In light of all the recent activities of CAIR and the other Muslim apologists here in the U.S., I thought this opinion piece was quite timely. Just a snippet below, with more at link, including the future (under Islam) of all the current Special Interest Groups in bed with the jihadis now.
Islam is pushing across the country for rights and privileges that are in effect trampling the rights of others. We took God out of the schools, out of the courtrooms and we are letting Islam in.
By Randy Taylor, Independent Analyst
11 August 2007: Im growing very concerned about this great nation of ours. We were given a unique opportunity some 230 years ago and we are doing little to capitalize on the gift given to us by our forefathers. We are slowly surrendering our great nation to this evil called Islam. We have gone from a nation of proud men and women to a nation of scared, frightened, politically correct weaklings, willing to compromise with the Devil. We are compromising our freedoms, our beliefs, our rights to free speech.
This country was founded as One Nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. This is no longer the case and when you look closely at the situation and you look deep into the soul, one must admit that we are failing as a whole. We have compromised the people of this once great nation because we are afraid to step up to the plate and tell these Islamic organizations, these twisters of the Constitution and purveyors of murder to shove off.
Posted by: BA ||
08/13/2007 09:05 ||
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#1
We have compromised the people of this once great nation because we are afraid to step up to the plate and tell these Islamic organizations, these twisters of the Constitution and purveyors of murder to shove off.
Still a great nation, however it is time to tell them to shove off--CAIR, etc. If you had a guest who wore out his or her welcome, we would tell them to shove off.
No God can condone this behavior exhibited by these swine.
Kapow! Right in the chops, as it were.
The entire stinking Offended Muslims issue is way out of hand people.
Stinking? This sounds like my kinda guy!
Now when I go to a restroom on some college campuses I have to pay attention that Im not urinating in their footbaths. Well at least Im supposed to pretend that I know these are their footbaths.
Ima liking the way this guy thinks.
It is not a Religion of Peace but instead a cult of death, with the focus of the religion being death, jihad and martyrdom and in the case of the United States the focus is infiltration and domination of all others.
Finally, someone who gets it.
Yet we are allowing these Islamic swine to peddle their garbage of insisting that Islam is a religion of peace?
Any of this penetrating that thick skull of yours, George? Would someone please nominate this guy as an independent candidate for president? He's got my vote.
#4
Any of this penetrating that thick skull of yours, George? Would someone please nominate this guy as an independent candidate for president? He's got my vote.
Mine too, but alas, he's unelectable. Tells the truth.
On a highway north of Kabul last month, an American soldier aimed a machine gun at my car from the turret of his armored Humvee. In the split second for which our eyes locked, I had a revelation: To a man with a weapon, everything looks like a threat.
I had served as an infantry officer in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and in Iraq in 2003, but this was my first time on the other end of an American machine gun. It's not something I'll forget. It's not the sort of thing ordinary Afghans forget, either, and it reminded me that heavy-handed military tactics can alienate the people we're trying to help while playing into the hands of the people we're trying to defeat.
My unnerving encounter on the highway was particularly ironic since I was there at the invitation of the U.S. Army to help teach these very principles at the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy. The grandly misnamed "academy" is a tiny collection of huts and tents on Kabul's dusty southern outskirts. Since May, motley classes of several dozen Afghan army officers, Afghan policemen, NATO officers, American officers and civilians have been learning and living side by side there for a week at a time.
The academy does much more than teach the theory and tactics of fighting the Taliban insurgents who are trying to unseat President Hamid Karzai and claw their way back to power. It is also a rare forum for military officers, civilian aid workers, academics and diplomats -- from Afghanistan and all 37 countries in NATO's International Security Assistance Force -- to unite in trying to bring good governance, prosperity and security to Afghanistan. The curriculum is based on the Army and Marine Corps' new counterinsurgency doctrine, released in December. Classes revolve around four so-called paradoxes of counterinsurgency. Unless we learn all four well, we'll continue to win battles in Afghanistan while losing the war.
The first tenet is that the best weapons don't shoot. Counterinsurgents must excel at finding creative, nonmilitary solutions to military problems.
Consider, for example, the question of roads. When U.N. teams begin building new stretches of road in volatile Afghan provinces such as Zabul and Kandahar, insurgents inevitably attack the workers. But as the projects progress and villagers begin to see the benefits of having paved access to markets and health care, the Taliban attacks become less frequent. New highways then extend the reach of the Karzai administration into previously inaccessible areas, making a continuous Afghan police presence possible and helping lower the overall level of violence -- no mean feat in a country larger and more populous than Iraq, with a shaky central government.
Said another way: Reconstruction funds can shape the battlefield as surely as bombs. But such methods are still not used widely enough in Afghanistan. After spending more than $14 billion in aid to the country since 2001, the United States' latest disbursement, of more than $10 billion, will start this month. Some 80 percent of it is earmarked for security spending, leaving only about 20 percent for reconstruction projects and initiatives to foster good governance.
The second pillar of the academy's curriculum relates to the first: The more you protect your forces, the less safe you may be. To be effective, troops, diplomats and civilian aid workers need to get out among the people. But nearly every American I saw in Kabul was hidden behind high walls or racing through the streets in armored convoys.
Afghanistan, however, isn't Iraq. Tourists travel through much of the country in relative safety, glass office towers are sprouting up in Kabul, and Coca-Cola recently opened a bottling plant. I drove through the capital in a dirty green Toyota, wearing civilian clothes and stopping to shop in bazaars, eat in restaurants and visit businesses. In two weeks, I saw more of Kabul than most military officers do in a year.
This isolation also infects our diplomatic community. After a State Department official gave a presentation at the academy, he and I climbed a nearby hill to explore the ruins of an old palace. He was only nine days from the end of his 12-month tour, and our walk was the first time he'd ever been allowed to get out and explore the city.
Of course, mingling with the population means exposing ourselves to attacks, and commanders have an obligation to safeguard their troops. But they have an even greater responsibility to accomplish their mission. When we retreat behind body armor and concrete barriers, it becomes impossible to understand the society we claim to defend. If we emphasize "force protection" above all else, we will never develop the cultural understanding, relationships and intelligence we need to win. Accepting the greater tactical risk of reaching out to Afghans reduces the strategic risk that the Taliban will return to power.
The third paradox hammered home at the academy is that the more force you use, the less effective you may be. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are notoriously difficult to tally, but 300-500 noncombatants have probably been killed already this year, mostly in U.S. and coalition air strikes. Killing civilians, even in error, is not only a serious moral transgression but also a lethal strategic misstep. Wayward U.S. strikes have seriously undermined the very legitimacy of the Karzai government and made all too many Afghans resent coalition forces. If Afghans lose patience with the coalition presence, those forces will be run out of the country, in the footsteps of the British and the Soviets before them.
I stress this point because one of my many gratifying moments at the academy came at the start of a class on targeting. I told the students to list the top three targets they would aim for if they were leading forces in Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold. When I asked a U.S. officer to share his list, he rattled off the names of three senior Taliban leaders to be captured or killed. Then I turned and asked an Afghan officer the same question. "First we must target the local councils to see how we can best help them," he replied. "Then we must target the local mullahs to find out their needs and let them know we respect their authority." Exactly. In counterinsurgency warfare, targeting is more about whom you bring in than whom you take out.
The academy's final lesson is that tactical success in a vacuum guarantees nothing. Just as it did in Vietnam, the U.S. military could win every battle and still lose the war. That's largely because our primary enemies in Afghanistan still have a sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan. Rather than make a suicidal stand against the allied forces invading Afghanistan after Sept. 11, 2001, many Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters melted away to create a parallel "Talibanistan" in the lawless tribal areas of western Pakistan. Last fall, Gen. James Jones, then NATO's supreme commander, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Taliban leadership now operates openly from Quetta, a Pakistani border city that's long been a hotbed of Islamic militancy. Karzai reiterated this point during his visit to Camp David last week.
Chasing terrorists and the Taliban around Afghanistan leads to little lasting progress as long as they can slip across the border to rest and regroup. Since 2001, the United States has tolerated this quiet reconstitution of the Taliban in Pakistan as long as Islamabad granted us basing and overflight rights, tepidly pursued al-Qaeda's leadership and cracked down on A.Q. Khan's nuclear-proliferation network. The Durand Line, which separates Afghanistan from Pakistan, is a mapmaker's fantasy. Without political reform, economic development and military operations on both sides of the border, we can do little more than put a finger in the dike that's keeping radicalism and instability in Pakistan from spilling back into Afghanistan.
On the last afternoon of the course, I asked my students to define victory in Afghanistan. We'd talked about this earlier in the week, and most of their answers had focused on militarily defeating the Taliban or killing Osama bin Laden. Now the Afghan officers took the lead in a spirited discussion with their U.S. and NATO classmates. Finally the group agreed on a unanimous result, which neatly expresses the prize we're striving for: "Victory is achieved when the people of Afghanistan consent to the legitimacy of their government and stop actively and passively supporting the insurgency."
Winning that consent will require doing some difficult and uncomfortable things: de-escalating military force, boosting the capacities of the Karzai government, accelerating reconstruction, getting real with Pakistan. It won't be easy. But the alternative, which I glimpsed while staring down the barrel of that machine gun, is our nation going zero for two in its first wars of the new century.
Nathaniel Fick, a former captain in the Marines, is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and the author of "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer."
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/13/2007 12:15 ||
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#1
Interesting how the two sides of this discussion -- 'hearts and minds' versus 'grab them by their balls' never seem to understand that both are necessary. Counterinsurgency tries to dry up the sea in which the insurgents swim, and at the same time make it really, really, unhealthy to be an insurgent. Mr. Fick makes a cogent case for 'hearts and minds', and he's right as far as he goes, but you also need security in the villages and towns (not to mention around your own firebases), and you need to introduce a healthy respect for your troops amongst the bad guys.
Spreading some reconstruction money around is good, as long as it does what it's supposed to do and not end up in some warlord's pocket. How do you guarantee that unless you have troops around (whether they do it personally or simply protect the USAID officer)? How do you make tribal chiefs play nice? Sure, offer them a good deal and remind them of how the bad boys treat them (aka, Anbar), but having enough firepower along to ensure said tribal chief knows who is the 'strong horse' is also necessary.
I get some fed up with these sorts of articles and the people who write them. They act as if doing just one thing will fix all our problems, and always claim that whatever we're doing, we're not doing the one thing.
It's not one thing. It's never one thing. If it were one thing we'd be done and home already. It's a hundred things, all orchestrated and done in the right order. That's the tough part.
I thank Mr. Fick for his service. If he's so smart, he could leave the think tank and sign onto our diplomatic staff in Kabul.
Posted by: Steve White ||
08/13/2007 13:09 Comments ||
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#2
The academy's final lesson is that tactical success in a vacuum guarantees nothing.
Particularly when you let the enemy, and their allies, shape and tell the story.
A corollary maybe, you can have all the OPSEC in the world, but if you don't tell the story, no one else will, and you'll still lose.
Time to get out of the mindset of the mid-20th Century. DO NOT out source the story telling to the MSM. They are not your friends. They have been the unquestioning mouth piece of the enemy.
Time to reinvent the PAO, presently organized and aligned to interface with the dead tree and crisis entertainment media. Exploit the internet to end round the news withholders and distorters.
Time to exploit that troop in the unit, who like the company clerk a generation ago who had the magical skill of typing and therefore regardless of Military Occupational Specialty was reassigned to the company orderly room, who has the skills to write and integrate the internet's technology to tell the story. You know, the real ones who've actually been in the dirt and sweat, not those who just transit assembly bases in Kuwait.
"...insurgents inevitably attack the workers. But as the projects progress..."
And how do the projects progress with nothing but dead workers?
This is the same problem with Iraq. We fix the electricity, they blow it up. We fix the pipe lines, they blow it up. It's a lot easier to blow it up when there's no security to shoot them dead.
#4
Generals like force protection. It keeps them from having to be grilled by the congressional morons showing off about their concern for casualties.
That the force protection either makes the objective impossible or increases casualties later on can be blamed on the generals.
Senior officers don't come to value force protection by their own selves.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
08/13/2007 15:06 Comments ||
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#5
This goes to "migrating" the battlefield back into a healthy country theory. Unfortunately, there have been some really great examples of how to do this that we have missed out on in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of these is to take as many unemployed men as possible and set them to work on government improvement projects at the prevailing (low) wage. Importantly, these projects are not make-work, but have to be designed to create small businesses and more efficient farms, like co-ops.
These type projects show they are working by running out of laborers--who go on to better jobs.
For instance, you hire 10,000 men to use hand labor to prepare a large area for farming. They clear and level the land, dig irrigation canals, and remove and break up rocks, which are then used to build fences to subdivide the land. For this they get paid a wage and food, with the wage going to their family or being kept in a bank. In their off work ours they both get classroom on how to manage such a farm, and get government speakers out there to encourage them and tell them the news.
When the land and buildings have been prepared, you split off perhaps 2,000 of them who will become the owners and workers of the prepared land. They get the agricultural co-op experts to take them through an entire season to show them how it is done.
The other 8,000 get another 2,000 newbies, and go on to the next project.
On top of that you have the really huge government projects that need 50-100,000 men, which are designed to improve a major region. It also keeps them from involving themselves in mischief, and pumps a lot of money into the economy. More so in setting up the support businesses to provide for this many employed people.
Ideally, you must shoot for 100% employment. The more troublesome an area, the more work is available. It neutralizes a LOT of the trouble making.
#7
All Clinton all the time. You cannot prepare for the next century by using a model of the past - especially if it fails consistently. This FP is a range of suspicious judicial killers.
Images at the site definitely and deliciously NSFW.
Parliamentary Debate -
Following rumours that the U.N. is not exactly falling all over itself, however accustomed they might be to doing so in times of crisis, and basically at all other times, to look favourably upon the RGiE's application to be allowed representation and have someone address the General Assembly in full uniform and with a gun on his hip, the recent parliamentary debate focussed on one crucial fact:
WE NEED OUR OWN MANDELA! A "RHODELA"! Balance at the linkie along with smashing bar room dancing girls
U.S. Marines host a party of diplomats and tribal sheiks.
Ramadi, Iraq I was not told about our trip to Ramadi provincial capital of Iraqs Anbar province until the night before. This was in order to preserve operational security: We were to meet U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and presidential envoy Meghan OSullivan, for a tour of what only a few months ago was the most feared insurgent stronghold in all of Iraq. No matter; no amount of warning could have prepared me for what I was about to witness.
Back home, the media has apparently gotten bored of pessimism about Iraq; optimism is now coming into vogue. The basic story (e.g., A War We Might Just Win) is by now familiar. At its center is the Anbar Awakening, in which Sunni tribes that were once bitterly opposed to the Coalition have turned in our favor and against al Qaeda.
That much I knew in advance. What I could not have imagined was the extent and tightness of the cooperation between the Americans and the local Anbaris at every level. After four years of constant fighting, peace is unmistakably coming to Anbar province. Good, detail report with video about Ramadi at the site
By Steven R. Hurst - BAGHDAD (AP) Iraq's most senior Sunni politician issued a desperate appeal yesterday for Arab nations to help stop what he called an "unprecedented genocide campaign" by Shi'ite militias armed, trained and controlled by Iran.
Adnan al-Dulaimi said "Persians" and "Safawis" Sunni terms for Iranian Shi'ites were on the brink of total control in Baghdad and soon would threaten Sunni Arab regimes that predominate in the Middle East. "It is a war that has started in Baghdad and they will not stop there but will expand it to all Arab lands," Mr. al-Dulaimi wrote in an impassioned e-mail to the Associated Press. "halp us, jon kery, we're stuk in iraq"
Sunni Arab regimes throughout the Middle East fear the growing influence of Iran's Shi'ite theocracy with radical groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the Syrian regime. But Mr. al-Dulaimi's warning about the specter of Iranian power reaching the Arab doorstep seemed unrealistic in the short term.
His fears of a Shi'ite takeover of Baghdad, however, are not as far-fetched. Mahdi Army militiamen have cleansed entire neighborhoods of Sunni residents and seized Sunni mosques. Hundreds have been killed and thousands have fled their homes, seeking safety in the shrinking number of majority Sunni districts.
The fighters, nominally loyal to radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, are thought to operate as death squads blamed for much of the country's sectarian slaughter.
Sunni extremists, many with al Qaeda links, are responsible too, mainly through massive bombings, often carried out by suicide attackers.
A fact that Mr. al-Dulaimi neglected to point out.
Mr. al-Dulaimi resorted to the harsh language a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi'ite, returned from his second visit to Tehran since taking power 14 months ago.
Mr. al-Dulaimi heads the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni political bloc in parliament. The coalition of parties pulled its six Cabinet ministers from Mr. al-Maliki's Shi'ite-dominated government on Aug. 1. Five days later, government ministers loyal to former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite, began a boycott of Cabinet meetings. That left the government without any Sunni Arab members, except the politically unaffiliated defense minister.
Major political figures were expected to hold a rare summit with Mr. al-Maliki this week in Baghdad to address the government crisis.
#3
Notice how there has been no calls among the Sunni for direct action against Iran? Not conventional, but to infiltrate spies, saboteurs, assassins, etc. into Iran, with the idea of disrupting their game.
The Iranians have al-Quds to do the same to the Sunnis, so why not do it the same way?
Hat tip Terran
Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.
Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. What can I say: it's Mark Steyn
A noteworthy snark
They don't seem to realize this destroys the entire premise of the piece, which is meant to be about the dehumanization of soldiers in combat. Pvt. Beauchamp came pre-dehumanized.
#1
I have two "grand-rats" that are being indoctrinated to "Global Warming" through $ paid to University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. The kids are totally unable to to even consider that the stix may be skewed towards proving Goreski's cash-cow thesis. Disgusting misuse of taxpayers and parent $$$....
#3
Hansen and his cronies manipulated the raw data to normalize the data set...to account for bad data and poor instrument siting. However, the al-gore-ithm they used effectively inserted a positive bias on the raw data...especially skewing the data after the year 2000. The USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) raw and adjusted data are from NOAA, the keeper of the data sets.
The bottom line?
Four of the top 10 warm years are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the on the list, behind even 1900. Most importantly, according to the GISS, 1998 is no longer the warmest year in American history. That honor once again belongs to 1934.
Al Gore's poster child, James Hansen made changes to the data which supported their claim of accelerated Global Warming...and got caught. Imagine that.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
By Steven R. Hurst - BAGHDAD (AP) Iraq's most senior Sunni politician issued a desperate appeal yesterday for Arab nations to help stop what he called an "unprecedented genocide campaign" by Shi'ite militias armed, trained and controlled by Iran. 
