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photo courtesy of Uncle Remus
From David Letterman’s Thursday Late Show Top 10 List:
Signs Muammar Qaddafi is hiding in your neighborhood:
Number 2) Neighbor keeps parking his tank on your Prius
Number 3) Monday: Quiet; Tuesday: Quiet; Wednesday: Mobs of Pitchfork-Toting Libyan Rebels; Thursday: Quiet
Number 4) Navy SEALs requested permission to turn your kid’s tree house into a sniper’s nest
From the comments on Exiledonline.com:
10. Paul | August 23rd, 2011 at 2:00 pm
So in the span of less than one decade the United States has installed pro American regimes in two of the biggest oil producing countries in the world. The Neo-Con goal after 9/11 was to turn the middle east into friendly liberal democratic regimes. Well so far, that is happening. It’s popular to write about the end of the american empire these days, however, I see a lot of wins.
THE WAR NERD: LIBYA: THE BERB-BURB ALLIANCE
By Gary Brecher
As far as I can tell, there were a few big reasons, starting with geography. They were close to Tripoli to start with. It’s a long drive along the Med from Benghazi to Tripoli, and a lot longer when you’re being shelled. Zawiya is a close to Tripoli, which is bad when Qaddafi sends his SP artillery over there but suddenly becomes a huge advantage when your guys dig in, hold on, use that NATO air support and start picking off his rocket batteries. Once you’ve done that, neutralized his advantage in heavy armor, it’s infantry on infantry and I haven’t seen one single sign that any of Qaddafi’s units had any stomach for close-in fighting. And that includes the “elite” Khamis Brigade, under the command of Son #29 or whatever. “Elite”! I think in terms of Qaddafi’s army, that means they showed up at roll call more often than not. Supposedly Qaddafi was using his Sahel mercs, the only real fighters in his forces, as MPs: They had orders to shoot anybody running from the front. That works, as long as you can keep the troops in their trenches, but bad troops can never fight once the line is breached, and they’ll run through fire to get away—they’ll be braver running away than they’d ever be attacking. One of the longterm weirdnesses of military history.
Antiwar.com
Libya: Obama’s Pyrrhic Victory
Our troubles have just begun
by Justin Raimondo
Aug. 24, 2011
Juan Cole derides the oil angle as a “conspiracy theory”: funny, he didn’t hesitate in blaming Greedy Capitalists for the plundering of Iraq’s oil, now did he? But of course the Libyan rebels are already threatening Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian oil concerns with expulsion from the country for not recognizing the new government in advance of their still-to-be-confirmed victory. Whom does Professor Cole expect will take their places?
This is “progressive” politics, Juan Cole-style: an international campaign to install crony capitalism by force. Cole once made the mistake of citing me as a source, and had to do penance by allowing some incredibly pretentious fellow professor to post a long screed on his blog explaining just why Justin Raimondo is a reactionary tool of the capitalist class and no one should ever listen to a thing he says. Look who’s the reactionary tool of the capitalist class now!
To see Professor Cole on Maddow’s war-fest – smirking as he exulted in the advance of the rebel army – was to see, super-imposed on the television screen, the ghostly figure of Bill Kristol smirking his way through an interview on Fox News, hailing the “great victory” of the “Iraqi people.”
Triumph in Libya? Not So Fast, NATO
by Ivan Eland
August 24, 2011
In fact, the Libyan conflict demonstrates that the U.S. is perfecting the technique of using ragtag local ground forces to fix enemy regime forces in place so that its air power can pummel them into sawdust. Previously, the United States had demonstrated this capability using the Kosovo Liberation Army to wrest Kosovo from Serbia in 1999 and using the Northern Alliance to take over Afghanistan after 9/11. The successful invasion of Iraq also was conducted using smaller quantities of forces on the ground — this time U.S. forces — in combination with the employment of massive U.S. air power. This model seems to promise winning brushfire wars without much cost in either blood or treasure.
Of course, the quagmires that Afghanistan and Iraq have become should indicate that, in many cases, this model is flawed. Taking over the country is one thing and ruling it is quite another. As with those two conflicts, if guerrilla war, tribal civil war, or general chaos results in Libya, the world will look to NATO to solve the problem. Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule” — “if you break it, you’ve bought it” — is a truism in foreign policy circles but is nevertheless regularly ignored.
I recently spent a rainy morning at the Rodin Museum. The museum is located in Rodin’s old mansion and gardens located in the 7th Arr. of Paris.
Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917). The museum contains thousands of peices of which perhaps a couple hundred are on display. Bronze, marble, concrete, plaster casts.
I took a lot of photos that day. Here is a sample of the treasure trove. As always, click to enlarge. (Wave the cursor in front of photo to see its reference number.) Have fun!
The Clear Case for the Gas Tax
Published: August 15, 2011
Excise taxes on motor fuels account for nearly nine-tenths of the $37 billion trust fund. The fund has lately required annual infusions from the Treasury Department to break even, and its obligations are growing. The gas tax has not increased since 1993, and its buying power, accounting for inflation, is now only 11 cents. Meanwhile, Americans are driving many more miles, placing greater stresses on the highway system.
When state taxes are added in, Americans pay, on average, about 43 cents per gallon in taxes — or about one-eighth the total price at the pump. That’s still a bargain compared with other industrial countries. Across Europe, drivers pay twice what Americans do at the pump — and well over half of that is taxes. In Britain, the tax bite is more than $4 a gallon, or 10 times what Americans pay.
***
Yeah! Yeah!
Go nigga, raise hell!
Yeah! Yeah!
Raise hell!
Yeah! Yeah!
Go nigga, raise hell!
[Verse One: Lil' Fame]
The new single, kid get your shit mixed
Catch this new slug from the M.O.P. hitlist
It’s thorough for the cars, for the clubs, for the Jeeps
(For the fellas on the corner posted up 20 deep)
Oh, yeah! Here we go. I’ve been waiting for this.
The New Yorker finally published a semi-in-depth look at the Seal Team 6 Bin Laden raid (DEVGRU’s Operation Neptune’s Spear):
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_schmidle
On March 29th, McRaven brought the plan to Obama. The President’s military advisers were divided. Some supported a raid, some an airstrike, and others wanted to hold off until the intelligence improved. Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault.
Gates reminded his colleagues that he had been in the Situation Room of the Carter White House when military officials presented Eagle Claw—the 1980 Delta Force operation that aimed at rescuing American hostages in Tehran but resulted in a disastrous collision in the Iranian desert, killing eight American soldiers. “They said that was a pretty good idea, too,” Gates warned. He and General James Cartwright, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, favored an airstrike by B-2 Spirit bombers. That option would avoid the risk of having American boots on the ground in Pakistan. But the Air Force then calculated that a payload of thirty-two smart bombs, each weighing two thousand pounds, would be required to penetrate thirty feet below ground, insuring that any bunkers would collapse.
“That much ordnance going off would be the equivalent of an earthquake,” Cartwright told me. The prospect of flattening a Pakistani city made Obama pause. He shelved the B-2 option and directed McRaven to start rehearsing the raid.
Then just this past weekend:
31 Americans Killed as Taliban Shoot Down a Copter
August 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/asia/07afghanistan.html?_r=1&hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/asia/07afghanistan.html?_r=1&hp
http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2011/08/01/truth-emerges-about-ied-carnage/
Did a New Taliban Weapon Kill a Chopper Full of Navy SEALs?
The Chinook makes an appearance at the end of this video:
***
Schmidle, the New Yorker writer, added this yesterday:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/08/al-qaeda-and-the-seals.html
And then, this just in, Pepe Escobar:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MH10Df01.html
A close comparison between the Abbottabad and Wardak operations may raise a forest of eyebrows – apart from puncturing the myth of Navy SEALs as invincible, larger-than-life hunter-killers. In Abbottabad, as version after version of the raid was being fed to the media, it was finally established that a stealth helicopter simply “crashed”. No one knows if this was a pilot error or the helicopter was shot at.
The fact is the “crash” left an intact tail section of the stealth helicopter inside the compound – that tail section that left the Pentagon freaking out it would be “sold” to the Chinese by the Pakistanis. It’s quite a stretch to believe this crash generated no casualties – according to the Pentagon/White House spin.
And because the Bin Laden raid narrative was redacted over and over again, febrile minds are already linking these casualties to the Wardak death toll – implying the SEALs who actually died in the Abbottabad crash have now died “again” in Wardak. It doesn’t help that the initial versions of the Wardak hit (later corrected or redacted) identified the SEALs as the same ones who took part in the “kill Osama” raid.
And then this from one of the comments on the Danger Room blog post on chopper taketown:
The russians have since recovered Osama bin Laden’s body from the seafloor using an ROV. The russian nuclear hunter-killer sub that shadowed the US NAVY battle group recorded that event on sonar, when the late UBL was tossed overboard from the CVN’s deck. So the russians had the exact coordinates to begin with and now they have the sheik’s slightly decomposed body put on ice in the Kremlin basement. They will hand it over to saudi extremists for proper islamic burial, if the arabs effectively intervene to help stop the chechen islam extremists’ long-running and bloody insurgency in southern Russia.
The USA was a fool to drop the UBL corpse into the sea and the russian navy personnel are now overjoyed to have recovered that body, everybody speaks about that with pride. Russians feel tit-for-tat has now been achieved versus the USA. They were always ashamed to learn the US Navy and the CIA grave-robbed and desecrated the wreck of a 1970s sunken soviet submarine near Hawaii (the Operation Jennifer Azorean) and wanted at least poetic revenge for the disturned corpses of their comrades. This time russians robbed the american’s big trophy from the seafloor and so the match has been equalized!
Who do we believe? What should we believe? Ooooh….the Drama. This is better than the premier pf Jersey Shore goes to Italy.
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