rise up and emphatically denounce the methods and means of terrorism. Instead we hear equivocation, passive hostility, and outright joy at America's misfortunes.
I am not hopeful about the prospects for the Muslim world, I must confess: the defects of tribalism, cronyism, and a stultifying religoius orthodoxy may be too great to overcome.
Monty, no one can know if Bush's gamble can work, but I think we're morally obligated to try. Think of it this way--if we concede that muslims do not have the same yearning for freedom that we do, we give up the universalism that is perhaps the best part of the western tradition. That's one of the reasons why people like me and Wretchard can write here--neither of us has an ethinc connection to the West. I know the issue is more complicated--even the most devoted believer in classic natural rights doctrine would concede that sometimes there's sometimes too much cultural "superstructure" (to perversely misuse a Marxist term) to pull off what Bush is trying.
But we MUST try in my view. We need to do our best to make the experiment work in Iraq. It may fail for all sorts of combinations of reasons--lack of will on our part, lack of will on the Iraqis, ill fortune, etc. But the attempt must be made, for our own sakes if nothing else.
Perhaps these are the wages of two generations of moral ambiguity and post-modernism in Western schools. We cannot speak harshly of the beast, even while it is eating us.
I personally wouldn't worry too much about this, and I can say this as someone literally in the academic front lines. I have an Ivy League college degree and a PhD from a major research university. I actually think that American universities aren't as monochromatically Leftist as conservatives frequently make them out to be, and even if I'm wrong, it really doesn't matter. Academe's own ideology of moral equivalence and relativism has badly damaged its own moral weight and standing in larger society--my impression is that most students care not a whit for the opinions of their professors. And why should they? When they're constantly told that all authority figures represent a corrupt establishment, they naturally will not make the implied exception that tenured radicals make for themselves. College students used to go to college to be trained for leadership roles in society in a serious way. Now most go so that they can make a good living, and the average English or History Professor has all the moral standing of the dude next door. There are certainly long-range concerns, but the slow inner rot and hollowing out of the humanistic disciplines is more an effect than a cause of larger cultural problems in my view.
WWSH
How many average Americans (or Britons, or Aussies) know what Wahhabism is? How many know the difference between the Shi'a and Sunni sects of Islam? How many know what Shari'a is?
We're learning fast, Monty. I know a lot more about Muslim women's clothing than I wanted to. Not to mention hadiths and hudnas.
What an anachronism it all is.
Were it not for Iraq, were it not for our politico/military's experience with rising constitutionalist democrats and entrepreneurial liberals, we'd have little evidence that from a war-crucible can arise a seoaration of Islam from jihadis. Of course, long peace with Muslim governments world-wide should be on our minds as a backdrop, but nothing states the case like recent enemy-state Iraq, that Islam can be separated from its jihad element.
Turning the left's tools, with the knowledge we've gained, is a right strategic adjunct. I can see the big propaganda portraits of suicide teens, adjacent a same-size portrait of a smiling free Iraqi, maybe drinking a local brand of something, having a bite to eat, smiling, with the banner "Allah Loves Life!" things like that. There is so much psychology and behavior mod knowledge on Madison Avenue. Film--movies--are--can be--life-changingly powerful even to western youth hardened by familiarity. Rock groups not so long ago ruled the Boomer generation. So much more. Wretchard may've never said anything more important than that we have reached an end of education, and now must step it up a level. Apply what we know.
Wretchard,
What you said makes a lot of sense but it would seem that you have set the bar at fundamentlly re-engineering an entire religion. But almost every reformation of a religion consists of believers going back to the source material and recreating the original religion within the context of the times in which they live. With the prophet himself waging war on the city of Medina and Islam's subsequent expansion by military force would it actually be possible to do this with Islam?
From three conjectures:
"Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad recently "told an international conference of young Muslim leaders ... (that) ... Muslims must acquire skills and technology so they can create modern weapons and strike fear into the hearts of our enemies". Fecklessness and gunpowder are a lethal combination. The terrible ifs accumulate."
And they accumulate in Iraq as well.
A Democratic Iraq with a Manueverist Military and zero inhibitions on hunting down Jihadis is a fearful weapon.
WWSH, I get your point--that the intended influence of leftish academics may not count for much, but your statement contains the acknowledgement of the derivative rot, the cynicism that a fool in authority creates for authority itself.
Granted, "think like me!" does not 'take', but what does take is disdain for appeals to selflessness and emotional attachment to national experience.
Granted, most kids are better than to self-subvert so easily.
But bureaucracies which invest credentialing power in individuals who inspire nothing but the failure of inspiration, are surely a moral/cultural problem worth an attempt to ameliorate. Less for what they do, than for the space they take from the other way of being.
The breach, the not-done, the opportunity cost.
Fortunately, as you point out, the effects are not catastrophic, as that great Michael Barone hard/soft America essay pointed out, the open marketplace straightens out a lot of hooey in a hurry!
So, this really is the prose poetry philosophy blog.
Stuck in an packed Airbus, bags and jacket jammed under seat, we're marooned by a ground stop at a hub in the network, 350 miles away, we'll get an update in an hour on when we might take off.
Perfect time and circumstance to read a throroughly annoying book, to kill the time and grind your guts:
Sleeping with the Devil by Robert Baer
This book is written by a long-time CIA operator in the ME, describing hell unearthed by the oil industry, the Western powers who find satan's fuel under the deserts; and, the effect upon the ancient minds who live there thoroughly driven mad by the endless wealth and a suicidal religious frenzy.
The movie "The Mummy" seems a plausible allegory.
It's an annoying read, especially when you're stuck at Logan, where certain Saudi citizens attacked US from on 9/11.
I'm afraid we are not fighting back hard enough to win.
Wot a gasbag I am--all I meant was, that sort sets a bad example.
Tony, the "curse of oil" is a great insight--but, then, after you digest the insight, what? Robert Baer has a good reform in mind?
"If we can get Al Jazeera outlawed, so much the better. If that's impossible we must infiltrate it and use it against its creators."
My philsopohy professors would call this putting one's nose on the contradiction.
The key in this debate is to pose a question so far away from the destination that it seems innocuous but which quickly sets the bait. The opponent follows the trail like a cat chasing a string until he enters a room of no return while closing all the doors.
The Left and Islam must be left in their own embrace, one neither able to let go, but recoiling in horror, not knowing if its a mirror or the real thing they have grabbed onto.
There is tremendously fertile ground here for a Milton of Arab extraction to frame the tumult of the times against a moral backdrop while using satire to put the two lovers - the Left and Islam in the same bed.
Somehow German and Arabic get mixed in my mind sometimes and all I hear is "Allah Uber Alles".
Buddy,
I hated the book. The author hates Arabs and al Sauds, and all American government officials are easily corrupted scum. That's the whole book, in a zillion boring names you can't keep track of.
Notably, it was recommended to me by a liberal friend, who no doubt is trying to convince me of his wisdom that all American governments are evil, thus demonstrating his non-liberalness, his even-handedness. He disdains not just Republicans, but all American administrations.
As I've told him over and over, to paraphrase the old song, "If loving America is wrong / I don't wanna be right."
Oh, plus, the writing is terrible.
Self-fullfilling prophecies running around like those cats chasing strings. Attack the West to save Allah, to survive attack West destroys Allah.
Exhelodrvr:
"I don't think that the Iraqi military will be better than the Egyptians, Iranians, or Turkish militaries, to name at least some. "
The Iraqis were quite good at the end of the 80s. They destroyed Iran using combined arms offensives in just a few months. They took Kuwait. And had they not paused at the Kuwaiti border, they could have had Saudi Arabia as well.
A new Iraqi military based upon meritocracy, free inquiry, rigorous training, and embracing manueverism will be very hard to beat. They will also have extensive combat experienced officers and men when OIF ends as well. They will be the most formidable Arab Army standing - even better than the Jordanians.
Wonder if the baby-bomb--which came just some hours after troops caught Zarkawi's #2, the "Emir of Baghdad", al-Aziz--was connected to that big capture?
Andrew Scotia wrote:
"... the result, in the United States at least, will be a Spartan State organized for total war. Before the end there will be windrows of the dead and the gutters will run with blood."
I think you underestimate the efficiency of the modern industrial state.
If the United States decided that Islamic nations Had To Go, we could flatten their major cities and kill a hundred million or more within hours of the conclusion. The rest would be cleanup, which we can do with frightening efficiency. Consider the capability of a Predator armed with Hellfire missiles; we can pick out a single suspicious person from miles away and blow him to smithereens, without the people involved ever leaving an air-conditioned office.
If you extend this to eradication of the entire Magreb, it is not much more difficult; a few contracts for UAV's which can mix and spray binary nerve agents on demand, air-droppable geophones which listen for characteristic human footsteps, webcams fercrissakes... All the fruits of technological society could be turned into pieces of the most efficient killing machine ever created.
If the people of the United States were angry enough with the Islamic world to want it all dead, we could do it. From Marrakesh to Indonesia to the Moro of the Phillipines, we could seek out and kill 99% of all human life within a couple of years, maybe 99.9%.
This scares the living crap out of me, and I'm fearless. No, I don't want to bet on it; I'm afraid that I might be right.
But Red River,
Where will the Iraqi Army get all those T-72's we smoked?
... and it wouldn't take a total war footing to do it, either. It would probably take fewer resources than trying to introduce democracy to Iraq, and have vastly less risk to Americans.
That's what's so utterly scary about it.
All these good ideas require one thing.. TIME !! Is there going to be enuff time to get some of them implimented before one of Osama's handlers comes knocking with a great disaster in his suitcase ?? If the American Hiroshima does happen, then there wont be time to stop what will happen next.. I dont even think anyone will want to stop it..
But first let's try to find a way to bork ole over-serious sissy bin Laden. Buy a sit-com on Al Jeez, "The Beverly Jihadis"...or a vaudeville variety show, "I Don't Love Death"
Tony,
Tell him going to Vietnam and serve the people there, he might learn one or two things. Talk is cheap. I used to challenge my economic mentor that way and it shuts his mouth pretty quick.
Having seen fire, you can recognize smoke, huh, Lan?
I remember reading somewhere a million years ago, about VC or NVA coming into a village after our guys had been there and inoculated the villagers against smallpox or something. Charlie came in and cut off every arm that had been inoculated. (Apocalypse Now? Like the Africans accusing us of causing AIDS?)
Just to prove the point that the West ain't coming to this town.
Whether or not that apochrypa is true (I can't find the book I read it in, tho the story is common on the Web), W's post on today's candy bombing is undeniable murder and mutilation of the innocent.
I take solace in the fact that we have faced fanatic suicidal enemies in the past, and conquered them.
Thanks Lan.
W. I like your term Riyadh-Berkeley axis. It exactly defines the enemies we are up against, within and without.
Within and without indeed!
---
In the piece linked below, Ledeen portrays the not so sophisticated views of Londoners, as well as describes their version of ignoring, nay encouraging, evil.
. The Jews.
It was widely noted, most passionately by the Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, that when Tony Blair reminded the House of Commons that many countries had been scourged by the terrorists in recent years, he omitted Iraq from the list.
In the growing recent literature about Great Britain's appeasement of Islamic terrorists over the past decade and more, we've come to understand that London was, in many ways, the epicenter of the terror network. Terrorists wanted in other countries were given safe haven in the United Kingdom, and the most amazingly hateful language was spewed out, openly and proudly, by various sheikhs and imams, all left to incite the faithful to terrible acts against innocent people the world over. For all this, her majesty's government had its reasons.
Brutality is a means to contest the wills of the participants. It will separate the run and the also run within so making targets are easier to identify. In a way, it controls internally and cleanse the rest. Externally, it sends a message to the appeasers to surrender for it makes no dents to the resolute. They fight one way or another, not because of covenience but because of principles. W. your Riyadh-Berkeley axis is very apt and that's why I am a US citizen. How ironic.
Where does the appeal of materialism/secularism fit into this?
Before the fall of Saddam, that was a significant element in Baghdad, at least.
Current day Iran regularly comes up with examples of younger folk delighting in rejecting the oppressive mandates of the mullahs.
---
re, the depressing quotes of the Iraqi adults at the scene of the children's massacre:
Wouldn't we expect western coverage to be as selectively biased in their Iraqi coverage as they are here?
Tony,
Rush was rehashing Wilson/Plame this morning.
Following the actions of the CIA in that whole fraudulent affair, is like watching the machinations of a bunch of democrat operatives, which, it seems, many of them are.
No wonder very few dots were connected.
And many were falsely connected in ways designed to sabotage Bush.
The Bible has much to say about these people. If a person were to read it their activities would be obvious. You don't have to be a genius just humble enough to get your body to open the book and read it.
Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh:
At minimum, leftist corruption of academia has resulted in a curriculum so filled with worthless tripe that many genuine academic courses are simply crowded out.
---
Perhaps your setting has more hard sciences than the average university?
At least not all of our universities are as bad as that pointed to in Wretchard's comments above!
---
""White men saving black women from black men--it's a very old fantasy that is always popular," Annelies Moors, a University of Amsterdam anthropologist who writes about Islamic gender relations, said dryly. "But I don't think male violence against women, a phenomenon known to every society in history, can be explained by a few Koranic verses."
---
"Islamic Gender Relations" alone should be the tip off that what follows is pure bs.
Doug,
The scary thing to me is that a large percentage of our fellow citizens still think that we have a choice to pretend this world war doesn't exist, and Bush caused all the problems. Pardon my French, but wtf?
Husker,
With all due respect, your optimism is unfounded.
Doug: "Islamic Gender Relations" alone should be the tip off that what follows is pure bs.
Pure bs? Surely bs bs.
At least the academics are now taking bs seriously, giving us, presumably, the ability to discern bs bs:
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
husker_met
While I appreciate your optimism, I often look back at my experience in my old country to wonder how could they let it set all back to rise again eventually you say, a 50 years later (30 years have passed and they are still at the bottom of the craps). Look at China today and look at China could be if they have not f*** themselves so bad with Mr. Mao. Russia is likewise. I know that because it suddenly dawns on me one day what I would become if I still stay on Vietnam (of course if I not dead in the concentration camp) instead of running to the USA that the Berkley axis is so disdain about. I am sure that if I stuck in Vietnam, I would be damn stupid beyond recognition and that unbelievable revelation is one of my fortunes never belonged to those have no such luxury in that unfortunate war.
It tells me one thing, in general, men's character is not enough unless they are genius but environment has also have tremendous impact on mankind's development. That is to hope the Muslim world to take a moderate stance and to condemn and prosecute the curse within them is a long term investment, and I believe they will do just that in a leasure time and rise to the occasion, as long as there is no force of destruction riding at their butts.
However my experience is the force of destruction is always swifter, always more resolute than the force of construction. So 20 years of destruction and 50 years of constructions (the optimistic time frame I'm using), which one comes to us faster? A simple mathematic isn't it? Within that 20 years, I am sure the 10 lbs bombs in London will grow exponentially and that's what bothers me. I can't speak for W.'s mind but I think I share his concern about how to diverge the obvious confrontation and I believe it's not pretty. Iraqis will fish, I am sure like Vietnamese eventually will fish. Like the Chinese after their 1921 revolution (84 years later and they have not learn how to fish properly yet). But the time to learn to fish properly will be longer than the time for the bomb to arrive. And the fishing condition will also depend on how resolute the next Admin regardless who will be in the House, the Dimwit or the Halfwit.
The enemy is resolute. That's a conslusive fact. Are we resolute? That's not a conclusive fact. If I can take 10 to 20 years down the road as a time frame, you can believe that I am as moderate as an appologist. And 4 years have passed since 2001 and the picture is still not that bright yet for the MadMullah is close to make his Gameboy and the Berkley axis still sing lullaby every days.
Guy comes up with pretty good description of the left!
---
"Rather, bull shitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true.
They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.
Frankfurt concludes that although bull shit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not.
Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true.
By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bull shit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Cedarford,
Good points. We are unable to distinguish the 'good' Muslims from the 'bad' Muslims with our current screening tools. This is their greatest strategic asset, the ability to submerge into a billion-man ocean. The answer of course, is to enter the ocean and propagate energy through it; to survey it; to know it better than the enemy knows it himself. Then we can localize, prosecute and destroy.
Hence, solving the terrorism problem requires engagement because you need the datum to develop the picture. Whether engagement means contact with enemy fighters in the field or entering the Muslim community as an organizer-agitator is a difference of degree, but not of fundamental kind. That's why the 1990s idea that the West could stand off and deal with Islamic fundamentalism without 'touching' the medium of Islam was a disguised prescription for doing nothing. A little diplomacy, a few academic reports, a few case officers operating out of embassies yielded -- nearly nothing.
I see the principal benefit of Iraq and Afghanistan as information. Information about what kinds of armed responses are effective; what kinds of intelligence gathering are effective; what kind of people we are dealing with. We could not have gotten that information without going into these places, except as an academic exercise, which of course means we wouldn't have gotten it at all. But the missing piece is that we haven't gotten into Muslim civil society. Hot damn it, the Brits didn't know a bunch of fish and chips kids were training to be suicide bombers in Leeds. Didn't know squat. What did MI5 call them? ">ily whites"? That's another way of saying they were broadcasting on a frequency that MI5 couldn't see. And we will never see until we sink our roots into their soil.
Let's not forget that many of the bombings of the "Sunni Insurgency" are paid for with Saudi funds brought in through Syria.
If this dried up, a lot of the insurgency would dry up.
---
And a search for "Trained in Pakistan" goes on for pages and pages - Another Example:
. Turkey suspects trained in Pakistan, intended to attack Bush.
ANKARA (AFP) May 04, 2004
A group of alleged Islamic terrorists arrested in Turkey on suspicion of planning an attack on a NATO meeting were trained in Pakistan and were planning to carry out a suicide mission against US President George W. Bush, Turkish press reports said Tuesday.
The suspects, who had been tracked by Turkish authorities for months before their arrest, were in possession of Turkish-subtitled video cassettes attributed to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden calling for a jihad, or holy war, against the "great Satan" of America, according to the reports.
That's a great example of the decline of the left, gordon.
C-4 and Wretchard:
One obvious resource are the Israelis, who suffered through another year at 5,000 attacks/year!
6 percent of these were suicide bombers and that six percent produced half of the total fatalities.
As Hewitt's guest Yoni says:
"Islamic terror is nothing but Palestinian terror against Israelis, adopted elsewhere."
IOW
Israel is the training ground.
Must be plenty of Israelis with plenty of knowledge about the subject.
Yoni fears when they leave Gaza, it will become an exporter of terror.
I was 384, in the Green thread, however not surprisingly my response fits here too. I begining to think it will fit in any Belmont Club posting with the word Iraq somewhere in the title or body.
Nathan said,
"Abakan,
Okay, I think I understand better what you meant by "semantic construction." I think what we have between us is a difference of definitions.
Yes, clearly we do, and if we probe it further it will unlock many mysteries.
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
Tenth Addition
war 1a (1): a state of usu. open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations
(2) a period of such armed conflict (3): State of War
1b : the art and science of warfare
war 2 a: a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism
b: a struggle or competition between opposing forces or for a particular end ,a class war,
,a war against disease,
Real wordsmiths complained bitterly when 'on' replaced 'against' but real words smiths are probably too anal for most peoples tastes.
So, the War on Terrorism in context is a struggle against terrorism correctly defined in 2b. The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are correctly defined in 1a (1), (2), and (3). The distinctions aren't very important.... to Americans who have degraded the use of English to a point that hinders actual communication.
So, our President declares that we are now engaged in War against Terrorism.
Here's where great mysteries unfold. War in 1a and 1b are designated as art and science. Art and sciences have evolved descriptive specific terms that are unique within their specific contexts.
So, who are we at war with again?
In the war against terrorism we are at war with terrorists. Gasp...
Does that mean we are in a struggle with Islamics fascists? It depends. Since Islam is a religion that imposes strict controls on individualism, it is for all intents and purposes a form of governance. So, we better be really careful because the perception by moderate, and fundamentalist muslims could quite easily missinterpret our endeavor as a crusade or holy war by Christians against Islam. After all, everyone knows that the United States is a Christian nation. We might be fine as long as we are perceived as struggling against Islamofascist terrorists. It's still going to take a bit of work since everyone knows that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. We might have to hand out candy to children, and rebuild infrastructure, and provide health care, etc. One thing is for certain. We have to state quite clearly that we are not at war against Islam. In the sentence above which context of war am I describing. You better know exactly, or we are in deep, deep, trouble. Are we in a struggle against Al Queda? Yes, but by this time everyone should know that Al Queda is a movement, or an umbrella organization, or choose the latest or your favorite descriptor. In any case Al Queda is too exclusive, and everyone should at this point know that they don't carry membership cards.
So, are we in a struggle with Osama? Yes, but Osama is just one man, and everyone knows that he will be replaced by yet another charismatic leader eager to wage war against the United States. BTW, what does war mean to Osama? Should we ask Webster? So, who are we in a struggle against? Gasp...
President Bush said we are in a struggle against terrorists. I'm comfortable with that, it works just fine for me. So, in our struggle against terrorists when will we declare Victory? Will there be terms for surrender? Will terrorists meet in Geneva or with the UN to discuss a cease fire? Are any of these terms really applicable? Do you want us to stop the struggle after we have won? Perhaps, we all will have earned a big fat peace dividend. We might spend it on education reform.
We are at war. Let's never forget that we are at war against the baathists and the taliban in Iraq and Afghanistan. See War 1a (1), (2), and (3). Refer to the Bush doctrine. We must acheive Victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's also not forget that we are in a struggle against terrorists. A struggle that isn't properly described or defined using the terminology evolved from our studies of the art and science of warfare. A struggle that many believe will require the embracing of democratic principles by Muslims in Islamic nations. We have tried everything else. We are running out of options. Let's hope it works.
I know who we are at war with, and I know who we struggle against? Do you realize that we are talking about two separate concepts that are related. Or, that the terms we use are different for each concept?
A training ground.
Here's what 'trained in afhanistan' brought up, Doug:
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer argued in the July 18 edition of Time magazine that the claim that the war in Iraq has increased Al Qaeda recruitment amounted to "nonsense." But Krauthammer ignored recent reports by the U.S. intelligence community that the Iraq conflict has been -- and will likely continue to be -- an effective recruitment tool and training ground for Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
In a column titled "... Why That's Ridiculous," Krauthammer wrote:
For the next decade, whenever there is a terrorist attack anywhere in the world, there will be those blaming it on America: if only America had not been distracted from the war on terrorism by the war in Iraq, if only America had not stirred Muslim resentment and increased al-Qaeda recruitment by invading Iraq.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200507130002
In a war between Patton and the Abakan/Nathan Complex,
(have yet to figure out who said what in Abakan post)
I'd bet on Patton.
He'd have annihilated the A/N Complex before the A/N Complex got through defining war.
ADE,
You want to target the wenches:
Shall we ply them with Ale?
ADE,
Thats "Mohammead's."
"The Left has no idea."
Suicide Bombs and 72 Virgins Vs
"No Idea":
What's the difference?
Sam,
I wonder what the collective IQ of the
"American Intelligence Community"
is?
Well, no OBL yet. Does that say anything?
Rune says,
"Historically, all protracted wars are characterised by an increasing brutalisation and indifference to enemy suffering. I wonder if that is something which can be witnessed in western societies today"
---
So far, we seem to be trying to have the "best of both worlds":
A PC War where we become less brutal, but still expect victory.
Nice. I follow you, ADE.
ADE:
"Then all that remains is the left."
With THEIR sexual hangups.
That might qualify as a
WMD!
Now if we can just convince them that Saddam had them all along too, they should calm down:
Bush told the truth!
Saddam had WMDs!
ADE,
The Japanese have continued to preserve the memorials.
I saw a picture of a tree that was just a short distance from ground zero that sprouted from the base and continues to live today!
They have also preserved buildings that survived.
(the shells at least)
I'm STILL fighting the battle of the bulge!
Afghan women are hot.
aGREED,
Indeed.
"What a shame such beauty is lost to the world."
---
Did you see the before and after pictures in National Geographic several years ago?
There was a cover shot of a beautiful young girl.
Then, more recently they found the same woman, and unfortunately the ravages of time spent in Afghanistan took a mighty toll.
papa bear,
I too agree w/common cents:
Those evil spewers of hate have decades living as a protected minority.
What a Crock.
Dream on.
"I know who we are at war with, and I know who we struggle against? Do you realize that we are talking about two separate concepts that are related. Or, that the terms we use are different for each concept? "
---
No, Actually, I don't.
BINGO!
But many conservatives have also been blind to the urgent requirement of creating a liberation movement within Islam, in part because they half believe all Muslims are themselves the enemy; [emphasis added] in part because they despair of Muslims ever rising up against the medieval institutions which constrain them; in part because they haven't thought about it.
This is something I have been pounding on as well! I am a fan of LGF, but when CJ refers to Islam as the ROP I don't need the vocal & visual cues to catch the sarcasm. When I hear Michael Savage railing against Islam I think what a fool. When I read Ann Coulter's angry post-9/11 column I thought that will really turn this into a global hot war.
This came up not too long ago in this section when I said we need to be careful we do not drive normal Muslims to the Jihadis of death.
Mind you, I do like Ann Coulter and Savage is at best a coin flip.
"So, are we in a struggle with Osama? Yes, but Osama is just one man, and everyone knows that he will be replaced by yet another charismatic leader eager to wage war against the United States. BTW, what does war mean to Osama? Should we ask Webster? So, who are we in a struggle against? Gasp...
"
---
I wonder how well
"War of the Worlds"
would have sold, if it was intstead:
"War of the Words?"
---
Myself, I liked that Monster Ant movie.
Instead.
At least Ann had a very personal reason.
Not too much fun to think of your friend riding a 767 into the Pentagon.
Savage:
Depends on what he's been drinking.
Fridays are often worth a listen when he reminisces on the old days of Chrome, Cubes, and Rock and Roll.
Wretchard,
That was the best explanation of why we must democratize Iraq that I have read. Thank you as usual. The Administration could do far worse than to hire you to work with President Bush's speechwriters to aid his explanations of the war on terror.
Pierre
I guess the loonie left is correct. We have embarked on a crusade. The enemy is Islam.
Let's just skip all the pretense and call a spade, a spade. Let's reclaim Jerusalem. If we have to we can always use the nukular option.
It's obvious that a dangerous percentage of educated, intelligent, witty, and charming Americans, can't identify a change in context in an English word.
I sure hope we win this WOT. It will do my heart good to see the sailors, soldiers, and marines come on V-Day.
Did that help any Doug?
"If I find myself at a loss for an answer to the questions:
"Why the innocent?" and
"For what purpose?",
then, in all likelihood,
the crime is of al-Qaida's doing."
Abakan,
My lineage on my mom's side was from the
"Show Me" state.
That meant deeds, not words,
so I am but a cripple.
(like Truman.)
Easy reading means hard writing.
Hard reading means easy writing.
Red River,
"They destroyed Iran using combined arms offensives in just a few months."
They were stalemated with Iran. And you discount the other nations too much. Egypt nearly beat Israel in 1973, and they have had 25+ years of U.S. military aid, joint training, etc. Similar situation with Turkey.
I guess since I'm an atheist, I should probably hope you Christians win. I don't want my head separated from my shoulders. I must admit to some dark thoughts about finding some place to hide just long enough to see if you will kill each other.
It's been a long long struggle against Islam, and perhaps it's time to finish it all. let the chips fall where the may. Let God sort um out.
If only that DAMN BBC would start calling terrorists by what they really are, Muslims the world might see the truth.
Islamo-fascists is such a cool word. It just rolls right off the tongue. Hell, I feel cool when I say it.
Terrorist is just so damn undescriptive.
Sadly--since we're all news junkies--but the news itself is the AQ force-multiplier. That's monumentally obvious of course but watching a newscast from Trafalgar Square just now, one can't help but be struck by the depth and breadth of London in time, space, and the imagination. The same explosions if a gas main or weather storm would've barely made a single news cycle. I see it all around, so many so busy on immediate projects that they barely know there's anything at all going on.
What a problem for AQ--it's the mirror of their low-overhead advantage. Keep it low so as not to attract the anger of this oblivious half of the west, and their attack stalls. Amp up the attack, and get this half angry, and loud fiery things fall on their bases.
As Lan and others say, time is on our side--unless we deliberately or accidentally subvert the progression.
Abakan,
"Iswamofaswists" works for me also, since we are supposed to be so "sensitive" to their tendency to easily feel humiliated.
Here's a thought. If 10,000 copies of a Belmont post calling Islam or even Islamic-fascism the enemy in the WOT were air dropped into Bagdad or Kabul do you think the result could be the same as the bogus Koran story? If your answer is yes, and remember I said could be, not would be then you should be careful. You might be endangering the lives of our troops.
Wretchard describes a horrible terrorists attack. I have analyzed the Iraq "Child Attack" and find it in line with the terrorist's goals to frighten the population by killing children who are given candy by American forces. It's a classic terror tactic - kill all those who interface with the Americans. That attack would be a seen as a solid win for the terrorists - or a long term loss.
Further, Wretchard notes that we are clearly in a war - a war of ideas and a shooting war. Wretchard also suggests that we take covert action an divide the enemy and destroy them via proxy fighters in cells (Wretchard, sorry about the blunt analysis).
Wretchard makes some good points. But, why wait for the next attack?
I would suggest one look closely at Wretchard 3rd Conjecture. He explains the asymmetrical warfare against the US could be very well be used against the enemy (and without borders). I would suggest that has a good idea.
It's well known that Syria, Pakistan and other countries frequently speak out of both sides of their collective mouths. They have now set a present.
I would point out that the terrorists have attacked multiple countries without regard to boundaries. Hence, why should not be do the same.
The world is a dangerous place. Who know when a "Cleric" of violence may bite the dusts in a shoot-out. Who knows when a rouge Paki General will be hit by a drive by shooting. Who knows when an unmarked aircraft will deliver a few small diameter bombs on al Qaeda training camp. Who knows when a Syrian ship may sink on the high seas. Who knows when a Predator Drone might accidentally discharges a Hellfire missile on a Saudi terror financier. These are but a few of the unpleasant possibilities for the enemy in the 3rd Conjecture.
Right. And, no propaganda in areas where there are westerners, will override their behavior and the natures of the relationships. If you're a Baghdadi, "America" is the soldier in your street.
Guess that's why the MSM reports so little of the day-to-day interaction. The "don't believe your lyin' eyes!" bit.
Once again folks
Name the enemy.
Kill them
Repeat
abakan and your definitons of war via Webster, words are great, but actions tell the tale.
Most of the terrorists of global reach are outside of our "War".
Does the word Hezbollah ring a bell. Do the countries of Iran and Syria sound familar.
Are we at wear with all those nation states listed on our State Dept.'s list of countries supporting terrorism?
No we are not.
Unending War
Nameless Enemies
so Orwellian.
Evil doer Ali bin el Monti is on the top 1000. He is sighted by a covert operative in a compound in Pakistan.
A stealth B-2 bomber is dispatched from it's on call station and the targeted compound is mysteriously destroyed.
Add another name to the list
Lenie, right...might as well legalize the Assassins as a legit political party.
ledger:
Wretchard's aim, with Three Conjectures and the like, is to prevent their coming true by pointing out clearly the forces pushing us toward them. If it is truly necessary, in the future, that we kill tens of millions to ensure the survival of our world, we will do so; but to find ourselves in such a situation would be a grevious favilure of foresight, and not to attempt to avoid it would be grossly immoral.
To interpret the conjectures as "advice" is diametrically opposed to their stated intent. (Though failure to make the distinction leads many on the left to hate Mr. Fernandez.)
"And when He was come into His own country, He taught them in their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not His mother called Mary? And his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things? And they were offended in Him. But Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, save in His own country, and in His own house. And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief." (Matthew 13:54-58 KJV)
"And He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief"
Not that W is a prophet--just that the principle applies--and goes WAY back in time.
I've seen talk in this thread and elsewhere about the Reformation, and the need for a Reformation in Islam. I believe that misses the mark entirely.
It was not the Reformation that caused the explosive growth of Europe, it was the Scientific Revolution. That is, the idea that natural laws could not be determined by logic and rhetoric alone, but that any theory had to be tested against reality. While the Reformation was merely another religious schimsm, the Scientific Revolution was a fundamental break through in human thought that energized the West.
Besides, Salafism is their Reformation. Let us not forget that many early Protestant sects were extremely austere.
Islam, by accepting that the Koran is the spoken word of God has painted itself into a corner. If it can be questioned, and that questioning shows bits and pieces of it to be demonstratebly false, then the entire edifice begins to crumble. Modernity, which at its core includes the scientific method's ruthless questioning, threatens to do exactly that to the Koran and Islam.
I think it is no surprise that the Salafists are led by so many people with exposure to the West. Surely they can see, even if it only at a visceral level, what a threat unrestrained questioning of the Koran poses to Islam.
Islam is at a wrenching moment. Many of its core beliefs -- treatment of woman and apostates, the literal truth of the Koran, prejudice towards none Mohammedans (use the term freely, it greatly insults them) -- can not survive the onslaught of modernity. Its crash and tranformation will not, indeed is not, pleasant.
Add to that the fact that offensive weapons in the form of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, have far outstripped defensive countermeasures and we are in dangerous times. A single miscalculation could lead to catastrophe on a dreadful scale.
lenie,
The problem with the Turks is because the war against Islamo fanatics has not defined yet and American has not resolute to win this war yet, for I still perceive it as an half hearted struggle. So they do not want to get caught in between. When it becomes an open and defined war with all the chips on the table, they will take side and I think they will take the right side But until then, they won't do a damn thing to screw themselves with more suicidal bombs arriving everyday.
Is the Koran not equally as subject to interpretation as the Bible? I don't mean the response to it, what I'm asking about is the internal logic, the statements themselves. Even a single contradiction means the book is divinely-inspired, but not Divine.
Muslims who are for peace might rent billboards with side-by-side contradictions copied, with an arrow pointed to the one that allows world peace and respect among all peoples.
"Why would Allah want death for his people?"
Then do not attack those who will deliver it.
Mr. Nyugen summed up my concerns. I am not worried about the ultimate attractiveness of American materialism/liberalism. I AM worried that before it does the job, the enemy will already be at the gates, or blowing them down. To paraphrase H.G. Wells, we're in a race between technology and stupidity.
Buddy,
No, the Koran is supposed to be literally the spoken word of God. Not words inspired by God, but his actual words, as spoken to Mohammed.
Here is a link to Moslem's website discussing the science and the need for the Koran to be 100% accurate: The Koran and science. Notice when he says, "The attitude that I carry with me even today, after over thirteen years of extensive research is that the day I find a confirmed scientific error in the Koran, I'll stop believing in it."
Good links--thanks--here's another. Europe may be waking up...?
ambisinistral,
As Rene Girard likes to say, we did not stop burning witches because we discovered modern science; we disovered modern science because we stopped burning witches.
In other words, the primary causal force in history is the ethical, not the narrowly scientific or technological, and the emergence of modern science depended on a prior evolution of ethical thought under the influence of Christianity.
Can Islam have a reformation? On some level, it has them all the time - they just don't look like the Protestant reformation, because when the Islamic reformers come down from the hills with their arms and Korans to reform the decadent townsmen, they are not leading the way to integration into a modern secular, scientific world. So far the many Islamic reformations have had the opposite effect.
Can there be a new kind of reformation? We have to hope so and do everything we can to encourage it. Otherwise, the only way into modernity for the Muslim world will be through a conversion process that many will resist with their lives.
"Israel would love us going after their enemies, but wouldn't contribute a man's blood or a single shekel to the effort."
No Israeli war on terror. Jeeeeeez. History laughs, history weeps.
c4 states:
Israel would love us going after their enemies, but wouldn't contribute a man's blood or a single shekel to the effort.
oh well cedar, such hatred....
interesting that israel has been fighting terror for years, (costing them a ton of cash) but that is not terror in your book is it?
israel hasnt helped the world in advanced medical procedures it's developed cause it's citizens have been blown to hamburger meat?
israel hasnt helped the world develop airline safety procedures and equipment due to PALESTINIAN (your buds) terrorism?
israel has never lost a citizen in fighting terrorism
yep israel is a virtual fucking oasis, free of your bud's (the islamo-thugs) violence...
THE fact is israel has repeatedly used it's blood and treasure to keep itself safe as well as the western world...
Yep Israel is raking in the cash with oil so high (opps that's right israel doesnt have oil)
Yep Israel is shirking it's world's duty to fight the bad guys... if only israel would use more live ammo...
btw that nuke reactor of saddam's that wasnt a threat to you of course.... remember that WMD? the one you most likely joined the world in scolding israel for blasting? (on a sunday night when it was empty of personal) oh, and while we are at it... remember the gulf war one when israel was being SHELLED, it was the usa that refused to allow israel to fight back...
your blantant hatred of israel is clear... it perverts every statement you make
Israel would love us going after their enemies, but wouldn't contribute a man's blood or a single shekel to the effort.
TEL AVIV - In total, more than 90 people were wounded in the attack. 41 remain hospitalized.In total, more than 90 people were wounded in the attack. 41 remain hospitalized. - Lying in the burn ward at Netanya's hospital, Betty Levy, 15, said the bomb exploded just behind her, scorching her back. She said she ran to find an ambulance. "A woman next to me was on fire. I'll never forget that," she said.
A bomb was detonated outside an Israeli bus near the Ofra settlement in the Binyamin region of the West Bank.
Shots were fired at IDF soldiers ear the southern Gush Katif settlement of Shlav Wednesday evening.
earlier, sappers detonated two explosive charges that had been placed along the security perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The larger of the two, weighing 95 kilograms, was discovered near the security fence southwest of Kissufim.
A second charge that weighed 40 kilograms was detonated by sappers near the Gush Katif settlement of Netzer Hazani.
yep israel is lazy, cheap and of course totally safe...
more from the peaceful lazy cheap cowardly israeli press
An Israeli woman in her early 20s was killed when a Kassam rocket scored a direct hit on a home in the Netiv Ha'asara kibbutz, just north of the Gaza Strip, on Thursday afternoon.
A total of four Kassams landed in Netiv Ha'asara, located about a kilometer outside of the Gaza Strip.
Another four hit the kibbutz of Nahal Oz, near the Karni crossing, causing damage to structures.
Three mortars were also fired at Netzarim, a Gaza settlement. One landed near a nursery school, and another near a playground.
An IDF jeep was hit in the attack. Luckily, no one was in the vehicle at the time. The jeep was completely destroyed.
gee C4 you are right, israel is a cowardly place where people would never lift a finger to fight your friends (islam-thugs), if only they had some balls and would just fire back......
would you be happy if israel would do like the arabs, the russians, the french do? and just overwhelm and bomb them bacK? me thinks you'd be bitching that israel is fighting too hard....
Trish wrote:
"we are confusing the mere right to vote and, I think probably, the right to publically express opinions without fear of persecution and prosecution, with an entire Western political philosophy and the broad culture within which it arose and by which it is supported."
Brilliant. Thank you.
A new article in USA Today by the always interesting Ralph Peters:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-07-12-iraq-edit_x.htm
Cedarford,
Don't see how you can possibly come up with that twisted logic about Israel. We have consistently kept them from going after our common enemies. Which likely was a strategic mistake.
Every thing else he said rings the bell of possibility.
The Zionist mania comes to overwhelm the sensibilities.
This piece in Wired Magazine addresses the question
Why GM Is High on Hydrogen
.
Spend a few hours watching a Leni Riefenstahl retrospective while thumbing through Der Sturmer and it all adds up. Israeli perfidy predates the modern state of Israel by decades - you can read about it and see it for yourself!
desert rat said...
"Once again folks
Name the enemy.
Kill them
Repeat
abakan and your definitons of war via Webster, words are great, but actions tell the tale."
I'm sorry desert rat but you are wrong. Words tell the tale, and two people describing the same action may describe it deferently.
So, you must control the word and the action. Which is where we are failing miserably.
desert rat said,
"Most of the terrorists of global reach are outside of our "War".
Does the word Hezbollah ring a bell. Do the countries of Iran and Syria sound familar."
No, they are not outside our war. They are included in the struggle against terrorism. War is a single facet in a multifacetted strategy.
The Bush doctrine will play out. We can't possibly cover all the bases with military force at the same time. If we could we would have already done so.
As Wretchard pointed out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan if we win and I'm less certain of that than I was 6 months ago, will have served only one purpose. Our struggle with terrorism will have been advanced by the removal of two state sponsors of terrorism.
Desert Rat said,
"Are we at wear with all those nation states listed on our State Dept.'s list of countries supporting terrorism?"
I guess that depends on how you define war. I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they will be very important in our struggle with terrorism.
Desert Rat said,
"No we are not."
And, strangely enough yes we are.
Desert Rat said,
"Unending War"
Yes our struggle against terrorism will be an unending war. I'm actually thankful for that rather bleak assessment.
Desert Rat said,
"Nameless Enemies"
We named them in them months prior to our military engagement with them. They were called Baathists, and the Taliban. If we are victorious against them, and absent success in the ascending order of conflict that civilized man prefers, we will name them again some months before our military engagement with them.
Desert Rat said,
"so Orwellian."
You are so right. 1984 was a novel about using words to control the perception of reality.
So, it would serve us both to remember that words and how they are used communicate and define reality, and becareful how they are used.
rat, in the movie, Dr. Strangelove...Peter Sellars character...would go along there talking away making a compelling case...then as he neared the end of the topic his right arm would start twitching and spasming convulsively, trying to take over and close with a flourish, with a Heil Der Fuehrer salute...
Strangelove/Sellars didn't want to do the salute, he would fight it with his other arm, snarling and straining and biting, but the arm just had a mind of it's own...the scene would fade out with the man and his arm locked in combat with each other...the camera would dolly back to show the other people in the room looking on in complete astonishment.
It's a scream.
"...We can learn from some of their security tricks....
You can try to fight those people, but watch out they will trick you.
I continue to have great respect for many who post here even though I might disagree very passionately with their worldview. In that vein, I propose that everyone here indulge me in a private experiment.
Just for one day, on any topic, cast away your prefered lexicon. Here are two suggestions. Throw away the WOT. Throw away Islamic Fascism. You should notice a change in how your thoughts align themselves immediately.
c4:
Not even Australia or Britain will support us if Israeli military forces are joined to American military actions. That is what I meant when I said that any American action against any ME terrorist group or nation will not involve a single Israeli sodier lost or shekel spent.
The simple fact is, like it or not - they are unusable pariahs to the rest of the world, though useful to America, the Soviets, India, and China for dispensing or selling info on technical ooolies, or major US technology & defense secrets in the case of the Indians, China, and the former Soviet Union<<<<
wow... "unusable pariahs" "selling secrets"
the hatred continues....
c4: Doug, I'm leery of ever joining the "Israel knows best, listen to them!" crowd because Israel's track record is doing technical things well while at the same time deepening the hatred and resistance.<
newsflash... they really really really really hate us now...
oh and if we fight back? they will really, really, really, really, really, really hate us..
and guess what? if israel died tomorrow, the arabs will still really, really, really, really, really, really , really hate you......
can deepen the hatred the death cult already has.
you ASSUME the arab's have the ability to love christians and jews and pagans that dont bow to them....
c4: That is why Israel was isolated from the Gulf war, Afghanistan, and Iraq - at the insistence of our allies. And us. And spent no money or soldiers in those conflicts. Indeed, in the Gulf war, which took down what they thought was their greatest threat, Israel lobbied for and got an extra 3 billion for "suffering" Scud missiles and not retaliating and destroying the Coalition...And they got Patriot missile technology, which somehow found it's way to China by the mid-90s....
good, then Israel sold worthless technology to the chinese..
"suffering scud attacks" i guess you mean being hit by a refrig traveling at 200 miles an hour doesnt hurt...
ruining the coalition? you mean the 10 billion we GAVE to egypt to sit out of the way? great coalition... i remember the syrians fighting the iraqi's republican army.. (opps that was a dream)
as for greatest threats, never heard of Iran eh?
The idea behind Israel sitting out GUlf War I was twofold, 1) to hold her own front just in case (which also held the coalition rear in the event of disaster), and 2) to not hand the anti-west forces of all stripes everywhere exactly what they want, the Mother of All Propaganda: Jewish Crusade against the neighbors.
1. No compensation for lands seized in the 1948, 1967 war.
hey c4, what compensation was offered the jews throw out of the arab world in 1948?
why was there no state of palestine created from 1948 - 1967?????
2. For 25 years introducing Settlers of the worst sort of Right wing zealotry into the occupied lands and taking land and water from the Pals to give to the Settlers.
what's your opinion on the concept of drip irrigation?
what's your opinion on arafat's attack BEFORE 1967 on Israel's water carrier, in an attempt to cause mass genocide?
what's your opinion on syria & lebanon restricting the flow of the river jordan to starve israel out of existence?
as for "Settlers of the worst sort of Right wing zealotry into the occupied lands" - read the UN resolutions, the land is "disputed" not occupied, as for the worse sort? yes right wing settlers build greenhouses, right wing europeans build death camps, right wing arabs behead westerners... if the setllers were so bad where is the DEATH TOLL from their genocide? after all gazan infant mortality is lower in gaza under israel "occupation" than egypt that USED to occupy it...
But couldn't resist grabbing more Pal land in the process.
the arab world control MILLIONS of square miles, and yet you focus on 20 square miles of disputed lands..
do you support the temple mount being returned to the jews since it is stolen?
do you support the return of hebron to the jews, since the arabs stole it?
do you support the return of bethlehem to the jews since the arabs stole it?
do you support the arab world returning the land it stole from the jews? the copt's the berbers?
if not you are a hypocrite......
We'll know the war is over when the extremists' own communities, world-wide, declare them heretics and act appropriately. They are well on their way in (the battle of) Iraq. And, every day we stay in the fight is a day that they act against their own best interests (v. suing for peace) given the necessity of terrorizing their own communities.
Extremists by definition have no throttle, no regulator. The real challenge is how to minimize our and others' casualties while killing those we can find, while waiting for this to happen (a realization by those same communities).
This is not unlike political warfare by ideologs who have no sense they've stepped well outside the tolerable. It's best just to stand quietly by while the electorate watches them self-destruct in their more and more outrageous positions and arguments.
Larsen 11:47 AM Started laughing hysterically part way through, stopped reading, will savor and pursue.
"Universities in the last quarter of the 20th century were the identity-forming places where the young learned which victims to identify with and (most especially) which victimizers to loathe, the inaugural ritual for modern and postmodern forms of identity." - Gil Bailie
Heh, some of us are still in school!
bennet,
your most interesting post yet.
lenie's post on Turkey, and C-4's comparison of supposedly socialist loving Israel's approach to security v the USA's pork belly model, lead me to believe that humans are way too complex for mere humans to comprehend.
"(on a Sunday night when it was empty of personnel) "
---
Nathan,
Doubt if Patton would have done that.
"Modern" western man would do nothing at all.
Except Dither.
(and I betcha Patton has Mika's vote.)
stagger,
Hewitt was citing stats that most of them were better educated than average, and many were college grads.
Would be fun to read a Wretch piece on Andrew's 8:37 AM post.
...unless it would be better left unsaid.
Actually, C-4's comments on Israeli security measures are easy to follow:
A direct response to necessity.
Our Pork Belly Model is a result of long security and affluence, I fear.
Decadence even.
nathan,
Yeah, Mika too.
...or maybe any day BUT sunday, since they would live to play another day that way.
Gotta go read about 4 or 6 articles on Instapundit re this Muslims vs Jihadis question--really, go, look.
We sure have done a lot for
"Energy Independence"
Ain't we?
Or even Independence Independence.
Socialism corrupts,
Affluence plus socialism...
Miriyam Aouragh is quoted as saying "[Hirsi Ali]'s nothing but an Uncle Tom...She insults me and she makes my life as a feminist ten times harder because she forces me to be associated with anti-Muslim attacks."
Translation: Hirsi Ali is hampering Aouragh's careful and quiet gathering of influence and power.
C4, what do you think of Prof. Juan Cole?
Nathan, google [department of energy] reams of stats, projections, position papers.
C4 asks why we have not developed a list of the enemy and instituted my plan. Weak knees is my first impression.
We are at war with the Baathist and Taliban , or so Akaban says. But they have been driven from the field on both fronts. In neither case is an Opfor military force present. In both cases native insurgents and out country fighters are attempting to harass the indig government. But there is no conventional miitary conflict. Major Combat operations are over, and we stand victorious on the field.
But what of the Baathists in Syria, they get a pass,
Guess they're 'nice' Baathists.
No war with Syria
Iran, even the 9-11 commission agreed, had more to do with 9-11 then Saddam's Iraq.
No war with Iran
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Wahabbi funding center.
No war with KSA
Name the evil Imams and eleiminte them, no can do - may lose an ally or two, if we aim true.
Call it what you will,
it ain't no war
>>>Cedarford said...
Pork Rinds For Allah -
Well, first of all you pick a "handle" that is deeply insulting to anyone of the Muslim faith. Not exactly a sign of your objectivity.<<<
i aint objective as most of the moslem world call me a son of apes or pigs....
>>>Second, you claim the people who have had their Occupation boot on Palestinian throats for 38 years are the "real victims."<<
what is an "occupation boot"? If the palestinians had embraced statehood and not war, they would never have been defeated ....
>>>Third, you didn't rebut any of my reasons, only said stuff like, "well with drip irrigation" (the water we stole is used more wisely) >>>
Who stole whose water? Don't Israeli have a right to water?
> ignoring B'tselem and WHO reports that Palestinians are rationed to 1/5th the water allocated to Settlers freshly arriving from Russia. <
true.. however the extra cash the palestinians get in world aid can certainly buy them lots more water than the zero aid the world give fleeing russian jews, palestinians have recieved per capita more cash than the marshal plan gave europeans, couple than with the additional 3 billion they are getting, i'd say they can afford to purchase water from turkey, just like israel does....
c4-As for your explaination of why Israel sucessfully sues, negotiates, and lobbies American companies and all sorts of Europeans for full reparations for any land or property lost - but refuses to pay a single shekel to Palestinians for homes, lands, and property taken in 1948, 1967, and by the creeping thefts of the Settlements and the security fence.....<
to me the answer is that the otherside, the arab world owes a much greater amount in what it stole from the jewish people... so why should israel pay money to the arabs as a settlement when the arabs still dont recognize israel's right to exist and refuses to pay it's trillions it ripped off? Let's see... how much for the property of Medina, bethlehem, hebron to start? (remember arabia had jewish towns before mohammed had his 1st erection)
>You embrace the "all Arabs are alike" strategy
no, i embrace the arab league's position all arabs are brothers. arab pan nationalism....
>. So Libya tossing out their Jewish population or Zionists encouraging Aliya there somehow makes Palestinians complicit in what Libya does because "all Arabs are alike" and you say no payment for losses is owed to the Palestinians.<<<
actually in 1948 there were no palestinians to speak of, that was invented in 1964 in egypt by arafat the egyptian.... but if there is a settlement, lets start with what the arab world stole...
> Not even Israel agreed with that whopper when they petitioned for membership in 1949. They pledged their "best, sincere efforts" to compensate refugees. They lied. No surprise..<
no suprise israel lied? wow talk about bias.... or if you read the UN resolution it states "refugees" not arab refugees, so why should israel make restitiution when the arab world refuses to?? show me one arab government that has made restitution to it's expelled jews...
>And repeat the old "since all Arabs share one big chink of land" it is no inconvenience to steal 200 square miles of Palestinian land because the natives can always move to Morocco or such..<
well, actually they could move 12 miles away to jordan, no need to go to morocco......, or they could have stayed as 400,000 did and are now citizens of the state you hate so much... (ps most jews are legally not allowed to live as citizens of arab countries)
c4, yes please read the arab league charter.. where were these so called palestinans in 1948? were the the arabs supporting hitler? (like arafat uncle the grand mufti of jerusalem) so shit happens, this rag tag group of death cult lovers have been played by their brother arabs not to settle, whereas after ww2 millions of other settled in new adjusted lands, jews were thrown out, poles were thrown out, germans were thrown out all did ok... except the palestinians.. get over it, now they will have gaza and most all of the west bank to make their weapons and rockets and plan their next suicide attack, if a few miles of land is used to keep the shithead out, too bad... It's a border dispute...
>A load of crap.>
yes your pov....
Ari tai, We'll know the war is over when the extremists' own communities, world-wide, declare them heretics and act appropriately. They are well on their way in (the battle of) Iraq. And, every day we stay in the fight is a day that they act against their own best interests (v. suing for peace) given the necessity of terrorizing their own communities.
Yes, reading the local reports on the candy bombing, it does seem we're getting to that point.
In earlier threads we're discussing a blood feud, and I can't see how one between the Iraqi majority and the Sunni/AlQ minority will not ensue from these years. I often thought of the situation in Northern Ireland the same way. Once you have killed my uncle or my cousin, I'm never going to forget it. Somehow it's dying out in Ireland, but it's a tiny community of wounded compared to what has happened in Iraq.
In any case, the larger war is moving too slowly, costing more casualties in restraint than bolder action would have cost.
Yo Doug and Buddy, re: Dr. Strangelove - have you watched it lately? It's hysterically 'funny' and a classic film, but when I last watched it a year or so ago, after a lapse of many years between viewings, I had forgotten how deeply serious and disturbing the core subject was. For those of us of a certain age, who grew up with the idea of nuclear holocaust as not a question of if, but when, it's not an easy watch.
Remember "Fail Safe" where Henry Fonda as President couldn't stop a runaway B-52 from nuking Russia, so he nuked New York ... in good faith?
Same story, different ending, same subject: human fallibility in possession of infallibly devastating weapons.
Watch it again, see if it doesn't bug you more than amuse you.
We're letting this war drag on too long.
I agree with C4 on one thing, the US Public won't stand for an escalation, not at this point.
We got bogged down and lost the 'mo.
Iraq, it is not a quagmire, but one deep ass mud bog.
desert,
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in Pakistan, with Saudi funding...
allah's porker
I am not familar with many of the things you and C4 get so wound up about. I thinl the Israelis have a right to exist and the Pali's got dealt a low blow from generations of Arab & UN mismanagement.
But, as to the water.
No they do not have much right to the river water at all. In the US West, the Colorado is the prime source of water. Each state, AZ, CA & NV divies up the water. The poor Mexicans, they get the hind end, what ever we allow to trickle down.
First in time, first in line
It fell on my land, the water belongs to me.
www.aliberaldose.com is asking people to go vandalize Karl Rove's home--and furnishing directions to it. So says FoxNews just now. And--with a war on, our left is going to blow nothing into a huge mess. Maybe OBL is right about us.
Tony,
Sadder yet, to me it was funny then 'cause I strongly believed it wouldn't happen.
Now, I try to talk the kid into watching it.
But maybe I shouldn't:
Ignorance is such a comfort.
Mine all mine, precious H2o
...Until in time, we let it all go.
See if you can spot the non sequitur (from Hindustan Times):
"The bombers who carried out the deadly London blasts may have been trained in Pakistan as recently as this year, reports said, leading to criticism that Bush Administration has failed to effectively dismantle the terrorist infrastructure in that country."
The joys and pains of being the world's nanny. What would we do without critics?
Rune,
That's a
Waa on Iswamism.
but I still prefer
Iswamwofasciswm
aristides,
Forget about the enemy.
We need Star Wars now, to save lives soon
Pakistan
The perverbeal thorn in the side. Funders of the Taliban.
With a General President for Life.
Stormed at with shot and shell
Don't be alarmed he just fell,
I mean he tripped.
Dr Khan built a Nuke
a national hero he became
beyond the reach of US law
A third of the that country is out of reach. No Pakistani soldier can fill the breach , they hire out though, to the UN, piecekeepers to the end.
watch the Japs, not what they say, what they do.
And, unfortunatly for now,
I got to go.
those vandals would guilty of a hate crime. What's that, a tripling of the sentence, like RICO. Now that is an idea, take on the blog under the RICO statutes... now that would get 'em roarin'
Doug,
Really? You didn't think it was going to happen?
I remember doing duck and cover drills in school, snuggling under our little desks. The physical scientist in me always looked at those tall walls of windows, facing south. In my Philly neighborhood, from high up, like in our classrooms, you could see through those windows the gas flares from the huge oil refineries only a few miles away. We always knew we were a strategic target, among the top 10 in the US. Myself the little scientist is clearly imagining the blast wave, all that glass becoming deadly piercing hail in an instant.
Hmm. So, you didn't have the recurring dream of the big white flash outside your bedroom window?
I guess it was just me.
What we should be doing:
Build up our intelligence on every single training camp, funding headquarters, and operations center of our enemy. Every mosque that openly spreads hatred and violence, every madrassa that brainwashes the young, everywhere around the world.
Then, like Michael Corleone, in one fell swoop settle all family business, without regard for sovereignty or "international law".
It seems to me that sooner or later, in the immortal words of Team America, "we're gonna need a montage."
Damn! I missed the party!
In a recent post, “The Blitz Comes to London”, out of 420 comments, 92 were Doug’s. Congratulations Doug, you have hijacked 22% of the Belmont Club comments section band-width. I used to try very hard to read all the comments. Belmont Club is now a chat line for lonely alcoholics. Thanks to Doug’s blogging under the influence, I can’t bother to try reading all the commentary. No staying on thread with Doug. Thank you Doug for single handedly bringing the discussion down to belligerent, belching one-liners such as the small sample that follows, enjoy!;
Doug Said,
ADE,
You are not a leftist, carry on.
...but no beer, rock and roll and etc
Doug Said,
Engineer poet:
'Rat can take care of the oilfields while we lure the masses out of their SUVs.
(He buys us time)
Doug Said,
ADE,
Ever tried Sierra Nevada?
USA's best, IMO.
...if you like hops.
Doug Said,
Was fun when we got Blitzed Here.
Doug Said,
ADE.
Most sucessful true microbrew in US.
Ales: Red Tail Stout my fav.
Northern Calif. (Chico)
I Grew up in CA
Doug Said,
Sorry, it was just Red Tail Ale.
(named after numerous neat predators in CA.)
Still worth fighting for.
Must have been the MSM "beer" fogging the memory.
...plus it's 5:30am
OUT!
Doug Said,
:-)
:-)(no offense ex-dem):-)
:-)
Doug Said,
Haven't read all the posts:
WHO PUT OUT THE TROLL BAIT?
Doug Said,
Sargent,
You are projecting.
And so is your picture.
Monkey.
Doug Said,
Sargent,
Some of my best friends are Monkeys!
Doug Said,
THAT guy is a GORILLA!
Doug Said,
...on two wheels!
Doug Said,
Isn't Mcbain in the Simpsons or something?
Doug Said,
The guy I'm thinking about doesn't use the F word tho.
Doug Said,
At least they don't say:
FU
Doug Said,
I'm opening up a
"Watered-down Aquinas and Kant"
Water Stand.
Any takers on the IPO?
Doug Said,
Two Triple Crowns in One Thread!
...latest at 2:13 PM
Doug Said,
Off the table Mable.
These two bucks are for Ale.
Doug Said,
...the wenches here all refer to me as "Buck.”
Doug Said,
No Blood for Ohio!
No Blood for Ohio!
Doug Said,
Blair's a Monkey Too?
Doug Said,
Peter,
I was afraid I might be taken that way.
But y'all know I'm.
JUST KIDDING!
...isn't that part of the Pluck of the Irish?
Doug Said,
Dan,
NY Times is experiencing a
"Power Surge"
at this time
Doug Said,
'Rat,
No, I Joined the Choir!
Boy!
Sir!
Doug Said,
".... after everyone know how strong and scarely those skullcaps as look..."
All your Skulls Belong to Mush!
Doug Said,
What's Baron's Site?
...The Grapes of Vienna?
Doug Said,
Peter,
I should show you a self-portrait I did:
Talk about a lack of proportion!
Doug Said,
I came out looking like 'Rat.
...but that's just because I ran out of ink.
Doug Said,
No wonder he looks so funny.
Doug Said,
He's French Licking.
Doug Said,
"Looking”
Doug Said,
:-)
Maybe I should quit while I'm
"ahead?”
Doug Said,
My wife always calls me the d head word.
Doug Said,
She Left.
Doug Said,
This morning.
Doug Said,
3 Triples!
I'm out here.
I lost the last one.
Doug Said,
...but I did come in 2nd, also.
Doug Said,
Blair's back at G-8.
All's Well.
Chirac in Control.
Doug Said,
re:
Chickensh.. Luck.
Yeah we should not be like the left and count our chickens before they crap.
Doug Said,
It don't add up.
Doug Said,
Hewitt plays ANOTHER
Why do they hate us soundclip!
"Basic Failure of Intellect on the Left.”
Doug Said,
Oliphant, quote I think.
Steyn:
"Too Weak and Too Decadent to Defend Themselves.”
Doug Said,
I warned you, Akaban
Doug Said,
Abakan
Doug Said,
At least no one will mistake me for one of those dangerous silent types.
Doug Said,
Duck!
Doug Said,
It's Doug Al Quack!
Doug Said,
A Quack Attack
Doug Said,
Kevin,
It means our worst fears are realized.
Doug Said,
What were the Airports like?
Doug Said,
Yeah, can be taken two ways
Doug Said,
"take what you can get and be happy that Grandpa didn't lose the farm to back taxes.
"
...ambles back to the OK Corral.
Doug Said,
Methinks the Professor needs some fresh air.
Doug Said,
Simple minds like mine think if it's closer to home, it's easier to get there.
Doug Said,
...it's just Bud.
Don't feel bad.
Doug Said,
The Profane
and
The Profound.
Doug Said,
I never left.
I'll try to now.
annoy mouse,
If it's any consolation,
I'd rather read through a hundred of doug's oneliners, than read a single post containing hundreds of lines by you.
doug's the bomb
It just hasn't gone off
perhaps a dud
or drowned in suds
to the ale some do hail
Ali doug el Del Belmonti
heathen to the core
Now that I'm thinking childhood thoughts, it occurs to me that people these days are just not afraid of anything.
We were justifiably afraid, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, that things could really blow. We were afraid of our enemies.
Today, the Conventional Wisdom seems to be that we CAUSE our enemies, and if only we were cool, everybody would love us.
Further, we don't have anything to worry about really, because we are omnipotent and invulnerable. How else could we be the source of all the world's problems?
A large portion of American, and an even larger portion of Western society seems to believe that if only we would be nice and understanding like the kindergarten psychologist, we could all get along.
People have been lulled to sleep, the sleep of imagined invulnerability and limitless self-determination.
WAKE UP! Be Afraid.
Bicker-blog, let's not. All the other blogs do that.
I glanced at a story about it. In those places that are actually sustaining aQ violence the rapture of OBL is on the wane. This was particularly true of the young people in those locales.
Polls are just polls, though.
Hey Annoymouse,
If you have a piece of software that gathers specific quotes from specific posters - you have a valuable commodity on your hands.
If you took all that time to gather those quotes manually, mmmm.
Husker, instapundit has it--along with some other reports simlar, if you scroll down.
David Bennett: Those who don't want to be involved will have no choice. We don't protect them.
You should take a walk through my old neighborhood. It always astounds me that people think we can make the world perfect. Nobody made it perfect for us.
Do you think America is 1) Omnipotent; 2) Invulnerable; or, 3) Both. Or, of course, 4) the Cause of All Evil.
desert rat said...
But, as to the water.
No they do not have much right to the river water at all. In the US West, the Colorado is the prime source of water. Each state, AZ, CA & NV divies up the water. The poor Mexicans, they get the hind end, what ever we allow to trickle down.
First in time, first in line
It fell on my land, the water belongs to me.
i think international law speaks differently, however, take your position, then if israel wanted to "take" all the water from the springs and not allow any to trickle to the palestinians the world would be on israel as murderers (opps they are already cause they built a wall) and c4 would be happy...
the arabs have used starvation of population (jews of jerusalem) and have tried to destroy the water carriers, they have set forest fires... personally the solution is simple, desalination....
Doug, don't worry, I PROVE it's possible to be boring without being all that drunk.
Interesting thoughts, all.
But let us not lose sight of the fact that Terrorists first and foremost act to create TERROR.
And that one of the primary objectives of such terror is to decrease the ability of their enemies to think rationally.
If this results in a Lash Out reaction that results in more terror - from the other side, that is fine. More will be brought to their side as a result, when both sides are poved to be morally equal at best.
If it results in others turning away and ignoring the problem, that's even better for the terrorists. When the myth of the "black pajamas fighting against imperialists for control of their own country" was broken by the U.S. invasion of Camboida and what it revealed, the Left moved deftly from shouting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" to "It's a mess! Hopeless! Bring the troops home!" with not even a pause. That proved to work better than praise for Uncle Ho when it came to shutting off aid to South Vietnam.
Killing Children is a tactic designed to kill rational thought, as much as anything - and at this stage to create disgust that encourages turning away from the awful sight.
desert rat said:
No war with Iran No war with KSA
Call it what you will, it ain't no war
Rat,
Let me ask you this. What do think would have happen if the US attacked Saudia first?
I'll tell you what would have happened. The US would have been exposed to potential loss of oil supply not only from Saudia, but from Iraq, and Iran! Both Saudia and Iran weren't very happy with Saddam. Iraq was the logical place to start while ensuring that oil supplies from Saudia and Iran are maintained. And Iraq had pending issues regards WoMD, terror sponsorship, and ceasefire violations.
You need to think of this war as a 3-legged stool. You always need to maintain two legs functional while you work on the third.
Once Iraq is "stabilized", Iran will be next.
rwe...it works very well on those who lack the capacity for outrage. "Understanding" is such a virtue, it's sort of difficult just where, at what point, it goes so terribly wrong.
I guess it never DOES go wrong, for those who feel they should not be here polluting Nature.
pork rinds for allah said: personally the solution is simple, desalination....
Yeah, of Jordyptians.
pork rind
The Mexi's do not get a 'fair share' of the Colorado. That is a fact.
When the water starts somewhere else then it is not yours. If you negotiate with the owner some reasonable accomadation may be available.
In the old West there were many a "water war". Right up there with grazing rights.
Civilization brings wonderful things.
mika
Not on GWB's watch.
I believe he has worn out the patience of our US Public. When, months ago, we discussed the next target, Damascus or Iran. I favored Damascus, immediately. Others consuled Iran, later.
We will get neither.
The US Public, sans another MAJOR incident, in the US, will not go adventuring, that window is shut and nailed.
desert rat said:
mika.. that window is shut and nailed.
We'll see.
and just who said
"...for I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. ..."
damn radicals
He also has a few other choise quotes on orginized religion
"...In every country and in every age, the priest ...(Imam)... has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
"... All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826 (in the last letter he penned)
Your god, his god, my god
live and let live
or as Mr Bond would say
Live and Let Die
desert Rat said...
"Once again folks
Name the enemy.
Kill them
Repeat"
Here are some names:
[Picture of list of al qaida top donors names in Arabic]
AL QAIDA DONORS:
SULEIMAN AL-RASHID
Al-Rashid Trading & Contracting (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
ABDEL QADER BAKRI (ABDULKADER [AL] BAKRI)
CEO, Bakri Group of Cos
CEO, Al Bakri International Power Co. Ltd (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
CEO, Al-Bakri Shipping Group (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
BIN LADEN BROTHERS
Saudi Binladin Group (SBG)
Bakr Bin Laden
YOUSIF JAMEEL (YOUSSEF [YOUSEF] JAMEEL)
CEO, Abdul Lateef Jameel Group
IBRAHIM AFANDI (IBRAHIM MUHAMMAD AFANDI)
Board member, Ibn Baz Foundation (President: Prince Salman, VP: Abdulaziz bin Fahd)
SALEH KAMEL (SALEH ABDULLAH KAMEL)
Born in 1941, Mecca, Saudi Arabia
CEO, Dallah Al Baraka (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) - 3rd largest Saudi company
AL-RAJHI (SULEIMAN ABDULAZIZ AL RAJHI)
CEO, Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Company (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) - 9th largest Saudi company, 4th largest Saudi commercial bank
AL-JUMAIH (MOHAMMAD BIN ABDULLAH AL-JOMAIH)
Member of the Committee for collection of donations for supporting the Intifada (Chairman Prince Salman
Chairman First Islamic Investment Bank
AL-SHARBATLY (ABDULRAHMAN HASSAN [ABBAS] SHARBATLY)
Founder and board member, Riyad Bank (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) - 7th largest Saudi company and 2nd largest Saudi commercial bank
MOHAMED YOUSEF AL-NAGHI
Al Naghi Brothers Co (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
BIN MAHFOODH (KHALID BIN MAHFOUZ)
Former COO, BCCI
Former CEO, National Commercial Bank, 1st Saudi commercial bank
SALAH AL-DIN ABDEL JAWAD (SALAHUDDIN ABDULJAWAD)
CEO, General Machinery Agencies (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) Agent for General Motors, Wacker Corp, Mannesmann, Renault (RVI), Opel
Board member, United Gulf Industries Corp, Manama, Bahrain (with Khalil Bin Laden)
AHMAD TURKI YAMANI (AHMED ZAKI YAMANI)
Born in 1930, Mecca, Saudi Arabia
Son of former Saudi Chief Justice
Former Saudi minister of petroleum and mineral resources
Former director, ARAMCO
ABDEL HADI TAHER (ABDUL HADI TAHER)
CEO, Taher Group of Companies, 52nd largest Saudi company
Owner, Marketing General Trading Corp (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
MOHAMMED OMAR
???
AL KUWAIT
???
AHMAD AL HARBI
CEO, Ahmad Al Harbi Group
(L'Houssaine Kherchtou testified on February 21, 2001, during the trial of suspected al-Qaida militants in connection with the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on 7 August 1998, that he was welcomed at Miram Shah guest house in Pakistan before joining Al-Qaida by "Abu Ahmed al Harbi").
AL ISSAEI (MOHAMMED AL-ISSAI)
Board member, Saudi Research & Marketing Company (with Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi, Saleh Abdullah Kamel, Abdullah Bin Khalid Bin Mahfouz, Dallah Albaraka Group) - 20th largest Saudi company
HAMAD AL HUSAINI (HAMAD AL HUSSAINI)
CEO, Akel Trading Company
CEO, Akel Agricultural Investment Company LLC
AL-QAIDA RECIPIENTS
Major recipients appear to be Usama Bin laden and Adel Abdul Jalil Batterjee. They receive donations from 13 donors.
USAMA (USAMA BIN LADEN)
Receives donations from the most prominent in the list: Bin Laden Brothers, Al Rajhi, Sharbatly, Al Naghi, Bin Mahfouz, Adel Faqih, Al Kuwait
WAIL (WAEL HAMZA JULAIDAN)
Former Secretary General of the Muslim World League
BATERJI (ADEL ABDUL JALIL BATTERJEE)
Chairman Al Shamal Islamic Bank (Khartoum, Sudan)
Founder, Al-Birr Society, Benevolence International Foundation
ABU MAZIN ( ??? MAZIN M. BAHARETH)
Son of Mohammed Saleh Bahareth (brother of Usama Bin Laden father's wife and tutor of the Bin Laden family after patriarch Mohammad Bin Laden's death in 1968)
CEO, Bahareth Organization (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia)
The Golden Chain list (or list of wealthy Saudi sponsors) was presented by the US government as Exhibit 5 in the Department of Justice "Government's Evidentiary Proffer Supporting the Admissibility of Coconspirator Statements" in the case of USA v. Arnaout (USDC, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division) filed on January 29, 2003... The list was part of a computer file labeled "Tareekh Osama", or "Osama History", containing scanned images of several documents. The computer files seized in Bosnia were delivered to the US Embassy soon after the raids. Our team was granted access to these documents following an order of the Supreme Court of Bosnia Herzegovina issued on March 6, 2003.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Al-Qaida list of top 20 Saudi financial sponsors include 6 bankers and 12 businessmen, among which 2 former ministers. Only two on the list have not been yet identified with certainty.
According to our estimates, their cumulative corporate net worth totals more than $85 billion US, or 42% of the Saudi annual GNP... Among the most notable findings, we should highlight the following
-Confirmation that the Bin Laden family has been a major contributor to Usama, despite its statements denying such support
-Involvement of bankers representing the three largest Saudi banks (National Commercial Bank, Riyad Bank, Al Rajhi Banking and Investment Corp)
See: GOLDEN CHAIN LIST ANALYSIS & PROFILES
Extensive list of terrorists, at large, captured, or dead:
[Spreadsheet of names, locations, and status]
See: Terrorists Score Card
[hat tip to posters at lgf]
Exactly ledger,
If these fellows are not on the short list we are not at War. Plain and simple.
If we were in an authentic War these folks would have found out just how sweet those white grapes of Paradise really are.
Well there is the start of a great list
Maybe we should just raise the bounty of the bad guys
Palladin - have gun, will travel
50 million for UBL raise it by 10 million per week. When the bounty gets to 250 - 300 million, even I'd think about mounting up again. Professionals would beat me to it, as old and slow that I've become.
Think of the money we could save chasing Z in Iraq. 150 million would be cheap.
It's like the Swiss bankers in WWII--free to swim in both sides waters. Basically, providing services to all combatants, too rich for either to touch.
If we're willing to go back to a 50s lifestyle, we just change the money--go to red instead of green, and don't covert ther dirty stuff, make a book on whoever converts, retire from globalization, be poor but happy, and stay exceedingly dangerous to screw around with.
Mistake was not letting Israel go to Cairo in '73.
What grace allowed us to survive the 70s--and were we 'spose to've learned something in return for the reprieve?
Yes, desert rat we are never going to win the war unless these terror financiers - who can throw millions around - are stopped cold. Men, material, and costs of transportation are high. These oil rich sheiks provide the means for terror acts and must be stopped from further funding of said terrorism (or conversely, our people should be allowed to fund equal groups to go after them).
And, I agree, that it would be logical to increase the bounty on these thugs. At some point someone will turn them in (or put them in a bottle).
I have always thought Bin Laden's family should be detained and questioned. They would be the people who pass the money to him (and may know exactly where he is located).
OT, More on UK Bombs:
[A new type of plastic explosive developed by China's defense contractors... It has the finger prints of state sponsored terrorism on it - which circles back to the financiers]
The Australian:
According to Israeli authorities, the two young radical British Muslims who were responsible for the suicide attack on a club in Tel Aviv, killing three people and injuring 50, used a new type of plastic explosive, originally manufactured by one of China's leading military defense contractors.
Mossad, the Israeli secret service, reportedly discovered the British suicide bombers, Asif Muhammad Hanif, 21, from Hounslow, west London, and Omar Khan Sharif, 27, from Derby, smuggled the explosive into Israel from Jordan. The same type of explosive is thought to have been used in the London attacks.
MI5 was yesterday piecing together the double life of Mohammed Sadique Khan, the oldest of the bombers, who worked in a school in Beeston, Leeds. Khan, the father of 14-month-old Maryam, was a "learning mentor" ...
See: Bomb mastermind identified
A Soldier's Reflections
I was that which others did not want to be.
I went where others feared to go
and did what others failed to do.
I asked nothing from those who gave nothing
and reluctantly accepted the thought of eternal loneliness . . .
Should I fail, I have seen the face of terror;
Felt the stinging cold of fear;
and enjoyed the sweet taste of a moment's love.
I have cried, pained, and hoped . . .
but most of all, I have lived times others would say
were best forgotten.
At least someday I will be able to say that I was proud of what I was ...
"A Soldier."
Phillip Edmundson
Edmundson was killed June 1 in Ramadi, Iraq, after an improvised explosive device detonated near his Bradley Fighting Vehicle during combat operations.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1443156/posts
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