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Gitmo: problem solved

Since these guys are untryable here, yet detainable until the end of hostilities according to Geneva Convention, and since so many insist the best prison on Earth still isn't good enough, I say, buy an older cruise ship (the recession's killing the cruise biz, there's bound to be bargains aplenty) and put them on that, with US military staff paid for by the UN (get some of our dues back for a change).  Then circle the trash gyres in the Atlantic and Pacific, with the task given these abominably uncivil terrorists who attacked the rest of the world, of cleaning them up.  Sorta like the Sheriff's roadside litter brigades.  Actually, exactly like that.
     So until and unless a full accord with all violent jihadi salafist bone-heads is reached and implemented without mortal breach for at least 20 years, I say we now have an unassailibly humane and completely appropriate punishment for these worst of the worst of the worst. It's even Green.
     Keep Gitmo around, mothballed, for the Castro regime, for the day freedom comes to Cuba. 
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Snakes on a Hill

What really can be said about NY senator Chuck Shumer? To call him a lying snake or a slimy slug is an insult to innocent reptiles and gastropods everywhere.  He is: as vile as vile can be; a power-mad liar without shame, honor or decency; a detestible dementor of our people; "lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut".  His comments that the 2007 Surge's summer of success in al Anbar was "in spite of" American troops, who have died in their thousands to secure what has been gained there, are ... beyond abominable, beneath contempt.  He refuses to apologize and is an execrable human being who should be shunned.
    I would wish him go away immediately to repent forever by taking a vow of silence, but he remains in two ways useful, first as an encouragement to our enemy, which makes them strike too soon (see my post "In Praise of Pusillanimity"), and second, because he is one of those handful of people so pathologically dishonest that they can be reliably used as an inverse indicator of the truth:  whatever he says, the opposite is sure to be true. 
    And the same goes for the rest of that cynical callous craven crowd now leading the once-noble party of FDR, Truman, and JFK ever deeper into the postmodern asylum/sewer.  I used to self-identify as a liberal, but nevermore; if these be the standard-bearers of Liberalism, with betrayal their byword, self-loathing their mentality, and mendacity their MO, then this much I know for sure:  I can never again be at home with those delusional, power-mad and ...unhappy few, that Band of Bothers, for he or she who shreds his or her principles with me here today shall be my weak sister...

And I of course mean no insult to any real sisters, living or dead, weak or otherwise, and beg of them--and wordsmyth Will's whirling ghost--the literary licence.  All rights reserved.

Mattaphor     my sight:  http://www.kiss-the-sky.com 
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."  ~  Edmund Burke,  Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." ~ Albert Einstein
"The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity" ~ WB Yeats
"De Oppreso Liber" ~ US Special Forces Motto     FallenHeroesFund.org      Semper Fi Fund        Anysoldier.com
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The War is Won


Historians will note today, September 3rd, Labor Day in America, as the day the War in Iraq finally turned the last corner and showed a definitive course toward American victory, and Iraqi freedom, or at least self-determination, which is close enough for government work.  Bush has done it, he hung tough long enough, and, Democrats please take note, changed his strategy in Iraq to a workable one.  His "war cabinet" appearance in al Anbar is the signal event.
   Note the previously grievously contested items now all moved into our column:

1)   Bush met today with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province.  They have been among our worst enemies until lately, when myriad reports, even from the conservative-hating press, inform us that they have, crucially, united with us and turned on
2)   Al Quaida in Iraq, which has suffered on the order of 10,000 casualties since President Bush ordered a change in strategy (Dimocrats take note), and has seen its support in Iraq vaporize like one of its ghastly zealots, as the Iraqis find a sense of identity at least in opposing foreigners with mayhem in mind, which has also brought new and forceful pressure against
3)   Iran, who is the main danger remaining, and who is reportedly taking serious heat from SF, as is proper, and has showed it, most recently by releasing that captive Iranian-American scholar.  Don't discount how important the new French government is in this equation.

4)   Since January, "Mooky" (al Sadr) has been in external exile, sent there by the promise of arrest and worse by his fellow Iraqis (who booked several hundred early on) and of course, the President's change in strategy (Dimocrats take note), known generally as the Surge, which put a price on his head, so to speak, and; 
5)   He just publicly ordered a six-month stand-down of Mahdi Army (JAM) forces, explicitly ordering a halt to attacks on American forces.  Who can imagine an effective return of that unit by then?
6)   If Bud McFarland is to be believed, the chief of staff for Ayatollah Sistani, and the heads of the Sunni clerisy in Iraq have met and agreed to end the militia and death-squad activity.  This is purportedly unprecedented not just in Iraqi history, but in the 1300-year schism of Islam, and may serve to pay important stabilizing dividends far beyond central Iraq.   Here again, another long-term goal and necessity is met.

These are all crucially important developments, goals we have fought very hard to achieve.  Add to this the progress in the political dealings in Parliament (an oil-revenue sharing deal and the resolution of de-Baathifcation issue), and tho much remains to be done, it appears that most of the hardest nuts are now cracked. 

Speaking of cracked nuts, the Dems will surely insist that their pressure on the Iraqi parties to conform or face the pull-out of US forces (to Okinawa?) was the key factor.  They have a history of fantastic escapes from reality, Bond-like, to evade capture for their hideous advocacies.  Sure, if threatening a new-born democracy with abandonment to the worst people in the world makes the Left's hearts glow, if threatening genocide makes them feel better, I'll give them that chit.  Chicken-chit.  They earned it.

Add the little-noticed deal with North Korea, and Bush and Co. are looking pretty good as the new season of politicking begins, and the Defeatocrat horde looks ever stupider.  As they should, for they understand nothing useful about human nature in matters such as these.

Happy Labor Day, the War is over!  How many can be home by Christmas?

Matt

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In praise of pusillaminity

 
One thing indisputable in history is that liberals think you can--must--talk to lunatics who mean your destruction, conservatives generally have little patience with such foolishness, and prefer bombing them into dust.  This sad "meme" seems more indestructible than the Sun.  I'll never fully understand why, because when I was a liberal, I had no problem smacking down bad guys; hell, I thought that was what good government and liberal civilization were all about.  I read The Once and Future King in 8th grade (thankyou Ms. James!), and believed it:  "Might for Right."  Silly me.
   I'll leave it to another time to discuss the how and why (postmodernism, Vietnam, Buddhism) the Left has lost its moral bearings in favor of a real love of Marx and a phony love of pacifism, just to note for now that they are extremely dangerous to our children's intellectual morale and therefore to our future as a great global guarantor of peace and prosperity.  This they achieve by denouncing, eliding and lying to them about their heritage and their ancestors' amazing accomplishments solving the ancient depredations of both nature and mankind.  They know that as goes patriotism, so goes patrimony, so they pour every manner of cultural and intellectual filth on both.
   So how can it possibly be that the cowards, traitors, degenerates, and marxist morons of the Left actually serve to improve and advance the Pax Americana?  In nature, weakness invites attack.  My point, exactly.
 
Liberal weenies and pusillanimatrons (flaccid little pricks and pre-programmed, heartless pussies) serve the US in two important ways (neither intentional, of course; it is axiomatic that the Left has everything bass-ackward):
 
   First, as Larry Schweickart and others have pointed out, the protests against US and the others' dead (wasteful and indiscriminate application of force) have wrought important changes in our fighting doctrine, increasing our lethality and precision, while putting a premium (sometimes too much of one) on our fighters' safety.  These two facts, along with the professionalism engendered by ending the draft, make the US armed forces the best trained, equipped, and motivated ever, by orders of magnitude.*  This condition is not likely to change anytime soon.
 
   More importantly, the acrimonious division caused by, and the public predominance of, the pusillanimous Left, the perpetual practitioners of what Bernard Lewis called "anxious propitiation", encourages our enemies to misread us and practice reckless adventurism, which exposes them prematurely, from their pov, to our deadly wrath, once some outrage finally moves us off the ball to crush them.  While we are not ultimately destroyable (except from within, by socialist nonsense), we can be hurt very badly from without, and many of the world's innocent will be destroyed in the absence of the American/Western/Capitalist hegemon, should we "liberally" respond only with a retreat behind our dunes, instead of advancing over theirs.  All sucessful empires grow by meeting and defeating their hostile border folk, and as Robert Kaplan has illuminated for us, we are still growing.
 
This awareness of the role of the appeasers doesn't mean we should encourage the coward contingent, much less the anti-American, anti-capitalist Chomskyite lunatics, as they do great and long-lasting harm to our nation's people in myriad ways.  But it does show they have had an historical role in bringing on the swift defeat of what could otherwise be seriously existential threats. 
 
  Let me explain:  If the West had heeded Churchill's counsel about Hitler in the mid-30s by say, opposing with force his march on the Ruhr, or later the infamous dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, what exactly would have happened?  Glib and shallow amateur historians declare it would have prevented WWII.  Can this possibly be true?  Is it not more realistic to conceive that Hitler and Co., thus chastened, would have more prudentially martialled their forces, bided their time, and when, in 1942 perhaps, they were much more ready than in 1939, they could have initiated the war they were impelled toward with a much greater chance of destroying the opposition.  This scenario is truly scary.  Hitler had originally promised his admirals there would be no war before 1944!  Why did he jump off 5 years early?  He sensed extreme weakness in the West, and had successfully tricked Stalin into nearly destroying the Red Army's fighting effectiveness.  He was drunk with the appeasement of the West and his many victories in the East, and justifyably feeling the road open, it is reported to have been truly surprised that Chamberlain declared war after the invasion of Poland.
   Consider that a chastened Hitler, spanked by a resolute West over the Sudetenland, would have been much more prepared than he was for the cataclysm he wanted.  England and France, convinced by their craven wishful-thinking, Hitler's assurances, and the limited success they'd had in Munich in 1938, would have been slow as ever to rearm and when the Blitzkrieg came it would have been overwhelming;  there would not have been time even for the US to intervene.  Imagine Hitler's restraint at Dunkirk (believing still in his dream of a negotiated truce with England, necessary while he conquered the Soviets) instead becoming a nuclear bomb there, and then more on London; picture the subsequent easy taking of North Africa and the Middle East; the displacement of the Soviet Union to the eastern half of Asia (where the Japs would finish it off).  He came close to all of these as it was, without ever bringing the German economy to "war-footing".  Had Hitler not been induced by Western pusillanimity into a disastrously underprepared overreach, had he played to the Lindbergh mentality in the States (quite prevalent before Pearl Harbor) the world today would be a very different place.  We might still be in a Cold War with the Axis: Germans in charge of Europe, Africa and the half of Asia not owned by Japan;  the US would have had no choice but to occupy the Western Hemisphere, and we'd have had at least one nuclear war by now.  We may owe as much to Chamberlain's fecklessness as to Churchill's resolution!
 
The same forces of megalomaniacal, genocidal, totalitarian fascism, sharing the Nazi and Commie obsession with anti-semitism, are on the loose again, and are closer than we think to having an industrial-strength nuclear weapons production line.  They too are encouraged to more reckless outrages by our weenies.  They too mistake the democratic civilization's bilious debate with weakness.  This is therefore to the great advantage of the West, to have our public face be so cowardly, propitiatious, and hypocritical.  The Soviets, Germany and Japan, and bin Laden all found out to their horror that the heart of the West is stronger than an ox, and our collective head is not nearly so stupid as the talking heads' and appeasing heads' social prominence suggests.
    
    For instance, the notion favored by Democrat leaders of setting a pull-out date from Iraq is as militarily stupid and enemy-advancing as imaginable;  it is only proposed by them because they think "the people" are bigger idiots and at least as cowardly as they are.  They advocate a strategic lunacy because they think it will regain them political power.  Their entire approach to Iraq is in this manner.  Nothing could be more despicable, after most of them signed their names to the bottom line demanding regime change, first in 1998, and then in 2002/3, than to send our troops into hell and then spend every waking moment undermining their success.  It is the vilest of treacheries, worse even than having working national security secrets betrayed by the New York Times.
   Our enemies know human nature in this respect quite well.  They know treachery, division, and deceit when they see it, and they see it in our Leftwits all the time.  Lenin called such people within our society "useful idiots".  They have only gotten more numerous and thereby politically stronger since Leninism's demise.  For which unhappy fulminance can thank our universities.

    This appearance of division and treason in our ranks, in addition to the appeasing policies of most Western politicians, encourages the enemy to act before they are really prepared to deal with the eventual onslaught of American arms.  Thank (maybe God, surely not goodness, but) stupidity--our Left's and our enemies'--because if they were smart, they'd play nice and exploit our divisions and stupid people until they were really ready to do us in, meanwhile, deep asleep in that phony peace, we'd surely delude ourselves to it being real, and wake up one day with our capital cities in ashes.  The 1990s were a foreshadowing of that nightmare, from which only some of us awoke on September 11th, 2001.  Our enemies' plans would make 9/11 look like a firecracker in a thunderstorm.
    This way, they are encouraged to by our apparent weakness to insult, usurp, defy, and finally, recklessly, outrageously overreach, and bring down upon themselves the destruction they so surely fear, and so richly deserve, after all.
   Provided that we haven't, all of us, been neutered by the pathetics of Liberal "thinking", first.
 
Mattunes
my sight:  http://www.kiss-the-sky.com
The only good thing you can say about megalomaniacal fascists is they tend to overreach.
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." ~ Albert Einstein ~
"De Oppreso Liber"  ~ US Special Forces Motto

  *Capitalismo, the hated bete noir of the Left that they so completely misunderstand, is the other major engine of American military dominance, thru its protean and indefatigable industry, of course, but also from the personal, physical, and financial investment that every American has in the success of his nation, this the truly empowering genius of private property rights.
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Nuclear Normandy

What to do about Iran?

They tell us they have dispersed their nuclear plants, some amidst cities, others underground, etc.  Here's what President Terry would do:

1) Gather all the Special Operations Forces folks that can possibly be spared, and from all trustworthy allies; secrecy is critical.   Give them all a week with their families in Cuernavaca and Acapulco, have the State Dept rent the entire cities.   The single guys can go to Hedonism. 
2)  Train them hard for two weeks/two months for their missions:

  Assaulting all known Iranian nuclear facilities, capture/interrogation of the scientists therin;
  A Quick Reaction Force to assault and destroy the places revealed by the first wave.
  Exfil of troops and critical scientific personel and documents/evidence.
  SOF and Air-delivered destruction of all known and revealed nuclear assets.

The infil and especially exfil will be challenging, but that's what we pay them for.  All or most scientific personel can be interrogated in Iraq and Afghanistan and some Gulf States, and returned on chartered French and Russian commercial jets to Tehran about the time Kofin Anan's blood pressure hits max.  Or not.

Protect the forces with various political deceptions before, and AC-130 Spectres, A-10s, and every other air asset we own during, plus Rangers and all other elites that know what they're doing, and the usual air-defense suppression, of course.  Can anyone imagine a truly effective response from the Iranian army being mounted in the small time allotted? 

This would be Desert One writ huge, but we're ready for it today, and it would pay enormous practical dividends, setting back their program several years at least, while turning the US-friendly population more completely against their discredited mullahcracy, and not against us.

Bush, Blair, Harper, and Howard collectively weather the storm of international BS (Israeli-style) and sells the attack to the planet as our unavoidable "Nuclear Normandy".  The humilation of the enormous raid with obviously deliberately low civilian casualties would likely doom the mad mullahs alone. 

Whaddya think? 

Mattunes
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First post. Welcome!

 Welcome to Along the Watchtower.  My name is Matt Terry and I'm a guitarist and homemaker in Tampa.   I'll be posting about international relations and politics.   My personal political journey was from yellow-dog Democrat to libertarian conservative.   There's more for those who care here, but let's just say I now understand how appropriate "yellow-dog" is as a metaphoric image for modern (since 1968) Democrats.  How about:  a cowardly cur holding the reins of a blindered jackass?  That's where they are.

I've been blogging--of a sort--on my personal website, adding political and other observations and links to columns and writers I approve of, since November of 2003.  I'm glad to say that my disillusionment with the Left predates 9/11 (since the '91 Gulf War, when only 10 Dims voted to eject Saddam from Kuwait), but ashamed to admit it was not yet so great that I actually voted for Gore in 2000.  Oh well, I didn't repeat that mistake, and I'm very glad to have GW Bush and his people in charge, and shudder to think how close to disaster we came in 2004, but for a few score-thousand votes in Ohio.
    I've started a 12-Step for former Liberals who've recognized the folly of their past endorsements:  Lib-Anon.

I was moved to formally blog here at townhall by the great Hugh Hewitt's urging, through his invaluable radio program.   Thank you Hugh, for the best thing on the radio, and that's saying a lot with the quality of your colleagues at Salem.  I got pulled into talkradio thru Tony Snow and Laura Ingraham, and have become a big fan of Dennis Prager and Bill Bennett, too.  
   I had thought of the name for this blog several weeks ago, as Jimi Hendrix was a huge influence on my life, and it seemed appropriate for the topics I'm interested in.  It also dovetailed with my website, kiss-the-sky.com, which is my spot for all thinks astronomical, musical, philosophical, and, until, today, political.  I pointedly omitted the "All" from the song-title however, as one of my greatest fears is the disunity that Liberalism spawns and thrives on.  We are clearly, not "All" of us manning the watchtowers of civilization.
    But I'd resisted the urge to join the townhall blogosphere until Hugh's special Saturday show following Israel's righteous taking up of Hezbollah's wicked gauntlet.  Not only was the show excellent and the analysis trenchant, as usual, but that day the bumper music for one segment was Jimi's magical rendition of Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower".   My die was cast, I could waver no more.  (For the record:  there is no affiliation at all with the Jehova's Witnesses; I personally don't believe in Jehova or anything like it, and repudiate most religious dogma, tho certainly not most religious people). 
    Thank you Hugh, for everything you do: for your clarity and fairness, for your moral and intellectual rectitude and fortitude on your show, for the new summary/best of program, and your organizing verve at townhall.  Your show graces my evenings with my favorite form of fun: it is intellectually invigorating.  I knew I'd found a home when I heard Christopher Hitchens, Mark Steyn, and Victor Davis Hanson on the same show.  When I learned they were regular guests, you had me forever.  More power to you, friend, and may you ever have "morning glory and evening grace."  
   
Mattunes
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