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Area: WoT Operations    WoT Background    Non-WoT        Politix   
Hizbies deny selling out Taliban
Today's Headlines
Headline Comments [Views]
Page 4: Opinion
9 00:00 whatadeal [6] 
1 00:00 Besoeker [4] 
6 00:00 JosephMendiola [7] 
6 00:00 anon1 [2] 
5 00:00 rjschwarz [5] 
5 00:00 borgboy [1] 
Page 1: WoT Operations
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Page 2: WoT Background
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Page 6: Politix
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Afghanistan
Unconventional Counterinsurgency
Posted by: tipper || 07/11/2010 13:32 || Comments || Link || [4 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Comments/questions from the article:

Anonymous:
Does this not now make the Kilcullen thesis of "ecosystem" research and analysis even more compelling?

Can in fact any of the currently used link analysis and social network analysis tools even come close to providing the fine line of info needed for UW/IW in Afghanistan?

Do we even have intelligence analysts and or BCT Cmdrs that even understand "ecosystems of insurgencies"?


Yes, yes, and yes!
Posted by: Besoeker || 07/11/2010 17:35 Comments || Top||


Down Under
Aussie schools encouraged to promote Islam
. . . by people who call Aussies racist, naturally
Posted by: ryuge || 07/11/2010 10:58 || Comments || Link || [7 views] Top|| File under:

#1  the most disgusting thing is the Government will naturally consider it. There is a lot of hate here directed at Muslims. The women get filthy hate-stares in the street.

But that is because their co-religionists fly planes into buildings and blow themselves up in Bali bars.

If they want to put one religious perspective in schools they have to put all or none at all. That means hinduism, atheism, jainism, budhism, animism, aboriginal rainbow serpent beliefs

or none at all

but the education board will only look at the pressure lobby's claims of "islamophobia" and will cave in.

it's part of the strategy for the global Caliphate. You fight on all fronts, especially in the education system as that is the future generation of minds you are moulding
Posted by: anon1 || 07/11/2010 19:18 Comments || Top||

#2  It's a intelligence test. The US and Europe have already failed it. We'll see how the Aussies do.

BTW, saw on HotAir that NASA has been renamed National Arabic / Ummah Self-Esteem Agency (NAUSEA).
Posted by: DMFD || 07/11/2010 21:15 Comments || Top||

#3  At the presidents urging, NASA is attempting to be more Muslim tollerant, more inclusive; science and engineering, research, women astronauts (sorry, sucks to be you Soraya m).
Posted by: Besoeker || 07/11/2010 21:30 Comments || Top||

#4  Thusly, Virginia, we have

To wit,

WAFF > [Thread] WE NEED TO SHIP MORE MUSLIM TERRORISTS TO AUSTRALIA | [Youtube 3-Part Video Series] UIGHURS IN PALAU.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/11/2010 22:54 Comments || Top||

#5  OOOOPSIES, forgot WAFF > WAR OF THE CONTINENTS, i.e. based on public data, what World Continents are likely to naturally or forcibly dominate the PROTO- + LATER [Pro-US-versus-Anti-US?] NWO-NEW GLOBAL ORDER???

D *** NG IT, AND TO THINK IT ONLY TOOK NINE YEARS AFTER 9-11 + THE END OF THE 1990's POTUS CLINTON ADMIN FOR THE NET + WORLD TO FORMALLY FINALLY BRING UP THE ISSUE!

But I digress ...
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/11/2010 23:03 Comments || Top||

#6  We didn't drink enough of our AM Coffee that decade, didn't we???
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 07/11/2010 23:05 Comments || Top||


Economy
When Giants Fall
[E] conomic debt can lead to a sudden loss of military power and global respect, Ferguson said.

"By combating our crisis of private debt with an extraordinary expansion of public debt, we inevitably are going to reduce the resources available for national security in the years ahead, Ferguson said. Because as a debt grows, so the interest payments you have to make on it grow, even if interest rates stay low. And on current projections, the federal debt is going to be absorbing around 20 percent — a fifth of all the taxes you pay — within just a few years. The item of discretionary federal expenditure most likely to be squeezed is of course defense. And there are lots of historic precedents for that,” said Ferguson, who is the author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power.

Ferguson said the financial crisis that started in 2007 has “has accelerated a fundamental shift in the balance of power,” with the U.S. shedding power and China absorbing it.

“I’ve just come back from China — a two-week trip there — and the thing I heard most often was, ‘You can’t lecture us about the superiority of your system anymore. We don’t need to learn anything from you about financial institutions and forget about democracy. We see where it has gotten you.’

Blog
Posted by: Besoeker || 07/11/2010 00:00 || Comments || Link || [5 views] Top|| File under:

#1  We don't need to learn anything from you about financial institutions

Big, big mistake.

Banking is all about measuring and mitigating risk, and risk management in Chinese banks is, by Western standards, very poor. Whether you can borrow and how much is a function of your political connections.

Image California's debt problems with much worse corruption and without a free press and democratic institutions to shine a light on what is going on. That is China at the provincial level.
Posted by: phil_b || 07/11/2010 2:16 Comments || Top||

#2  "'...and forget about democracy. We see where it has gotten you.'"

The medium is the message. Just as China's state organs can continue to persuade its population that they don't need or want individual rights, Obama's popular and news media cronies have so far managed to convince enough Americans that their liberties are vanity, and a hindrance to social progress. Democracy needs a strong, independent and diverse media if it is to survive. When a majority of the people are no longer well informed, but are instead brainwashed, or at least steered, by one political narrative, you no longer have a functioning democracy. America has endured that for a few years now. The only hope is for a revolution in information dissemination, and to restore proper and honest political debate exposing the Emperor for his lack of clothes and getting rid of the pervasive cloak of fundamentally racist, intolerant, PC thought-codes.
Posted by: Bulldog || 07/11/2010 3:50 Comments || Top||

#3  Supposedly these Orientals have a long term perspective. They've been a civilization for 4,000 years. We've been around only 400. What did they do with their 3,600 year head start? And now they're ready to claim superiority based on 4 of those 400 years? Not so fast, Kowalski.
Posted by: Nimble Spemble || 07/11/2010 9:21 Comments || Top||

#4  that's really interesting Phil B

THis is an idea i've been thinking of too. It's like the wizard behind the curtain in Wizard of Oz.

We will never really know how strong China's economy is or whether it is liable to unexpected and sudden collapse (remember the USSR) because information is so tightly controlled by the state.

They are mercantilist, their governmnet disguises itself as corporations (state owned) and plunders the world of natural resources to feed its factories and energy needs.

There is a lot of money there being thrown around

But then when you get to the domestic front, I think you are right: political connections are everything and the money could be disappearing down the corruption hole.

i never really trusted the china growth story enough to say, buy shares listed on the Hang Seng or Chinese exchanges. Why would you? It's so opaque, not transparent at all. How can you tell if you are getting a good deal or not. It's a gamble.

Well the Chinese do love gambling that's true.

we will see if a lack of independent scrutiny, no free media and the lack of freedom will result in what i believe to be inevitable: a spectacular economic collapse one day for no apparent reason.

societies evolve and I believe we have seen through history that societies that have those characteristics, lack of freedom, lack of scrutiny/transparency/free media, tend to implode eventually as it leads to misallocation of capital and resources (due to corruption/political interference)

The US though it is an economic cripple, I believe will rebound off the ropes for this reason.
Posted by: anon1 || 07/11/2010 19:28 Comments || Top||

#5  US seems to go into recessions as part of the natural business cycle and then recover. Reporters declare doom and gloom and the end of US leadership each time. During my life it was Japan, the Asian Tigers and now China. Heck, they were even talking about the European economic superpower and now they seem to be wobbling worse than the USA.

I'm not saying that it won't happen, or can't happen but wishful thinking on the matter is pretty pathetic.
Posted by: rjschwarz || 07/11/2010 21:46 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
What You Can't Say About Islamism
American intellectuals won't face up to Muslim radicalism's Nazi past.

In our present Age of the Zipped Lip, you are supposed to avoid making any of the following inconvenient observations about the history and doctrines of the Islamist movement:

You are not supposed to observe that Islamism is a modern, instead of an ancient, political tendency, which arose in a spirit of fraternal harmony with the fascists of Europe in the 1930s and '40s.

You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists, notably in regard to the demonic nature of Jewish conspiracies and the virtues of genocide.

And you are not supposed to mention that, by inducing a variety of journalists and intellectuals to maintain a discreet and respectful silence on these awkward matters, the Islamist preachers and ideologues have succeeded in imposing on the rest of us their own categories of analysis.

Or so I have argued in my recent book, "The Flight of the Intellectuals." But am I right? I glance with pleasure at some harsh reviews, convinced that here, in the worst of them, is my best confirmation.

No one disputes that the Nazis collaborated with several Islamist leaders. Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, orated over Radio Berlin to the Middle East. The mufti's strongest supporter in the region was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna, too, spoke well of Hitler. But there is no consensus on how to interpret those old alliances and their legacy today.

Tariq Ramadan, the Islamic philosopher at Oxford, is Banna's grandson, and he argues that his grandfather was an upstanding democrat. In Mr. Ramadan's interpretation, everything the Islamists did in the past ought to be viewed sympathetically in, as Mr. Ramadan says, "context"—as logical expressions of anticolonial geopolitics, and nothing more. Reviews in Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker—the principal critics of my book—have just now spun variations on Mr. Ramadan's interpretation.

The piece in Foreign Affairs insists that, to the mufti of Jerusalem, Hitler was merely a "convenient ally," and it is "ludicrous" to imagine a deeper sort of alliance. Those in the National Interest and the New Yorker add that, in the New Yorker's phrase, "unlikely alliances" with Nazis were common among anticolonialists.

The articles point to some of Gandhi's comrades, and to a faction of the Irish Republican Army, and even to a lone dimwitted Zionist militant back in 1940, who believed for a moment that Hitler could be an ally against the British. But these various efforts to minimize the significance of the Nazi-Islamist alliance ignore a mountain of documentary evidence, some of it discovered last year in the State Department archives by historian Jeffrey Herf, revealing links that are genuinely profound.

"Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion," said the mufti of Jerusalem on Radio Berlin in 1944. And the mufti's rhetoric goes on echoing today in major Islamist manifestos such as the Hamas charter and in the popular television oratory of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a revered scholar in the eyes of Tariq Ramadan: "Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one." Foreign Affairs, the National Interest and the New Yorker have expended nearly 12,000 words in criticizing "Flight of the Intellectuals." And yet, though the book hinges on a series of such genocidal quotations, not one of those journals has found sufficient space to reproduce even a single phrase.

Why not? It is because a few Hitlerian quotations from Islamist leaders would make everything else in those magazine essays look ridiculous—the argument in the Foreign Affairs review, for instance, that Qaradawi ought to be viewed as a crowd-pleasing champion of "centrism," and Hamas merits praise as a "moderate" movement and a "firewall against radicalization."

The New Yorker is the only one of these magazines to reflect even briefly on anti-Semitism. But it does so by glancing away from my own book and, instead, chastising Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch champion of liberal values. In the New Yorker's estimation, Hirsi Ali's admiration of the philosopher Voltaire displays an ignorant failure on her part to recognize that, hundreds of years ago, even the greatest of liberals thought poorly of the Jews. And Ms. Hirsi Ali's denunciations of women's oppression in the Muslim immigrant districts of present-day London displays a failure to recognize that, long ago, immigrant Jews suffered oppression in those same districts.

But this reeks of bad faith. Ms. Hirsi Ali is one of the world's most eloquent enemies of the Islamist movement. She makes a point of singling out Islamist anti-Semitism. And the anti-Semites have singled her out in return.

Six years ago, an Islamist fanatic murdered Ms. Hirsi Ali's filmmaking colleague, Theo van Gogh, and left behind a death threat, pinned with a dagger to the dead man's torso, denouncing Ms. Hirsi Ali as an agent of Jewish conspirators. And yet, the New Yorker, in the course of an essay presenting various excuses for the Islamist-Nazi alliance of yesteryear, has the gall to explain that, if anyone needs a lecture on the history of anti-Semitism, it's Ms. Hirsi Ali!

Such is the temper of our moment. Some of the intellectuals are indisputably in flight—eager to sneer at outspoken liberals from Muslim backgrounds, and reluctant to speak the truth about the Islamist reality.
Posted by: Beavis || 07/11/2010 00:00 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Read up on the SS Handschar division. Vile bastards.
Posted by: NCMike || 07/11/2010 9:38 Comments || Top||

#2  Hardly anyone holds service in an SS unit during WWII against the veterans. Even Soviet Guards units veterans have come to terms with the fact the Waffen SS was just that: combat units.

Our media have done a typically piss poor job over the years of distinguishing between those who did commit illegal acts of war and those who served honorably on behalf of their country.
Posted by: badanov || 07/11/2010 10:14 Comments || Top||

#3  I stand by the term vile bastards for the SS Handschar, they were particularly suited to dirty work because they were muslim:

http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/yugoslavia_collaboration.htm

My step-Grandfather was attached to the 6th SS Mountain Division Nord in Finland. That was a combat unit.
Posted by: NCMike || 07/11/2010 11:50 Comments || Top||

#4  NCMike: SS Handschar was the only SS Division disbanded for reasons of cowardice. One of their duties was to guard the rail lines to Auschwitz.
Posted by: borgboy || 07/11/2010 16:18 Comments || Top||

#5  badanov: elements of the Heer, not to mention the Waffen SS joined in the mass killings. Citations galore abound. Not to mention the 1990s exhibit that toured the nation in the 1990s to promote this point.
Posted by: borgboy || 07/11/2010 16:31 Comments || Top||


Israel-Palestine-Jordan
A one-state solution for Israel?
Posted by: American Delight || 07/11/2010 09:43 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Relocating Paleos from WB an Gaza to other Arab states. That is one-state solution for Israel that would work. I got it from an Egyptian dude. I think he was onto something.
Posted by: twobyfour || 07/11/2010 10:44 Comments || Top||

#2  Prior to 1967, the West Bank was part of Jordan and Gaza was part of Egypt, both of which had no intentions of giving it up for a Paleo state. It was a three state solution that was in place since the 1948 failure to destroy Israel then. The only reason they changed their position was because they lost the war and land to Israel. Suddenly, they became benevolent with land they no longer occupied. I believe the Egyptian wall around Gaza tell us all we need about their interest in getting it back.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 07/11/2010 12:07 Comments || Top||

#3  The Arabs have always advocated a one-state solution, which would either initially or subsequently become Judenfrei. It's only the Jews who insisted that they were entitled to a Jewish state in which non-Jews of good will could live as equal citizens. It's shameful that the Voice of America is pushing this vicious old idea.
Posted by: trailing wife || 07/11/2010 18:37 Comments || Top||

#4  Hummmm... This would be more along the lines of the Lebanon model. IE a dysfunctional unstate in a continual civil war.
Posted by: Mike N. || 07/11/2010 19:27 Comments || Top||

#5  Build the wall, build the electric fence, dig the moat, put the muslims on the other side of it. ie: in Jordan.

voila.

problem solved.

just make sure you take back those lovely beaches of Gaza first though.
Posted by: anon1 || 07/11/2010 19:43 Comments || Top||

#6  oh yeah make sure you pay them. it's gonna cost. $20,000 per man / woman / child.

kick the muslims out of israel and pay them compensation. Put them in Jordan never to return.

If Saudi Arabia won't let a jew in the country maybe its time Israel led the way and didn't let a Muslim in the country. kick them out and there will be peace in 50 years

screw what the world thinks, grow a pair and solve this problem by force.
Posted by: anon1 || 07/11/2010 19:45 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Liberals analyze their Obama 'despair'
delicious schadenfreude. Their salty tears are great on a margarita glass rim
Posted by: Frank G || 07/11/2010 14:52 || Comments || Link || [6 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Geez, Frank, do you pull the wings off flies, too?
Posted by: Matt || 07/11/2010 17:06 Comments || Top||

#2  The remedy for the problems progressives face, Borosage says, lies in creating an equal and opposite force that can rival the enthusiasm of the tea party movement.

Knock yourselves out guys; you have an organizer in the White House. How hard could it be?
Posted by: Bobby || 07/11/2010 17:14 Comments || Top||

#3  heh, Matt. Flies actually have a higher purpose, libs? Not so much
Posted by: Frank G || 07/11/2010 17:17 Comments || Top||

#4  Flys do far less damage and know there is no utopia.
Posted by: newc || 07/11/2010 17:35 Comments || Top||

#5  More, more please. I'll say 'when.'
Posted by: Besoeker || 07/11/2010 17:41 Comments || Top||

#6 
Posted by: Guillibaldo Unusing2147 || 07/11/2010 17:45 Comments || Top||

#7  I like how the guy whop wrote the report turned it into everyone is against us piece. STFU yall seemed too have enough support getting this fool into office so don't turn it around.
Posted by: chris || 07/11/2010 18:26 Comments || Top||

#8 
Posted by: DMFD || 07/11/2010 21:07 Comments || Top||

#9  He learned to hate business without learning how to jobs help the poor: to sneer at whites without loving blacks or browns: he cannot love, he does know how to govern. He is petty, small thinking, & the manchurian candidate.
Posted by: whatadeal || 07/11/2010 22:22 Comments || Top||



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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.

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Meet the Mods
In no particular order...
Steve White
Seafarious
tu3031
badanov
sherry
ryuge
GolfBravoUSMC
Bright Pebbles
trailing wife
Gloria
Fred
Besoeker
Glenmore
Frank G
3dc
Skidmark

Two weeks of WOT
Sun 2010-07-11
  Hizbies deny selling out Taliban
Sat 2010-07-10
  65 killed in twin suicide attacks in Mohmand Agency
Fri 2010-07-09
  Fifteen killed in Baghdad on last day of Shia holiday
Thu 2010-07-08
  Afghanistan: Mullah Omar's arrest 'unlikely'
Wed 2010-07-07
  Pakistan Arrests Taliban Chief Mullah Omar: Reports
Tue 2010-07-06
  The United States of America vs. The State of Arizona; and Janice K. Brewer
Mon 2010-07-05
  Bangla Jamaat rampage
Sun 2010-07-04
  Ayatollah Fudlullah dies at 75
Sat 2010-07-03
  Obama signs toughest-ever US sanctions on Iran
Fri 2010-07-02
  37 people killed in bomb blasts at Pakistan shrine
Thu 2010-07-01
  Protests rock Bangla capital
Wed 2010-06-30
  Bangla Jamaat big turbans held on court order
Tue 2010-06-29
  Kabul dismisses report Karzai met Haqqani
Mon 2010-06-28
  Drone strike kills six Taliban in N Wazoo
Sun 2010-06-27
  15 insurgents killed by their own bombs in Afghan mosque


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