Archive for June, 2008

Obama and Israel

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Obama gave a speech to the AIPAC meeting today. That is a very pro-Israel group which has been accused of various conspiracies over the years. Since the Constitution preserves the right to “petition the government for redress of grievances“, the complaints are baloney tinged with anti-Semitism. The speech is discussed here and some serious points are raised. A lot of the people around Obama are pro-Palestinian and some are openly anti-Semetic. He has some ‘splaining to do.

In his speech, Obama said all the right things, like “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and undivided”

Now he is, as usual, backpedaling. He meant not divided by barbed wire. He also used an ominous word in his speech. He said the Palestinian state had to have “contiguous” borders. The 2000 agreement which Arafat spurned had a corridor connecting Gaza to the West Bank. The corridor crossed Israeli territory. “Contiguous” sounds like a new condition. I don’t trust him.

A preview of the presidential campaign

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Senator Obama’s speech last night, after he gained the majority of delegates for the Democratic nomination even while losing both primaries, is analyzed here and shows a preview of what to expect this fall. His radical associations with Weathermen terrorist BIll Ayers and race-baiting Reverend Wright and Father Pfleger are off-limits. That’s religion which is unfair to consider.

The suggestion that he visit Iraq to see what has happened since his two-day visit in 2006 ? No, McCain needs to tour the US.

Maybe if he went to Pennsylvania and met the man who lost his job but can’t even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one, he’d understand that we can’t afford four more years of our addiction to oil from dictators. That man needs us to pass an energy policy that works with automakers to raise fuel standards, and makes corporations pay for their pollution, and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future—an energy policy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced. That’s the change we need.

OK. Here are two items before us for consideration. Our addiction to oil from foreign dictators might be reduced if we drilled for oil in our own country, like ANWAR and the coastal shelf. Brazil has leased most of the world’s deep ocean drilling rigs to look for oil off its own shores. Why can’t we drill in our known reserves ?

Nuclear power provides over 75% of France’s electricity. Why are we not building lots of nuclear power plants ?

Canada has vast oil reserves, much of it in oil shale and tar sands. Why aren’t we developing refineries and exploration techniques to use this source from a close and friendly country that is not a “dictatorship” ? The Democrats in Congress have passed legislation that prohibits the government from using alternative fuels that have a larger carbon footprint than conventional oil. Greenhouse gases trump economics.

I wonder how willing the oil companies, which have world-wide operations, will be to turn over their profits to Obama ? I suspect they will simply move away, leaving us to get our energy from president Obama’s speeches.

How much success has Obama had in those states with economic troubles ? Not that much.

Clinton’s popular-vote victories thus far include the three biggest Electoral College prizes: California (a solid Democratic state), New York (another sure bet for the Democrats), and Texas (a solid Republican state). (Although Obama won more delegates in Texas, Clinton’s vote total exceeded Obama’s by nearly 100,000 votes.) However, her victories also include several of the largest swing states that both parties will be battling to win in November: Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as wins in the disputed Florida and Michigan primaries. As a result, Clinton’s 20 states represent more than 300 Electoral College votes while Obama’s 28 states and the District of Columbia represent only 224 Electoral College votes.

Obama won the nomination in caucuses, usually dominated by the more left wing sector of the Democratic Party, and early primaries before his awkward associations came to light. He hasn’t won a primary, except for Oregon, in the last month of the campaign. Oregon is a reliably Democrat state. The question is, can he win Ohio ?

The Left supports the troops

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

The Left supports the troops as long as they refuse to fight. This is the sort of thing we get from The American Prospect, a left-wing magazine:

A striking number of officers have chosen to leave the armed forces–by deciding not to re-enlist after completing their official military obligation, by turning to civilian lawyers when they are told to deploy to Iraq, and, increasingly, through desertion. Among those who remain in the military, morale is low, largely because of the damage caused by Iraq.

How many Army officers have deserted ? She writes:

More than 25,000 soldiers and officers have deserted since 2003; more than 200 have sought refuge in Canada.

I would certainly like to see evidence of this number. I simply don’t believe it. But this is how te Left supports the troops.

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.

News from Afghanistan

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

The Taliban is at the “tipping point” of losing the war to the allies and the Afghans. So much for the theory that Afghanistan was lost because of Iraq.

The key to the success may be the increasing use of Predator drones over Pakistan, which do not require permission and are deniable as they fly very high and have enormous range. The BRitish are using another vehicle:

They have also been subjected to strikes by the RAF’s American-made Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the guided Royal Artillery missile system, which have both proved a major battlefield success.

The future of this sort of asymmetrical war lies with technology as well as the COIN tactics of General Petraeus. In the 1980s, the Mujahaddeen told the CIA “We are not afraid of the Russians but we are very afraid of their helicopters.” The next generation consists of UAVs that can loiter at high altitude for 24 hours looking for targets.

An MQ-1B Predator unmanned aerial vehicle based at Balad AB Iraq engaged three anti-Iraqi forces in the process of placing an improvised explosive device along a road near Balad Air Base Monday night, 29 March 2004. The Predator launched an AGM-114 Hellfire missile against the group. The Predator monitored the three individuals for about half an hour while they used a pick ax to dig a hole in the road, placed an explosive round in the hole and strung wires from the hole to a ditch on the side of the road. When it was clear the individuals were placing an IED, the Predator launched the 105-pound Hellfire missile, resulting in the deaths of all three insurgents.

They didn’t hear it or know it was watching them !

A pretty good profile of Bill Clinton

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Bill Clinton has been a mixed blessing for his wife’s campaign this year. He draws crowds of Democrats and he is without doubt a brilliant man, but he has been clumsy and, as the author of this Vanity Fair piece says, “he is the bride at every wedding he attends and the corpse at every funeral.” Vanity Fair has declined as a useful publication since the editors got a terminal case of BDS but they are still the best at gossip. Read and enjoy.

An astonishing turnaround at the Washington Post

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

We have been watching a turnaround in Iraq the past six months or so. Now it has spread to the Washington Post !When Mr. Obama floated his strategy for Iraq last year, the United States appeared doomed to defeat. Now he needs a plan for success.That is nothing less than stunning, and a big problem for you-know-who.

Why we fight

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

 Why we fight

In World War II, there were posters and even movies with the subtitle, “Why we fight.” In Iraq, this slide show from, of all places, the Washington Post, might qualify. The Iraqi Army is taking over more and more of the security burden and that is as it should be. This is the result.