(disclaimer: may not be in the exact chronological order, and will not list each and every act of terror, but a good list is linked here)

*click!*
The Olympics in the 70s.
*click!*
The US Embassy in Iran.
*click!*
Marine Barracks, Beruit
*click!*
Leo Klingenhoffer on the Achilles Lauro
*click!*
Lockerbee, Scotland.
*click!*
Discos in Germany where US Service members congregate
*click*
Bombing of embassies in Africa,
Swarming over the “Mog”
USS COLE
9/11
Madrid
7/7
*Click!*
*CLICK!*
*CLICKKKK!*
Read the rest of this entry »

Eagle 1 quote Ralph Peters here. Something about killing the bad guys when engaged in a war. Sounds like a tried and true technique, strategy and tactic, from well before the US of A was even a political twinkle in any one’s eye…

About a year or so ago, a gentleman came into my place of work to have us do some for him. He was older, and it was about the time we had seen the “Mission Accomplished” banner, and yet, we were still having internal security problems in Iraq.

As we talked, he said something, so I asked “the question” and yes, he was a Vet, in fact, US Army and a vet of not only Okinawa, but also he went to Japan as part of the occupation force.

I asked him what kind of problems they had with internal security. He told me pretty much none. He said as they marched to the town they would set up camp near and administer, the streets were clear, with only Japanese policemen at each intersection. As they came by, the police would come to attention and salute the formation as they passed. He said sometimes you might see a door on the houses cracked slightly open, and several sets of eyes peering out, but it was orderly and the population went about the business of rebuilding a nation.

He did say one time someone was killed, so the order went out to the locals: You have three days to turn in your weapons. After that, if you have a weapon, you will be shot on the spot.

How did it work? They came and they turned in any and everything that was a weapon, including the many heirloom samurai swords and daggers, some of great age, but…the bottom line, they complied to the letter. He said they never found anyone with a weapon and they never had any issues of anyone being attacked again.

This also, is the connection, as to how so many fine swords ended up in the hands of the vets after WWII. They were each allowed to go to the turn ins and take, for their personal property, one rifle, one pistol and one sword as the spoils of war.

Does this go against our 2nd Amendment rights? Yes, but then again, it was a necessary measure, to ensure the safety of our troops, and we took it.

Consider Iraq today….

Trackbacked to:
EagleSpeak

Yesterday, I drafted a piece “Iraq: The Democrats 21st Century Cambodia?” I cross posted the piece at Third World County andI received a comment that linked to an editorial by Gordon Dillow in the Orange County Register from April 2005, which was written 30 years to the month after the final US pullout from South Vietnam.

Don’t take my word for this coming human rights disaster (funny how the Democrats hold themselves up as the champions of this issue, isn’t it?), read about a man and his father in the following editorial, then consider the human wreckage to have and to hold, when we pull out of Iraq, thinking it will stop the Islamofacsists from demanding more and more, until we are nothing left…

This month will mark the 30th anniversary of a shameful chapter in our nation’s history. Thirty years ago we abandoned a longtime ally, the Republic of (South) Vietnam.

And with it, along with millions of others, we abandoned Quang X. Pham’s dad.

Quang is an old friend of mine, a 40-year-old Mission Viejo businessman who came to the U.S. as a boy refugee from Vietnam and later served as a U.S. Marine helicopter pilot in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His father, Pham Van Hoa, now deceased, was a U.S.-trained South Vietnamese Air Force pilot who spent 12 years in a communist “re-education” camp because he refused to leave his country when the North Vietnamese army swept through South Vietnam in April 1975 – this while America, after investing 58,000 of its own sons’ lives, stood by and washed its hands of the entire bloody and tragic affair.

And even though he became an American who loved his country and served it courageously in uniform, for many years that abandonment rankled Quang’s heart. It rankled mine, too.

Quang has written a new book about his father, and about his own experiences as a refugee who became an American Marine. It’s called “A Sense of Duty: My Father, My American Journey,” published by Ballantine Books (you can get more information at www.asenseofduty.com), and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand what the Vietnam War meant to some of the people who suffered the most because of it – that is, the people of South Vietnam. It’s powerful, and moving, and in it Quang tries to dispel a myth about Vietnam that still persists.

The myth is that guys like his dad didn’t fight for their country.

“I just want to see South Vietnamese (military men) like my father acknowledged,” Quang told me. “Not made into heroes or anything, but just acknowledged for what they did. I wanted to set the record straight.”

Certainly the casualty numbers tell a story that’s far different from the myth. The South Vietnamese armed forces lost a total of about 250,000 men killed in the war – a number that, as a percentage of national population, was about 50 times greater than American deaths.

And the numbers of the maimed were even greater. Ten years ago, as a reporter for the Register, I went back to Vietnam to cover the 20th anniversary of the end of the war, and everywhere I went I would meet aging former ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers who were missing arms or legs or eyes, many of them reduced to beggary because the communist government offered no pensions or even menial jobs for former ARVNs. When they found out I’d been an American soldier in the war they would often break out yellowed, crumbling, long-hidden South Vietnamese military ID cards and tell me, “I was with you, I was with you.”

And they were.

Now, I know some of my fellow American Vietnam veterans will disagree with me on this subject. They’ll call me up and tell me bitter tales about “Marvin the ARVN,” about South Vietnamese M-16s that were in perfect condition because “they’d never been fired, and were only dropped once,” about South Vietnamese corruption and incompetence and cowardice. Certainly there was no shortage of such things, particularly in the ARVN’s politicized upper ranks.

But don’t tell me – or Quang X. Pham – that 250,000 guys died with no brave men among them. Don’t try to tell guys who got their arms or legs blown off that they didn’t fight hard enough. Don’t think that a lot of guys like Quang’s father didn’t have a sense of duty and honor, even as they lost their war, and their country, and languished in brutal communist prison camps for years and years and years.

In the coming weeks you’ll probably see and hear a lot of retrospectives about the Vietnam War, some of them truthful, many of them media myths perpetuated by people who were never even there – the same sort of myths that even now are being created about the Iraq war and the Americans who’ve been fighting it. More on that in a future column.

But if you think that the Vietnam War was strictly an American war, if you think that the people of South Vietnam weren’t worth fighting for, or with, then I have a suggestion.

Talk to a guy like Quang X. Pham.

And ask him about his dad.

Read the book. See history throught the eyes of one who has been there and project into the future as to what might be as a result of taking counsel of our fears.

Update 11/17/2206:

From John of Castle Arrgghhh!, an email of an Army Officer, who has had mulitple tour in Iraq. He sees something over there and it says we’re about to do what this post is about, in the minds of the Iraqis, friend and foe alike, from David J. Baer, CPT(P), IN, 3/2/6 IA MiTT Team Chief:

By all means send my note on to his family. Before I got this job on the MiTT, I was a mechanized infantry company commander in southeast Baghdad and I lost two soldiers so I know what it’s like to write letters of condolence and what kind of loss his family must be feeling. You always hear certain people in Congress talk about leaving Iraq because of the horrible casualties we are taking and whatnot. However, they never seem to be the ones with family over here doing the grunt work. And as for casualties, each loss is a blow, but overall we have been extremely lucky to have as few deaths as we have had since 2003. No one in D.C. ever seems to ask guys like me what we think because they know that we would tell them that we have to stay until the job is done. If you want to win in Iraq, you have to take the gloves off like we did in OIF I and OIF II. We were aggressive and violently kinetic. It worked and the bad guys were deathly afraid of us and the people of Iraq respected us. Now we use kid gloves and the bad guys walk all over us and the people of Iraq don’t think they should support us because we may pack up and leave and then they would be the object of reprisals. It’s the hard right (lots of offensive action and firepower and not afraid to use it in a city) or the easy wrong (the kinder, gentler approach to dealing with terrorists to try and avoid casualties). I know which one works and which one doesn’t. I know which one will solve this “problem”. It will break a few eggs, but in the end we will have an omelet that will be passably good and tasty.

How about them apples? Act strong, be respected. Act weak and suffer attacks.

H/T: Third World County reader DC

Trackbacked at: CAstle ARRGGHHH!!!

Recently, the discussion was about the Tet Offensive and how the events of February, 1968 related to current day situations was posted on this blog here and here.

Possibly now, it is the moment to get ahead of the power curve and discuss the big picture that happened 30 years ago, and see if it may relate to what happens next….

So, Richard Nixon was President. The Democrats had control of the Congress. The President, as he promised in his election campaign was pulling our troops out of ground combat positions, yet left the promise of support for the South Vietnamese Army, using the strategy of “Vietnamization,” a process of turning the war over to the ARVNs, as they were able to handle it.

Effectively, in 1972, our ground combat forces were out, safe advisers left the ARVNs. While the president is the Commander-in-Chief, Congress controls the money (you’d think people would quit accusing the presidents, of any time, of what goes on with the budget, but, once more, I digress). So Congress cut off the funding for the supporting arms and the supplies from America going to South Vietnam. Now, the study of history over the ages shows the winner of wars is the country who has the best logistics and can out-produce the adversary in the fight. When “we” (the Democratic Congress) pulled appropriations from the war support effort for our allies, they sentenced them to loss of the war, and, in many cases, death in a very literal sense.

So in 1975, the NVA rolled into Saigon and raised the North Vietnamese flag in that city. It was over. What next? The Communist rebels in Cambodia, led by Pol Pot now had nothing to fear and a totalitarian government came into power and the killing fields became a part of life, as about 1/2 of the population of Cambodia was killed it’s own.

Why did the conquest of South Vietnam and the mass murders happen across the border? There was no nation with the power to let them know this wasn’t acceptable.

What does this mean today?

We already know there is simmering hate in Iraq between the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds. We have not yet been able to help them understand there’s a better way to solve issues than to murder 75 people a day, using very brutal means.

Add to this, there is at least one neighboring country, Iran, already stirring the pot, for for us to have an ally, let alone a foothold in the region, keeps them in check, unable to carry out their desires to control much of the region. Syria is a player, too, but seem to at least be keeping their head down and themselves out of the media coverage.

So, the time may come, if the Democrats can strong arm their agenda to withdraw, whether by getting the President to acquiesce to this via the “bi-partisan” Iraq Working Committee, or by the pulling of appropriations for any support of our troops. The Department of Defense will end up with no choice to bring the troops hone, or at least out of the battle zone of Iraq.

My prediction: The Sunnis, having been in power for so many years, used to being able to, even as a minority, rape the other cultural groups of the country, literally and figuratively, feeling they have some right to murder and torture as they feel. So, the Sunnis will come back with a vengance at the Kurds and Shiites. Bloodshed…and much of it.

Add to this the military power to the East, the Iranians. They, with their affinity for the Shiites, the majority culture, will now roll across the border and become directly engaged with the Sunnis. Bloodshed.

The Kurds, who have rebuilt much of the infrastructure to the north, and are already prospering from the oil flowing, will most likely get attacked by the Sunnis and Shiites, and the Iranians, as they have valuable resources and are using them.

If we thought we stepped into a hornet’s nest in 2003, we haven’t seen anything that will be like this. The locals of the area will feel empowered to kill and plunder in even more horrific manners and scales than they have, for they now see “we” (and I substantially contribute this to the Democrats and the Liberals) don’t have the stomach for it. Much like asking someone to be an EMT and all they can do at any car accident is to stand by, while people bleed to death, throwing up. Those people, politically, are the Democrats and they, in this scenario, would decide it’s better to legislate against people having car accidents, rather than finding those who can take care of such messy conditions, and wait until things are safe to toss their cookies.

More and more, I am coming to see the Democrats in modern times are the party of death and destruction, with pools of blood running from their hands. They do this, not because it’s the best course of action for the rest of the world, or the country, but so they can ascend to positions of power, where they can rent the Lincoln bedroom out to friends to raise money, so they can buy their way back into power.

I can only figure their deep dissatisfaction with the War on Terror, is they see the revenues of President Bush’s tax cuts flowing towards Iraq, and not into their hands, to bribe the voters of the next election with their largess.

The Democrats and Liberals have never acknowledged they had a part in approximately 3M deaths in SE Asia after 1972. They cannot, for they would have to face their part in mass murder.

They stand on the edge of history and are prepared, with a complete disregard for history, their own, and that of world events, ready to loose the executioners in the Middle East, first, and later in Africa and Europe. They will then turn their face from the horror and go back to their fund raisers, not even consciously aware of their shameful part in the deaths.

My gallows humor would be to think maybe they are thinking of this outcome as a help for the environment, for after all, it’s people and the demands they place on industry, that cause greenhouse gasses and causes desertification and the now, the acidification of the oceans. If we have a few less million of us to cause pollution, let alone perpetuate the species, then we’ll not have to worry about running the air conditioners quite so long at the homes and offices of liberals.

Update 14 Nov 2006: See this follow up post, too!

Cross posted at:

Third World County

Trackbacked at:

Eagle Speak

I don’t get it. A national level politician makes a statement in clear English, and, those he spoke off take offense.

The media and the staffers, now, being smarter than us troglodyte type people who can only work at McDonalds or get stuck in Iraq, have to tell us what he really said. Could it be the liberalized education system, more enthralled with telling children to feel, rather than know things (like the English language), has failed us and made us too stupid? I guess we didn’t study hard enough to know what he said wasn’t what he said…our bust, sorry….

But, the pattern I see is a national leader makes a statement in public and, when pinned down by the fire from those offended, he sneaks off to offer an apology in a completely inappropriate forum.

Senator Durbin is the first one I’m talking about. Now, Senator Kerry, makes a public statement and follows it up with more public statements telling us to just swallow the joke he bungled (jokes he loves so well), but, now posts a statement on his web site saying he apologizes for his offense “to anyone he offended” (Yeah, not like I think I did, but if it offended you, then I’m sorry).

Let me see: Durbin doesn’t go to GTMO and face those he called Nazis, but goes to a local (read: Friendly) veterans group in his district, and says he’s sorry to WWII vets. Kerry says lots in public and defends himself in public, but places a post on a website that says something differenet from what he personally is heard saying.

Yep, don’t blame President Bush, Senator Kerry, blame the poor job of liberals in completely brainwashing entire generations so we’d know you didn’t mean what you said.

“I apoligize to no one for my remarks.”

That one will go down in history. I’m sure all the mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, brothers siters, grnadmothers (Nancy Pelosi?), and grandfathers will accept this….

Bizzare, strange and, if it wasn’t for the understanding that some people still think like people did in before the Age of Enlightenment, it wouldn’t be comprehensible!

In the UK, the head Islamic Cleric says it’s OK to kill gays…

*BUT…*

Palestinian Gays fleeing to Israel!

Hmmmmmm….There are gays among the Muslims are….figuring out that their “enemy” will treat them with more respect and most likely save their lives….

If enough Muslims, who are gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that, move into Israel, maybe Israel will be saved from extermination!

Just thinkin’…

From Part II of the series, I stated on 10/03/2006, as the Mark Foley scandal began:

I will, once more, predict (and I’m certainly no oracle), that, as one TV correspondent says last night, they are getting many emails from other pages. It is only realistic to believe, that the subjects being discussed in those emails coming in will include human beings, most likely almost exclusively male, and, there ceratinly may be some Democrats in the bunch. Whether that is disclosed before or after the elections next month isn’t necessarily the issue, but the fact that it’s a human condition in the sexually related society we live in. The “backsplatter” will get those who are making exceptionally bad (and in some cases, illegal) choices, but it isn’t reasonable to brand everyone of their party as participating in the same behavior.

Well, it didn’t pop out quite as I envisioned, but…James Webb seems to have quite the active imagination.

I’d be willing to bet many conservative minded Virginians, who may have been leaning towards a “punishment vote” mentaility will come back and decide to cast one for George.

How will the Dems portray this one? “He only wrote about it, so it’s a freedom of speech issue! Nah! Nah! Nah!” If that’s so, then I guess text messaging 18 or older used to be pages before, but are not now and are not minors anymore when it occured, should similarly be consider the same? Nope…not via the media’b’Allah. You see, it will come down to the party who supports the organization that supports the ACLU as opposed to one from the party who says such things are a danger and asks for laws to protect people from it.

Anyhow, I tried to warn the Democrats, but no, they didn’t listen and all I did was recall some not so distant history of the “culture of corruption screeching to try and help.

Geez…’nuff said

H/T: Right Wing Nation

Can they think of things more disgusting to make money on? Response from “Down Under”:

Oh, yes, someone can….

Trackbacked at: The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns