Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
“I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.”
“Quelle surprise!!!”,
But will they say Obama lied?
Some of us will. There’s gonna be another war in the ME. Israel can’t afford not trying to take out Iran’s nuke program. After they try, there’s gonna be a war.
If you are correct, then we need to end the endless cycle of violence: We need to stand aside and let the best country prevail and the loser(s) will be flattened to such an extent that they no longer can continue to wage low-intensity warfare much less full-on war. If we don’t do this now, or sometime, then Israel will continue to suffer or will, ultimately, be overrun due to the amount of time that its enemies have to prepare.
Our traditional approach over 50 years, which makes continued conflict a certainty, makes me question who in our government benefits and how from the ongoing instability in the Middle East.
The last big one, Yom Kippur ’73, I was all for letting the Israelis finish it. Brezhnev and I had a difference of opinion, however, and he threatened to intervene if we didn’t. The Egyptian 6th Army was surrounded and cut off, and the Israelis had just started to move to destroy it, when we jerked the leash.
If we had allowed that, then the Israelis would have settled Assad’s hash. Too bad we couldn’t let them. I’m all for it this time too. Russia may get involved as well. But, if you read Ezekial chapter 38 and 39 you’ll see it won’t matter.
Déjà vu all over again, QM -you must have been channeling Putin!
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4193517,00.html
Yeah, I saw that late last night. Russia is basically our conjugate in this. While Ezekial uses the term “King Of he North” it would seem Russia is most likely that “King.” The coalition of countries includes Persia which is modern Iran. The nuke issue is probably the trigger for the fight involving them.
I doubt that Mother Russia has ever taken their eyes off of the oil and the warm water port- when things go FUBAR in Iran they will be not be setting on the sidelines, or like us, go to the bloody U.N.
O/T, recently someone mentioned a Nancy Meyer model and Lex asked how many of us had to do a search to learn who/what she is. I had to look it up having never heard of her. Well, now every figgin ad in my browser is showing “Shop Nancy Meyer” with a photo of a rather attractive lingerie model. It’s a good thing no one is looking over my shoulder at work.
You have only Snake-Eater to blame for that..
…a blame I fully and proudly accept. Best
Will need to GOOgle her
Thanks Snake.
I also searched for hotels in Vegas to plan for my June trip there, so I’m getting a lot of ads for Vegas resorts as well.
This tracking of my web doings is scaring the hell out of me.
I was seeing those banners without doing anything, and see them more often now than before. And I never Googled (which I don’t do, or Yahooed her.
Hans Brix to the lescue….
F*** Hans Brix-does he have any idea how freakin’ busy Ahmadamadingdongjad is?
You know: Finish on a high note.
Here’s a version of what should occur to Iran shortly that I would like to see courtesy of George Clooney in ” The Peacemaker ” (one of his best & underrated films)
Devoe: [Devoe phones Kodoroff, who is driving a truck loaded with stolen nuclear warheads] You watched CNN during Desert Storm. You remember all those television shots from the nose cone of the GBU missiles slammin’ into those trucks? Remember that picture? How it kept gettin’ closer and bigger on the screen… You’d just about see the faces of those drivers and then… Zap! The picture went dead, we didn’t get to see what happened next. Well guess what, Alek? You will.
That is the type of phone call old Beady Eyes should be getting anytime now….
In Book form, rather than Movie… the scene you are describing is known as the “Ryan Doctrine” and is in Tom Clancy’s “Executive Orders”
And in that case it WAS Iran’s Ayatollah that gets it.
“Peoples do not make war. The decision to start a war is most often made by one man. They used to be kings, or princes, or barbarian chiefs, but throughout history it’s usually one man who decides, and never is the decision to start a war of aggression the result of a democratic process. Throughout history, Kings and princes have made war at their whim, sending people off to die. To the kings, they were just peasants, and the wars were just grabs for power and riches, a kind of entertainment, and if people died, nobody much cared, and when it was all over, for the most part the kings were still kings, whether they won or lost, because they were above it all. All the way into this century, it was assumed that a chief of state had a right to make war. At Nuremberg, after the Second World War, we changed that rule by trying and executing some of those responsible. But getting to that point, arresting the criminals, as it were, cost the lives of twenty million Russians, six million Jews, so many lives lost that historians don’t even know… Every idea in the history of man, good or bad, has started in a single human mind, and wars begin because one mind thinks it profitable to kill and steal.”
Mamhoud Ahmadinejad… Are you listening?
I know I’m in the minority here, but I’ve long felt that Nuremberg was an illegal trial, going completely against the grain of English Common Law.
The real reason we held those trials was the guilt felt over letting the Jews get slaughtered. That’s it. There was no legal basis for a trial, as the “crime” they defined (“against humanity”) was ex post facto. There is (or was) an old English saying: “No law, no crime” which highlights the English Common Law position on the subject.
The United States Constitution specifically prohibits ex post facto law, as does Canada’s. Modern British law was modified after the English Civil War which established Parliamentary Supremacy; i.e. Parliament can pass any law it damn well pleases. Should I point out this was one of the reasons our own Founding Fathers made a special point of establishing barriers against the supremacy of any single branch of government?
So the Nuremberg trials -no matter how evil the acts committed by the Nazi regime- were illegal according to traditional English Common Law as well as the constitutions of several Allied powers. The fact that Soviet judges participated was just icing on the cake of irony.
If you want to drag the worst offenders out behind a shack, and shoot them (Churchill was alleged to have proposed a Bill of Attainder for this), fine. Put a bullet in their successive brain stems. Just don’t call it justice.
The most perverse part of the Nuremberg Trials is that it supports one of the most heinous concepts of modern Progressive thought, that it is possible (and legal) to craft ex post facto law to punish “new” crimes, such as “hate crimes.”
Just like war itself, Bad but sometimes necessary, the same holds true for the Nuremberg Trials. The world needed closure on the heinous atrocities created by the Nazis.
Atrocities happen in war. On both sides, no matter which side is the “Good guys” or “Bad guys”. We like to think that only the bad guys commit atrocities, Like with the Nazis and the Japanese. But anyone who has read “With the Old Breed” or watched “The Pacific” knows…. Our Marines and others are just as guilty of “individual atrocities”. It is part of the human coping mechanism when one has seen literally hell on earth. A recent example is the Marines who were pissing on the dead bodies of Taliban. The atrocity itself is bad, but understandable in a way. The real stupidity was videoing it and posting it to the net.
What Nuremberg should have done was go after the Big Systemic Atrocities perpetrated on a wide scale. Hitler’s “Final solution”. and other large scale atrocities like the Malmedy Massacre. and others. Small scale individual atrocities such those committed by individual troops should have been left to be handled within the ranks of the service. And for the most part, that is what they did. Go after only the bigwigs.
This isn’t a defense of the Nuremberg trials. I fully agree with your reasoning, Just showing there was a reason, a necessity for it despite it being “wrong”. On another site I frequent I had a very long discussion (argument) over the Nuremberg trials and I was defending one of the German officers found guilty of the crimes charged. Karl Doenitz. If you read the transcripts and the official reports, they flat out stated that the case for many of the crimes alleged was NOT PROVEN, yet they found him GUILTY regardless. Many an Allied Officer testified IN DEFENSE of Doenitz. He was the enemy, true, but one who was worthy of respect. He was a very capable officer doing his duty to country.
An example. He was found guilty on the basis of “waging unrestricted submarine warfare” despite the fact that the allies ALSO waged unrestricted submarine warfare… in fact that was one of the first orders to go out after Pearl was attacked!
He was also convicted of crimes against humanity in not providing aide to the victims of the U-Boats.
The Allied Sub service did the same thing. Actually, the records shows that German subs checking on survivors and giving some food/water… and pointing out the nearest landfall was quite common. It was an extreme rarity in the allied services. so case could be made that the opposite was true, yet he was found guilty regardless.
CG-23 Sailor/
Agree with you on Doenitz–I would add Raeder as well..
Casey/
I tend to agree with you about Nuremberg,, but an ever more egregious proceeding was the trial and hanging of General Yamishita by MacArthur in Japan. Tho admittedly an unsympathetic figure carrying out the policies of an odious regime, most historians and jurists judge this to be a black mark on MacArthur’s record as the the ability of Yamishita to control all disparate Japanese forces (whose savage killing/raping of civilians in the final days of defeat while technically opcon to Yamishita and his failure to control them was the crime charged against the general) within the Philippine Archipelago was negligible as Yamishita was physically far removed from the action with little or no means of communication. Yamishita’s span of control was admitted even by the prosecutors to be tenuous/negligible at best and his hanging seen by many as simply an act of personal revenge–the settling of old scores–on the part of a MacArthur piqued that a rival General had defeated him in the field earlier at war’s onset..
I’ve always acknowleged a difference between justice and the law…kind of like the difference between sprirituality and religion.
SK1: You’re the only person I’ve encountered besides me who liked that movie. Despite some corny moments and a few bad lines, I quite enjoyed it. Distinct minority opinion.
Then there’s three of us, ‘cuz I love that movie!
Boy, I never saw THAT coming…
You know: Finish on a high note.
Had we only done that in the Af…
And all the time I thought large masses of explosive spoke in a low gravelly rumble. Whoda thought they ended on a high note.
August,1939. We could’ve stopped this or at least slowed it down. Now we are having trouble in Afganistan and Iraq’s going down the Iranian trail.
Big,freaking, trouble..
I think Syria’s the tripwire btw…
I think the NorKs will throw in too..
Now about that 2 front war..
Greetings:
I spent most of my working life in the printing industry. When I was starting out (working for our Navy as a civilian printer, no less) we were still setting letter-type in the traditions of both Gutenberg and Franklin. Hopefully, the work order for that New York Times headline would have include a specification to “leave the type standing” for future re-use. Also hopefully, the Israelis will have better luck than the Nuclear Inspectors.
Failed states cause wars. Look at Africa, Latin America, Wiemar Germany, and Afghanistan. Breaking a country and walking away is a sure-fire way to ensure that you’re going to have to come around a break things again in a decade or so. Iran has oil. That means if we do go in a break the country somebody is going to rebuild and become an influential power in Iran. We could do it, or we could give Russia or China major influence over the Straits of Hormuz.
Nation building is a vital aspect to national defense. We can argue against reality or we can accept it and start building force structures to accomplish our goals.
We didn’t engage in “nation building” in eitehr Japan or germany after WW2. The people of both countries were already nations before the war, and had traditions they could draw on to reconstruct their countries after the war. Neither was substantially different after the war.
Countries like Iraq, Iran, and Trashcanistan do not have peoples that constitute a nation. They tribal and clan based societies where clan/tribal relations command the loyalty and act somewhat as nations only when they have a strongman over them.
If we went in and broke Iran, they would probably break apart, which would be to our advantage. Somalia is a problem only because of piracy, which could be ended rather quickly if anyone had the will to do what the Brits did to Pirates in the 17th and 18th century. There is only so much a failed state can accomplish in modern times. Nations, on the other hand, are completely different from the state. Israelis have remained a nation through better than 2 millenia inspite of being scattered.
I don’t see breaking Iran as causing war, anymore than breaing Iraq would have. We don’t have to rebuild the place after we break it. We could have done as was planned in Iraq, pump the oil and use it to rebuild and making arrangements to insure Hormuz remained open to navigation. Breaking it up otherwise would be to our advantage.
We, ourselves, will not get to do the experiment, however. Obama doesn’t have the strategic vision for much of anyhting beyond his re-election. Defending our interests is quite beyond his ken.
Good points, QM, would only add that Obama’s ability to defend/promote HIS ideological “interests” is, unfortunately, seemingly quite well-honed..
Germany had a national identity in the 1920′s and ’30′s. Didn’t stop them from becoming a major threat to world peace. In fact it probably exacerbated the problem. Iraq definitely has a national identity, look at the response to Biden’s idiotic partition plan. I will grant you Afghanistan, a nation constructed because nobody else wanted it. However, you have to be kidding me about Iran not having a national identity. It is one of the oldest nations on earth. Xerxes referred to himself as Iranian. Yes, there are some ethnic minorities in the modern borders of Iran, but they’re peripheral to our interest.
If we broke Iran the Iranian people would look to rebuild, and they have the oil and strategic importance to pay for it. I can easily see Iran leasing naval bases to China in exchange for reconstruction aid.
If we’re going to end the Iranian threat we need to commit fully. Half-assed effort is only going to cost us.
NOW you’re talking. I’m wicked tired of being poked in the eyes by Islamic idiots who have been trying to kill the both of us since 1979. The Iranian people are suffering because their Leadership is hateful and evil??? It sucks to be them. Welcome to our world. Now do something about it, dipsticks…..
Subsunk
I vote for rural renewal of particular parts of the state….