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Photo courtesy of the EPA.
That would be my advice. Truth is, we quickly make Russia into a demon. They do the same to us. If there is anything we have learned over 100 years since the Great War started in August 1914, it is that going to war, should be the last resort…
Back in the early ’90’s upon being given the privilege to look over the Soviet’s intelligence when Communism fell, we were shocked that all their aggressive actions were seen in their eyes as defensive moves against possible aggression being planned by us….It is best represented by a young officers story from the cold war. I’ve long forgotten the source, if it comes up later I’ll tag it in…
But a young officer was in charge of a section of the German fence, and on his first shift, received a request for orders and told the reconnaissance brigade to go 5 more miles along the fence past where they usually turned around. They called back to say they’d stumbled on fresh movement of troops being maneuvered to that gap on front line we never had bothered to inspect.. After finding our troops were now outnumbered by their new response, this young officer ordered another brigade to move up from the south. That brigade also discovered another large number of troops moving in from the eastern reserves to that same point… The officer began to sweat. Was he witnessing on his watch, in his territory, the beginning of the long-feared invasion of Western Europe by the Soviets? He called up two more brigades and ordered them to dig in around that point. The Soviets brought up tanks, and lined them up for an invasion… The young officer then picked up the phone… Far away, the head of command looked over all the evidence… Finally he gave this advice… Pull your troops out, by ten miles…. he did, and the Soviets pulled theirs back as well. Ok, came the next order. Resume normalcy. And soon, everything again was routine….
For those that don’t understand war, the point of the story was, that the young officer caused the crises. The whole Russian buildup, was because of him. He made a move the Russians didn’t understand, and since they didn’t understand, they prepared for an attack. As we brought up more, so did they. They were simply matching our moves… Fortunately someone wise enough to understand that he Russians really didn’t want to go to war, stepped in and averted a possible WWIII start-up incident…
As if on cue, already dumb John McCain is rattling swords and demanding we nuke Moscow. Soon Lindsey Graham will follow as Tweedle Dumb always follows Tweedle Dee… Likewise, Putin will also have his exact same crowd (probably riding Harleys), his group of idiots, clamoring for war as well…
The Western press has already begin its war talk, leading with the condemnation of the Russian Government… But really, isn’t that a bit premature? No one has died. Far less than anything that happened in Kiev earlier this week….
Let’s wear Putin’s shoes for moment….
What if the predominantly Mexican population of San Diego wanted to be aligned with Mexico instead of the USA, all because we couldn’t get Republicans to pass immigration laws.. What if they gathered en masse in San Diego to protest, stayed, burned down government and private buildings. What if we tried to make them stand down, and it roused up even more Mexicans to their defense. What if the Mayor fled to Yuma, and camped out in a sanatorium. … …
What would the US do. OUR entire Pacific Fleet rests in San Diego… We would probably act prudently. and move outward to expand our perimeter. We would probably commander all airports and ship docks in that area in order to be able to land reinforcements if necessary. We would probably park a couple of gunboats facing the city as an intimidating force reminding the Mexicans we had forces they couldn’t get to, so their behavior should keep that in mind. We’d probably block access roads leading into the port, so an invasion army wouldn’t be able to charge in unannounced…
Just to play devils advocate, what might happen if we took no action to defend ourselves? As most Americans are asking the Russians to do? We saw the Mexicans had little respect in town for law and order. There are a lot more of them than there are of us… What if 10,000 of them just walked on to the base, armed with shotguns, hunting rifles, and a few semi automatics. What if they boarded all our ships, our subs, and put our sailors at gunpoint into the brig, and announced they were in charge of the Baja Mexican Navy… Now the 2nd largest navy in the world. What would the US do? Would we sail into our own harbor as did the Free French and blow what used to be our own ships up out of the water?
Of course the Mexicans would say we are invading their new country. Of course every Spanish tonged nation South of our border would be condemning us for invading Mexican California… despite the fact that a lot of gringos, maybe even a majority, live around San Diego and support our American troops being there and keeping the masses of Mexicans from turning on them….
Point is, we would ourselves, do what Russia just did...
So how can we condemn them, when we have contingency plans to do exactly the same thing?
There is further evidence this is not like Sudetenland, . One, no one has died. It was a smooth peaceful quiet takeover, textbook by American Standards. Two, action is isolated to the port and Crimea. Three, all evidence points to these actions solely for the purpose of controlling access to the base.
As Americans we would laugh at Europe, Russia, and China telling us to abandon San Diego. There are a lot of similarities between that and the Russian base. The number one move now appears to be: for the Kiev Ukraine government to insist that the base will forever stay Russian, and guarantee the safety of all Russians living on Crimea… Second, it should state that the current administration insists there will be no change for those who like having Russians close by. For that select group, there will be only two options. Life goes either goes on the same; or it gets better. The third option that it may get worse, is forever off the table.. .
It would be the equivalent of that American young officer calling off his men, and telling them to retreat backwards 10 miles.. it would be the opposite of what happened 100 years ago, where threats begot threats and soon rigid plans took effect and not one leader had the chutzpah to stop it from going forward. 6 million soldiers died, 15 million civilians died, and a whole generation of young men was wiped out. Girls had to marry men their father’s age.. and in the end Western Europe’s borders were right back where they were before the whole event started.
Cool heads must prevail. Of course the McCains will spout off. They don’t matter. What matters is that we treat the Russians with respect just as we would like them to do for us, if the shoe were on the other foot and we were fighting the battle of San Diego…..
Recently all of Delaware called out Chris Coons for supporting war with Iran.
He has now pulled his support from that piece of legislation..
- Obama promised to veto that bill last night in his State of the Union.
- Two others pulled out today as well: Sen. james Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)
It’s emotionally tough to go back on one’s word, when one realizes one has made a mistake. However, It is intellectually stupid NOT to do so.
Hat’s off to Chris Coons for listening to the right angel whispering in his ear……
China shoots down two B52’s flying through it’s extended air zone.
What now?
The initial reaction would be to retaliate. Strike something of theirs! Expect some nut of the Tea Party to do a stand-up filibuster the Senate and demand nuking Beijing and Shanghai… But they are stupid.
The US is really not in any position to retaliate. We would have to react diplomatically. Pull our staffs, etc, etc,… talk to them through the Russians.
For if we were to launch, we would be launching against a nation smart enough to cybersleath into our NSA, not some dumb Muslim nation locked in the 13th Century. Good chance that not only would we have lost the two planes originally, but our losses would also extend to every single one of our attacking planes. We’d be wiped out. No doubt all our electronic deflections have already been neutralized by the Chinese… Our most effective military retort would be of a submarine at-sea launching of unmanned missiles taking out a minor retaliatory target. But even if that launch was not jammed, once that was over, the extension of airspace would remain, and not be challenged again…..
In any military engagement off its coast, China wins. Pretty much the same way the US would win in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine 2 centuries ago… We have the power here; and you, from way over there, don’t.
So one must use a different perspective.
What is the one thing China most fears… Come on.. you know… It is obvious… Still guessing? Ok, I’ll help you out. China most fears an insurrection of its own people. People who want freedom, privacy, democracy, and those great things we often take for granted. The Chinese willingly let themselves be run by their totalitarian government… At any point, based simply on numbers, ie the number of people in security, and the number of people not, China could rise up, revolt, and rule itself… This scares the Party more than any other threat. They know that whereas the US would certainly not dismember their bodies in a public square, if the revolt got ugly, unlike us the local population would have no qualms in doing so…
Therefore we play to their fear….
The reason China does what it does, is to keep the people happy enough so they don’t revolt. Their economic growth, their development, their capitalism, is all based upon that premise. “If they are happy, we, the Party, stay in control….”
So.
What if we declared economic war? Stopped buying anything from China? China would have to become a consuming nation to survive. Currently China’s wealth is saved and reinvested. Compared to the average US income, which practically buys everything it makes… China buys very little of their own products, those are slated for exports to bring more cash into the country. If the world stops buying Chinese products, then those savings not invested outside of China, need to start buying up the products instead of the other members of the global economy…. That is a short lived proposition. After all, how many shovels will each Chinese buy?
It is further aggravated by China’s demand for raw materials. Food is one. Oil is another. Heavy metals are a third. As each of these become critical, each becomes rationed, the growing restlessness starts whispering that these hardships would never have come to pass, if the regime had not shot down two airplanes that up until a week earlier, had always flown that route with no problem. Now, because of a gross error made by the current regime, millions have to go hungry, aren’t working, and are barely existing… Perhaps the whispering campaign goes, it is time to overthrow the overlords and sue for peace, and get things back to normal?
As China cracks down against this whispering dissent internally, it loses focus externally…
That would be the time to present a show of force. The US then blockaids China. It would take two rings. The outer ring would consist of ships permanently parked outside the range of China’s missiles… Their job would be to impede all international commerce headed to China, boarding and searching every ship… The inner ring would consist of primarily of stealth submarines who would sink or shoot down everything making a mad dash into China…
The Russians would probably take the middle road, most likely benefiting from their proximity to China, but not going as far to alienate the US itself by forming a Sino-Soviet Aggression Pact. It would be impossible to stop all commerce into China. The demand for all goods would make the profit margins of smuggling, impossible to ignore. The Soviets would benefit; Indochina, India, Burma, the Stans, would all benefit, but that amount slipping through, would not compensate for the hurt coming from the Shanghai and Hong Kong docks being empty of commerce….
Sooner or later, a group within the Chinese leadership, would have attracted enough numbers to challenge the military extremists, and something would crack and diplomacy would then become an option….
Point is, the choice to not attack militarily, is not an act of cowardice… it is just so smart. If every American citizen were to follow the Tea Party option and attack China, we would be at a 5 to 1 disadvantage. But if every citizen in China attacked the ruling party and we were on THEIR side, we would have a 20 to 1 advantage….
Attacking China with economic weapons, is no different than surrounding a castle during a Medieval siege and waiting it out….
Super smart. One gets the prize for no cost at all…..
That is why China has erred in its calculations… by thinking only in military terms where it does possess all the cards in its favor…
Unfortunately in war… one does not get to make up all the rules….
We are a tired generation… We grew up with ‘Nam. Which ever side we were on during the battle here in America over that police action, or war, looking back after it was done, …. we all knew it was wrong….
After that we thought all war was wrong, and unfortunately took some of that angst out on those who least deserved it: those coming back from the steamy jungles of hell…..
Against our will a certain president soon sent Marines into Beirut; what happened then reinforced our belief that an American war was unjustifiable and that all other means must be utilized to prevent American war from ever happening again…. Against our will, we propped up a Nicaragua dictator against some rebels. Against our will, we sold arms to Iran to use for paying for our support for that Nicaragua dictator, since a Congress elected by the American people, flatly said no to supporting him in Nicaragua… We found a way to do it anyway….
I remember Senator Rudman, (R-NH) saying at the hearing while addressing Oliver North,… “The American people have the RIGHT to be wrong.”
Oliver North had been insisting that even when Americans flatly say NO, one still must do what one deems is necessary, that whatever one deems necessary, is the highest moral truth. “Sometimes one has to go above the law!” was actually said by the defense at this hearing. Only one good thing came out of those hearings: we all were introduced to Fawn Hall.
But then… The Brits quickly regained the Faulklands. Then came Grenada, which went off without a hitch. Then Panama, which was successful and almost painless. Then came General Schwartzkopf. The 4th largest army in the world, was routed in hours, and in days, had been completely mopped up. Then came the Balkans. We were on a roll. We’d finally nailed down the successful formula of how to win in battle.
Today we say Iraq is a failure. But that was so not so just after the invasion. Inside Baghdad, the pulling down of Saddam’s statue, the victory of capturing Saddam, the ability of us to hand out billions of American dollars, initially gave this campaign the luster of looking like another success story…
Until we tried to steal their oil. The standard global rate of dividing oil revenues is that the US gets a 20% cut for the development, and Iraq would get to keep 80% because it is after all, their resource. That is how we deal with Nigeria.
But Brenner announced that we’d flip that to pay for the war, and that Iraq would be allowed to keep 20% because we liked them so much, and we’d only, by our good graces, take 80% of the revenues. 24 hours after letting that cat out of the bag, the first IED went off under a US military vehicle… Before week was out, the total was in the hundreds.
The luster was gone. We were an invading army, something we have not called ourselves since WWII. We always saw ourselves as the policeman who leaves as soon as order is restored…
Afghanistan likewise, got worse. Then Pakistan. Then Yemen. On the diplomatic front instead of doing no harm, .. we could do no good. Then Libya costs us an ambassador who was running guns through Turkey. He shouldn’t have been there; it should have been a low level staffer with security clearance.
This baby boomer generation knows that war is wrong. We know from experience. The only time it can be employed successfully, is a) when the whole world is united behind you, b) you go in and get out, and c) you have a structure that stays in place long after you are gone.
The only time it goes badly… is every other scenario.
Which brings us to Syria. Syria has no importance to anyone. (They couldn’t even defend the militarily advantageous Golan Heights in ’67!) Which is why we let the Russians have them.
People are going to die in Syria if a): Assad wins, b): the rebels win, or c): no one wins. The only thing changing upon this wars outcome, is which side will be massacred at war’s end. Hence the battle for survival over there now.
So by having the US intervene or not, we are choosing which side gets to kill the other after the hostilities die down.
The weakest argument for going in still left with standing, is that they used chemical weapons. In WWI, the British, French, and Germans all used chemical weapons. Are chemical weapons really worse than being burned alive? Or asphyxiated as a bomb blast sucks all the oxygen out of your lungs and the room? Or a milk jug sized piece of jagged metal shrapnel ripping and leaving a hole through your body? Or a mine being stepped on? I’m trying to think why chemical weapons are so much worse, except for the fact that we’ve been told” they are so much worse”?
A causality is a causality.
We understand “why” some say we should go into Syria. Because if we do not respond to chemical weapons in a big way, someone else will become confident and use theirs. There is only one way to keep the genie inside the bottle, and that is to never leave a opening for it to escape….
We also understand “why” one of our beloved School districts had a policy that suspended, and expelled those who brought weapons to school! Not just guns, but knives too. After all, the argument for punishing Syria, applies to soon-to-become high school felons too.
But, there came a time when the response generated by a policy, actually became the crime, You remember the little boy expelled who brought a cake to school, and his grandmother thoughtfully sent a knife knowing teachers usually don’t have utensils in their classrooms. The teacher actually cut the cake, served it, thinking nothing of it.. it was someone higher up, reviewing the situation, who said, “wait, that can be interpreted as a breach of regulations. Let’s make an example out of this little boy”. He was suspended and could have been expelled, except it eventually became news and public outcry was solidly on his side. The policy makers were laughed out of town.
Which is why, if you are making this decision, you need to stall. Acting quickly and decisively is equivalent to acting on rumor and innuendo. So what if Syria lied and shot the gas cannisters off?
Does a military strike create enough excellent good will to neutralize this bad act?
Ironically what is best for the US in this situation, is for Assad to stay in power, to have a zealous change in heart, to work closely with the USA to get his economy working, to becoming a partner in that region with the US, and to signing a treaty with Israel, as did the Egyptians many, many years ago…
What is worse for us, is if the jihadists win, push out the moderates and take over the reform movement (they always do), then go to war with Israel, Jordan and Turkey. Making ourselves into the evil empire will only create more explosions everywhere, flare-ups which would not have occurred had we taken the Jedi way, and used the “Force” in our possession, to make events on the ground turn our way and happen in our favor….
Realistically such a rosy scenario probably can’t happen; but if it did, were this to come about, there would be no doubt: Obama would be lauded as the best president we’d ever see in our lifetimes. The cost of failure is so low that it just might be worth the try.
The second point… which all us Viet-namers will well remember, is that you may win every engagement you participate in Syria, but you won’t win the war at home, and that… will suck all your energy away from all the good you plan to do before 2016.
It broke LBJ. It broke Bush II. Don’t let it break you….
The Daily Kos puts together a great list. This was the first time I’d seen everything on one page, some of which I’d missed over the weekend, and it deserves wide spread viewer ship. Some excerpts:
1. The NSA lost a huge court battle, and was found to be acting unconstitutionally by the Secret FISA Court. The Obama administration is keeping this judgement secret, even though the secret court said, secretly, that it should be public and produced to all America. Even Congress has been denied the secret decision from the secret court, keeping this judgment secret about how the secretive NSA violated your and my rights…
2. The NSA not only gathers and keeps data on your web and emails, it also tracks every single phone call of every single American.
3. The Obama mistreatment of whistleblowers far exceeds anything that the Cheney Bush administration ever did. Snowden’s fear of returning to this country doesn’t seem all that farfetched, given how Bradley Manning was tortured.
4. The Obama administration continues to lie to the American public, insisting that congress is fully informed about FISA and the NSA, despite every congressman and senator who answers the question, denies that they are getting any information from them.
5. Cloud computing providers report that their international business is crashing. Various bar associations must examine whether lawyers can even use cloud computing for their offices, because of the great probability that their data is being access and scrutinized by the feds – which causes every cloud computing attorney to be violating their oath to keep the attorney client privilege intact.
6. Those intimately involved with FISA, repeatedly allege that daily, constant, and comprehensive domestic spying on 320,000,000 Americans has resulted in absolutely no actionable data that could catch terrorists or prevent terrorism.
7. Remember the original Patriot Act Color Coded Threat Alert? It took 8 months, but even conservative critics began to notice that any rise on color assessment board (which looked like it was designed by a TV game show producer) had nothing to do with actual, viable threats, but rather, it was raised anytime and every time that the Cheney Bush Administration faced a potential political nightmare.
And so today… Sunday August 4th, Embassy closings galore in every Muslim country.
Hmmmm. (I bet the absence of any attempt will be touted as being the result of secret phone tappings by the NSA that were disallowed by the FISA court but were done anyways… ) Let’s see how the spin comes out on Monday.
An old American was reprocessing his old studies of Brezhnev-Soviet-Military thinking and brought back interesting points of discussion that directly relate to Syria.
The old Soviets had a classification for different types of wars:
“Many of these—such as the categorization of wars in ideological terms (including wars between imperialism and socialism, civil wars between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, wars between bourgeois states, national liberation wars)—now appear quaint and irrelevant for understanding today’s (and perhaps even yesterday’s) world.”
There was one other: wars between the people and a regime of extreme reaction
“What they understood about these conflicts between a dictatorial regime and its opponents was that they were not conflicts between two parties, but among three”
“In wars between the people and a regime of extreme reaction…both communists and non-communists united to fight the dictatorship, with each group hoping later to establish its preferred form of government (dictatorship of the proletariat or republican democracy).
In these conflicts, once the dictator was overthrown, the Soviets knew they eventually had the upper hand because their supported group had outside support, whereas the moderates would be (abandoned by the United States who had been propping up the dictator) forced to fend for themselves. With all factors being equal, the extra force could make a minority within the initial revolt, grab power after all was done.
Back then, it was America supporting the regimes of extreme reaction; the Soviets were seen the revolutionaries. Today it is Russia and Iran, who support these dictatorial regimes, and moderates and a few islamists who are those engaged in making change.
The lesson taught was that once Assad falls, without America’s strong continued support of the moderates, the otherwise strong support of Saudi’s Sunnis behind the Islamists will tip the balance to their favor. For as in the past, when moderates took on an American supported regime of extreme reaction, and the communists joined in the fight, it became viewed as part of the bipolar tug of war between the Communists and Capitalistic USA. Therefore even though the moderates usually far outnumbered the splinter cells of Communists, because the ending conflict was deemed a Soviet victory over the US, the communists had tremendous clout and enough support to take over power.
This certainly makes Syria clear. In their battle against Assad, the Islamists supported by the Radical Sunni movements are few in number compared to the moderates who want a democratic republic after Assad leaves.
If Assad gets pushed out, the Islamists because of their unlimited funding and support can push themselves into power quickly, meanwhile the moderates sit around and try to figure out their next step. In that vacuum the organized faction always wins. The US then as now, could prevent this from happening by throwing its weight behind the moderates after the dictator is removed by being a counterbalancing force.
Our success in Western Europe after the Second World War by doing just that, never translated itself afterwards over to East Asia, Africa, or Central America. Instead of immediately inserting ourselves as a civilian presence when moderates and radicals toppled a regime, we sat on our hands, and only later would then send military hardware in our feeble attempt to contain the outbreak our own inaction created.
The lesson for the US is that we really need to not focus so much first on the war itself and then immediately extricate ourselves after the conflict when we are needed most, but we actually we need to use our debacle in Iraq as a self-taught lesson to create a civilian team we can move in at a moment’s notice with all the backing and assistance exhibited by the Marshall Plan, to quickly mend broken services, return to normalcy, and stifle the unrest that allows civil wars to fester and continue among both factions of winners long after the regime of extreme reaction is overthrown.
We need to focus on reacting immediately with ways to get a nation quickly back on its own feet as soon as the Dictator is disposed.
Our opponents of 40 years ago figured this out. If we can learn this, that may be the most valuable legacy the Brezhnev era can ever pass on to us.
it is probably time to discuss this.
For years we have quietly known and accepted the negatives of having an NSA. Things like we need it for our protection, or it makes things safer, tended to overide our fears that they know too much already, and I can’t do anything in private anymore…
We accepted that as progress.
However, when you have an organization so secret, that members of Congress are shocked to find out what it is doing, that no one knows who is authorizing who gets spied upon and what, that when brought before the courts for overstepping the Constitution, it can’t be prosecuted because a) it operates under “secret” laws, b) with “secret operations”, c) authorized by “secret courts” …. it is time to shut the entire operation down.
Why do we have the NSA when we have the CIA and the FBI. The FBI covers domestic spying. The CIA covers international spying. So, unless we find out that there are aliens and the NSA is really running the world while we think otherwise, then it probably ought to go.
I find it interesting that those on the far right, and those on the far left are the most outraged by this disclosure. We’ve been stating that news on this blog after the story was broken back in 2007-8 and not one press person cared. I supposed the AP Story opened their eyes this time. Struggling to put a finger on why, I came up with the theory primarily by looking at Congress, that it is the libertarians on left and right who are against, and the conformist, primarily in the center who are acceptive. So this gives us a split where the bottom third and the top third of the political body are opposed to the middle third… If you look at Congress that is exactly how it splits up. Moderates are pro domestic spying, the libertarians are not.
Probably similar is the theory that those beholden to corporate interests are pro-spying, after all, that is normal in the corporate environment; interoffice spying is not limited by any judicial system because it is deemed to be private. Those aghast, tend to fight corporate intrusion from their original political perspective, either left of right.
What the NSA does, watch everything to discern what is happening to increase its chances of survival, is not new. Intelligence has been the secret success of many an empire. Knowing what someone will do before they do it, is pretty comfortable in a world where in a day, we probably pass within 10 feet of 10,000 people (that includes inside our vehicles).
That is what all governments with the capacity, do. The biggest argument against it, is that it is un-American. Sure we have the “ability” to do it, but do we have the restraint, not to…
America has always been ruled by restraint. When Washington was entreated to be the King, he restrained and said no. When the heads of Europe all bet that Washington would invent a method to stay in power, he restrained, and government turned over peacefully. When the US was left in charge of a broken Europe, it put it back together and went home. The only country to invade another and give it back willingly to its original owners.
We had a scare in Boston a while back. Did the NSA protect us then? It’s a secret, no one knows. In Newtown 26 bodies littered the floor of an elementary school. Did the NSA protect us then? When a gunman burst into Aurora firing into the audience, did the NSA protect us then? When Gabby Gifford took a bullet, where was the NSA? Did the NSA protect us then?
That is the point. We are always in danger. But our personal lives are more at risk if our private information should fall into a competitors hands, than being victim of a terrorist. In Boston just 2 people died. In Newton 26. But each and every one of us, is at risk that selective information from ones past, can be used in secret to smear each and every one of us, should it fall into the wrong hands.
What would happen if we shut the entire agency known as the NSA down? A big nothing. They overstepped. It is not knee-jerking anger to respond “Shut them down right now!” It it calm, cool reasoning tipping the balance, that points out simply that is the right way to go.
Courtesy of lolsnaps.com
When attacking an enemy it is best to hit them at their most vulnerable part….
With North Korea, that would be to sever the support their leader and the military gets from it’s people. The entire extravaganza is being perpetuated for domestic consumption.. There are some serious cracks appearing in the North’s support for the “kid”. And why wouldn’t there be? What legitimacy does he bring as the head of state?
In the past year, things have gotten worse for the citizens of North Korea. This saber rattling is the “kid’s” last chance to lead… Rumors abound of multiple future plots being devised against him….
It is in the US and the rest of the world’s best interest to make this dissolution happen. Someone less irrational, smarter, and a lot more stable would make everything in that region settled and stable.
Aggressive Military action has the opposite effect. When the state is threatened people flock to the leader. Just look how democrats flocked to George W. Bush. Engaging the “kid” in military fashion will solidify the people behind him….
Our goal is to have the people solidify behind someone else. At the same time, keep our military prowess at top proficiency to prevent others from taking us on simply thinking we are weak….
Here is how.
If provoked, we take out North Korea’s air defenses. Then we airdrop food by having it parachuted into starving neighborhoods with the words, from your friends the United States of America….
We do and the point gets made.;. Gee North Korea, if you’d just take care of the “kid”, your lives will quickly get a lot better.
The only recourse the kid would have, would be… see I made them drop food for you….
North Korean’s aren’t dumb. Just knowing that the world is pulling for them to rid the “kid” might be enough to make one of those current rumors swirling around the impoverished countryside, turn into reality…..
A. A woman, with two small children, separated from an abusive husband. He has just started violating a no-contact order, and is making threats over the upcoming divorce.
B. A father of three boys, married, lives in rural area. Owns 97 acres of woods. Has a two mile driveway. Then fifteen miles of one lane road to the nearest major highway, whose junction is 38 miles from the nearest police station.
C. A 15 year old urban dropout, who was jumped and beaten up badly when he was twelve in an act of random violence; he was in the wrong place when they were looking for something to do, allegedly to “teach him a lesson”; the reality? There was no reason for it.
D. A thirty year old man, who was raped over 100 times while a child by a neighbor, and that neighbor now is politically well connected, who boasts on talk radio of how big his arsenal is….
E. A bright, attractive professional woman of twenty five, who has a high powered job, lives alone out of necessity and convenience, lives on an international schedule, enters and exits often between midnight and 6 am.
F. A 43 year old mother, who at 18 became state’s witness and testified against her acquaintance and he, is being freed tomorrow, sentence done….
G. A 62 year old pill popping DJ, who excels at conservative talk radio, by stirring up hate, spinning lies into truth, and coining derogative names to be recycled by bitter old white me, like “femminazi’s”….
H. Pastor Washington, who has taken the calling of walking around the inner city on very cold nights, and persuade homeless people to swallow their pride and come inside to a warm shelter…
I. One day, you?
As predicted in a post below, Iran is using the cover of Gaza and was caught removing spent fuel from the Russian reactor that had been signed over to it.
Most people believe Iran is so significantly behind in the spent fuel enrichment process, so this matters little. However, the comment that was given to the press by the security officer at the site was rather interesting in its bluntness.
“Pay no attention. Everything is under control here.”
“That is exactly what I would say if I was up to no good…
Here are excerpts quoted from Reuters in the Chicago Tribune….
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report two days ago on Iran’s nuclear program that fuel was unloaded from the Bushehr plant in October and transferred to a spent fuel pond. Russia is required to import the spent fuel back into its country.
It was plugged into Iran’s national grid in September 2011. it reached 100% just months ago, August 30th. Iran did not give a reason for this past Friday’s fuel removal at the 1,000-megawatt reactor near the Gulf city of Bushehr. A diplomat familiar with the issue said it meant the plant was shut down.
Early last year, Iran said it was having to remove fuel for tests.
Mark Fitzpatrick, a nuclear expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think-tank, said that early fuel removal at Bushehr in the “worst case” might provide weapons-usable plutonium.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, suggested “It is a “very normal technical procedure (during the transfer) … to make sure every safety aspect is taken into consideration,” he told Reuters, without giving details.
Bottom line: a nuclear plant that has been under construction for 37 years, finally goes on line 2 months ago; within months it apparently gets shut down, and while all eyes are on Gaza, the spent fuel is removed under only Iranian supervision….
Of course it could be nothing to worry about…. but on the other hand, it could also be that the timing of Gaza’s rocket attacks upon Israel, was anything but randomly decided.
kavips 