Category Archives: Military

Updated: Karzai Crazy, Or So The US Says

Foreign Policy, Israel, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Old Right, Terrorism, War

Afghan President Hamid Karzai must be crazy, or at least hopping high, to kick back at the empire that created him. These are what supposedly serious pundits are saying in response to Karzai’s allegation that Western governments and the United Nations committed electoral fraud in last year’s Afghani presidential election.

The Hill: “Over the weekend, Karzai reportedly told members of his parliament that he would consider leaving the political process to join the Taliban if he continued to come under outside pressure.”

The last threat was so obviously tongue in cheek, but Americans didn’t find it amusing. Peter Galbraith, “the US diplomat who worked for the UN in Kabul until last year,” went on Smear TV accusing the leader of our Afghan satellite state of being unstable and toking it up too.

It’s a “bad trip” indeed.

I haven’t searched out reactions on the far- Left and Right to this hint from Kabul that the US has overstayed its welcome. These political factions, however, generally treat shows of Israeli sovereignty with fury and demands for Obama to crush Israel.

My guess is that you should look for the exact opposite reaction from said elements when it comes to our “Muslim allies.”

Since consistency is the touchstone of truth, this scribe is pleased about both Afghani and Israeli resistance to US meddling:

“Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach. Patriots for a sane American foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends, Israel included, to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours.”

Update (April 8): Meanwhile back in the trenches on the side of the righteous, a US “Special Forces team gunned down an Afghan police chief, a prosecutor, and three unarmed women, infuriating locals and drawing a sharp rebuke from politicians in Kabul.”

AND (via the CSM):

In a video conference taking questions from troops earlier this year, McChrystal said with some frustration “we’ve shot an amazing number of people” who were not, in fact, threats. In February, McChrystal apologized to the Afghan people after a NATO airstrike killed 27 civilians.

A scene of “Sulcha” unflods in which an animal is sacrificed and American slobber, and the only words that are sensible and honorable come from a local man, Mr. Sharabuddin:

“… justice would only be served when the Americans gave up the informant who sent the Special Forces squad to raid a house full of civilians and government officials. ‘We want that spy who gave the false information to the Americans,’ Mr. Sharabuddin said. ‘I don’t want the spy for myself, I want him to face justice or be handed over to the commander of the [Afghan army] corps.”

Updated: ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ For Hets and Homos

Feminism, Gender, Homosexuality, Intellectualism, Military, Morality, Uncategorized

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ For Hets and Homos”:

“Sodomy and oral sex: these will be the topics the nation’s military brass will be studying—not-too-closely, we hope—between now and December.

The priapic preoccupation of some very senior soldiers is part of a new Pentagon study aimed at reviewing the 17-year-old military legal code related to ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ including rules on buggery and related practices. …

The trouble with the military, however—besides its imperial reach and bloated size—is not gays. It is, rather, that the ranks these days are either rutting furiously, or supporting the right to rut, and now, scrutinizing the mating habits of grunts.

The military is soaked in sex. The presence of women has helped this state of affairs. Throw together young men and willing women — and you’ve created an undisciplined, sexually charged atmosphere. Coupled with enabling laws, this combustible admixture is bound to yield bumper crops of unmarried moms and (poor) baby bastards. ” …

Read “‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ For Hets and Homos” for my answer to the facile DADT debate.

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update (March 5): The Honorable Judge Reavis: As you well know, even though a classical liberal, I’m not really a “you types” kind of a thinker. So what does this classical liberal fear most?

An inversion of morality and rationality is what I fear and dread; a world where the bad, the banal, and the stupid are rewarded and lauded, sought and celebrated; a world where those with the gift of truth and reason are hounded and shunned; where men of (so-called) integrity huddle in atrophying intellectual attics enforcing party lines and other consensus, instead of being courageous. That world, in my experience, is upon us and has come to pass.

The afterlife? G-d ? I’m probably too shallow or practical or both to bother about those.

WarbotObama Kills More Non-Combatants

Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Terrorism, War

When American armed forces working for warbotObama kill non-combatants in the Afghan theater, they are referred to in the press as NATO forces. MSNBC.com leads with the story that “A NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan killed at least 33 civilians, the Afghan cabinet said Monday, an incident that is inflaming already heightened sensitivities over noncombatant casualties in the war.”

On the 15th, at least 10 people, including 5 children, were killed in Marja, with American rockets.

Face it, the forces might be deluding themselves that they are killing bad Taliban in Afghanistan, but they don’t really know who they are targeting. “NATO forces confirmed in a statement that its planes fired Sunday on what it believed was a group of insurgents in southern Uruzgan province on their way to attack a joint NATO-Afghan patrol.”

It turned out they were women and children.

On the other hand, the Israelis—in a spectacularly surgical operation—remove the blight of a terrorist from the face of the earth and the world, Israelis included, is fulminating.

Update III: Murder By Majority (Or Mercy Killing)

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Islam, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

Barack Obama needed a war he could call his own. In Afghanistan, OB has found such a war. A meaty presence in Afghanistan has morphed into an all-out onslaught, with the attendant slaughter of innocence.

It wasn’t a daisy cutter of the Bush era, but a Himars rocket, an acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, that killed at least 10 people, including 5 children, in Marja, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, to where Obama has taken his war.

The place is dotted with rural villages and villagers, so some are bound to be incinerated by American bombs. So far nothing about BO’s shame in the op-ed pages of the LA Times or the NYT.

Most Americans may approve of BO’s pet war, but murder by majority approval is still murder. Those Afghans who died today are involuntary conscripts—they get to partake of the wonders of American democracy only indirectly: a mob (of Americans) in a far-away land decided their fate. And by golly what a splendid job this mob has done.

Update I: THE MIGHTY TALIBAN.

“I don’t think you can really describe them militarily. It seems like a few guys taking potshots … and not terribly effectively, with some exceptions.”

That’s NYTs correspondent ROD NORDLAND describing the Taliban on the PBS News Hour today.

His Boy Obama and his General get top marks for mercy killings. When Bush finished off civilians it wasn’t nearly as kindly as when McChrystal does it under the divine inspiration of BO:

Remember “the — the wedding, one of several, actually, that was bombed a year or two ago,”? … “the Bush administration, you know, they just — it took them months to ever admit they had even done anything wrong.”

Barack, by contrast, is positively killing these kids with kindness:

“They were so quick to announce that, in fact, that it turns out they exaggerated, apparently, the number of civilians they killed. It turned out it was actually only nine, and there were also three Taliban in the house who were shooting from the house, and thereby, at least arguably, making it a legitimate target.”

To listen to NORDLAND, you’d think that BO brought back from the dead three civilians thought dead.

In fairness to this correspondent, the NYT was all for the previous warbot’s war as well.

During Bush’s war, “Fox News was able to create the perception of a parallel universe in Iraq replete with big (nuclear) bangs and miraculously materializing al-Qaida terrorists because its Hollywood-inspired vision resonated with viewers. The ratings provided proof. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Miller) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.”

Everything is as it is in the USA.

Update II (Feb. 16): Thanks you Van Wijk for reminding the errant folks that, as I put it, “Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one.”

Update III: I loathe rehashing arguments I’ve already won on this space many times over. Alas, this is the human condition.

Myron: Polls show a respectable percentage of Muslims condone Jihadi pursuits (search for some fresh data; I like those). If equaled by as many Jews and Christians, liberals and libertarians and elements on the American Right always helping to make the “Islamikazes'” case would protest as loud as you lot squealed over placing a bug in Abu Zubaydah’s cage. Hence the issue of fifth-column immigrants.

Back in 2005, “a leaked Whitehall dossier revealed that affluent, middle-class, British-born Muslims were signing up to Al-Qaida in droves. Translated into official speak by Timesonline, only ‘3,000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.’

And if that doesn’t allay unwarranted fears, ‘Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.'”

In other words, 16,000 homicidal sleepers are loose in England!

These figures, of course, are statistically significant—stupendously so—given the barbarism they portend. Over this sort of astoundingly consequential number, our Myron is jumping for joy.

Such is the liberal mindset.