Posts Tagged ‘Somalia’

I don’t know if I believe this story

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

UPDATE: David Pryce-Jones doesn’t believe it either.

This is an interesting story although pretty hard to believe. A group of Somali pirates hijack an Iranian ship before it enters the Suez Canal. They force it back to a small Somali port and hold it for ransom. They force open cargo containers, which are found to contain only sand. Then 16 pirates die mysteriously in the next few weeks.

Within a period of three days, those pirates who had boarded the ship and opened the cargo container with its gritty sand-like contents, all developed strange health complications, to include serious skin burns and loss of hair. And within two weeks, sixteen of the pirates subsequently died, either on the ship or on shore… …At this writing, the MV Iran Deyanat is at anchor, watched closely by American, French and Russian naval units.

[Russian sources claim she] was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore

Now what ?

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The Left only wants to invade where it doesn’t matter

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

We now have great enthusiasm on the left for an invasion of Burma. While Burma is a humanitarian disaster, it is of no strategic significance to us. George Bush I was pressed to land troops in Somalia in 1991 to protect food that was being stolen by gangs from UN famine relief efforts. The left was wholeheartedly in favor of that invasion.

Then Bill Clinton decided to do some nation building and got his nose bloodied when sluggish generals got too predictable and the Ranger force was ambushed. Clinton quickly beat a retreat and Osama bin Laden decided we were a paper tiger.

Clinton loudly criticized Bush’s reluctance to intervene in Bosnia, although, when it came his turn to use force, US soldiers were ordered to patrol with empty machine guns on their humvees. When three were captured, Clinton decided to avoid ground troops in any subsequent action against Serbia. The result was civilian casualties that no one complained about and bombs hitting the Chinese embassy. Notice that all these stories use “NATO” as the source of the bombs. Do you think the press would have been so delicate if George W Bush had been president ?

Even Foreign Affairs, no right wing source, called the policy what it was: Foreign Policy as Social Work. Democrats do not care about strategy and national security; they want to “do good works.” Consequently, when George W Bush takes on a foreign policy dilemma like Iraq was in 2001 and makes a decision to “cut the Gordan Knot,” he gets hammered by the Left.

Such is politics in the US in the 21st century. God knows what a president Obama would have in store for us. He would probably invade Canada to stop them from refining oil shale.

Hillary, Bosnia and Iraq

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Christopher Hitchens has some strong feelings about Hillary’s laughable Tuzla story. He doesn’t think it is funny, however, and says why. What is forgotten in the Democrat’s rush to abandon Iraq is how we get into these things in the first place. Saddam invaded Kuwait, imitating the Japanese who united the USA in 1941 by attacking Pearl Harbor. Had they nibbled away at Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, which is what they really wanted, they might very well have gotten away with it as we focused on Europe. What is different today is the influence of television.

We went into Somalia because CNN was showing thousands of starving Somalis and got out when Clinton’s attempt at nation-building caused casualties.  Why did we go into the Balkans ? CNN was showing the massacre of Bosnian civilians by Serbs. We had no strategic interest in Somalia or Bosnia. In fact, the first Bush administration made the decision to stay out of the war, a decision criticized by Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign. After he was elected, he dipped a toe in the water a couple of times and finally decided to bomb Serbia from high altitude to avoid casualties. The Serbs eventually got out but the example set by Clinton probably encouraged Saddam in his ambitions toward Kuwait.

What would happen if Obama were to be elected and a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq resulted ?

Zbigniew Brzezinski thinks he knows:

Contrary to Republican claims that our departure will mean calamity, a sensibly conducted disengagement will actually make Iraq more stable over the long term. The impasse in Shiite-Sunni relations is in large part the sour byproduct of the destructive U.S. occupation, which breeds Iraqi dependency even as it shatters Iraqi society. In this context, so highly reminiscent of the British colonial era, the longer we stay in Iraq, the less incentive various contending groups will have to compromise and the more reason simply to sit back. A serious dialogue with the Iraqi leaders about the forthcoming U.S. disengagement would shake them out of their stupor.

So, a pain-free withdrawal happens. Fine. What if he is wrong and genocide results ?

Kevin Drum is not concerned:

there’s no point in denying that U.S. withdrawal might lead to increased bloodshed in the short term. It most likely will. But it’s highly unlikely to lead to a catastrophic regional meltdown of the kind that the chaos hawks peddle on cable TV. What’s more, Brzezinski is also right that the risk of increased violence is inescapable at this point and, in fact, probably grows the longer we stay in Iraq. The events in Basra over the past week ought to make that clear.

What neither of them address is what happens when the TV networks show massive genocide of Sunnis followed by a Sunni intervention by the Saudis to avoid an Iranian takeover ?

They don’t say.

Obama in a clumsy interview says he would have a “strike force” ready to do whatever…. That sounds like “Blackhawk Down” all over again. If I were an Army ranger who had been yanked out of Iraq just as we were on the verge of winning, what do you think my attitude would be about being ordered back ?

Especially by a wimp like Obama ?