Grueling war, promises of peace, new attack — are we about to repeat this tired cycle?

By Victor Davis Hanson

After the Second World War, the United Kingdom and the United States once again disarmed at an astonishing rate. By June 1950, even tiny Communist North Korea had access to better tanks and jets than were available to nearby American occupation troops in Japan. Only the threat of a nuclear response kept Stalin’s divisions from walking into postwar Western Europe — mostly disarmed despite efforts to forge a conventional NATO deterrent.

Louis Johnson, briefly Truman’s secretary of defense, had sought to close down the Marine Corps altogether and dismantle as many army divisions as he could — all thought to be superfluous in the new postwar age of strategic air power and nuclear weapons following the defeat of the Axis powers. Admirals were up in arms over massive cancellations of shipbuilding and the mothballing of their fleets.

Then came the Communist-inspired effort to topple Greece and Turkey, the Communist takeover of China, the war in Korea, the brutal Soviet suppression of liberation movements in Eastern Europe, and the massive expansion of the Soviet Union’s conventional and nuclear forces. Only the rearming of the United States in the early 1950s, along with the new policy of containment and foreign aid, stopped the Soviet advance and saved millions from Communist takeovers.

By the mid-1970s the United States was weary again. Vietnam had nearly wrecked the American military and had sent millions into the streets at home. Accommodation and détente — not the rollback of Communism — were the preferred way of dealing with an ascendant, but now supposedly more moderate, Soviet Union.

After the Nixon years and Watergate, the evangelical Jimmy Carter called for defense reductions and an end to our “inordinate” fear of Communism. He put confidence instead in the United Nations, good will among men, and a new emphasis on global human rights, rather than, yet again, reactionary deterrence.

But after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Communist intrusions into Central America, the rise of radical Islam, and the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, Carter ended his presidency in disillusionment about the efficacy of the United Nations, and about the supposedly benign intentions of the Soviet Union and radical Islam.

Nonetheless, Ronald Reagan was considered a cretin for once again massively rearming and waging an ideological war against the “evil empire” created by the Soviet Union, as well as for engaging in provocative acts like bombing Libya and invading Grenada. Reagan spent eight years enlarging all branches of the military, creating new strategic weapons, and opposing Soviet adventurism almost anywhere it was identified. Soon after he left office the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended.

George Bush continued these policies during the four years of his administration, but then, as if on cue, Bill Clinton reversed course and announced a “peace dividend.” He reduced the number of army and marine divisions and of air wings. The military shrunk radically in size. New weapons programs were put on hold. We settled into the 1990s prosperity of the dot-com boom. The talk was all about twentysomething college dropouts making millions in ground-floor stock options by brainstorming for brilliant new concerns like AskJeeves or America Online. Little Silicon Valleys were going to sprout up everywhere.

By 1999 Americans were focused on whether their president should be merely censured or impeached for engaging in sex acts with a White House intern in the Oval Office. Occasional radical Islamic attacks such as the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the murder of U.S. servicemen in their Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the destruction of three of our East African embassies in 1998, and the assault on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000 were all considered police matters that did not warrant a full-fledged military response. It was the global American hegemony and support for Zionist Israel, not existential hatred for Western freedom and liberality, that provoked these outbursts from an exasperated radical Islam.

Then came 9/11, and the belated catch-up inevitably followed. A new Department of Homeland Security was created with bipartisan support. Both houses of Congress passed the Patriot Act. A majority of Democratic senators voted with the Republicans to authorize two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush enlarged the defense budget. In the dark days after 9/11, Americans praised the FBI, CIA, and armed forces for keeping us safe.

Indeed, for the next eight years there was no repetition of the September 11 massacres, despite terrible suicide bombings abroad. For all the tragedy of the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were removed, and ensuing constitutional democracies continued to survive. Tens of thousands of al-Qaeda terrorists flocked to Iraq and were killed there. Their leadership remains attrited and scattered in the wilderness of Waziristan. Dozens of terrorist plots in America were broken up while still in the planning stages. The message went out that if another American city were to be attacked, an unpredictable but angry United States would go after any nation that had supported, housed, or subsidized the terrorists, even if only tangentially.

CNN founder Ted Turner said the former Soviet intelligence agency KGB was “honorable” — and equated the U.S. mission in Iraq with the U.S.S.R.’s invasion of Afghanistan.

During an appearance on last week’s “Meet the Press,” Turner — whose latest book is “Call Me Ted” — was asked by host Tom Brokaw if he believes all nuclear weapons can be eliminated if the U.S. and Russia take the lead.

Turner, co-founder of the Nuclear Threat Initiative to stem the spread of nuclear weapons, said “absolutely,” and called the Russians “very reasonable, pragmatic, practical people.”

When Brokaw mentioned Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s past with the KGB, Turner responded:

“Well, he had that background. But you know, we have an FBI, and we’re not prejudiced against somebody who’s worked at the FBI. It’s an honorable place to work. And the KGB, I think, was an honorable place to work. And it gave people in the former Soviet Union, a communist country, an opportunity to do something important and worthwhile.”

The next exchange went like this:

Brokaw: “But in the meantime, it appears that he’s very much more interested in just causing difficulty for the United States, getting in our face in a manner of speaking.”

Turner: “Well, wait. We’re the ones, in my opinion, we’re the ones that started that. We’re the ones that started by putting the Star Wars system in Czechoslovakia and Poland when they wanted to be part of it. We’ve said that system is only to protect us from Iran or protect Europe from Iranian missiles. So why didn’t we cooperate with the Russians? Why have we constantly been pushing on the Russians all the time?”

Brokaw: “Your friend, Jimmy Carter, tried to be friendly with Leonid Brezhnev, and for his friendliness what did Brezhnev do? … He invaded Afghanistan.”

Turner: “Well, we invaded Afghanistan, too, and it’s a lot further — at least it’s on the border of the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union or Russia…”

Brokaw: “But Ted, don’t try to go there in terms of justifying that … It was naked aggression on the part of the Russians at the time.”

Turner: “Well, going into Iraq was naked aggression on the part of the United States.”

Brokaw failed to challenge that assertion.

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What’s now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad — using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.

“Everyone is very happy to have this safely out of Iraq,” said a senior U.S. official who outlined the nearly three-month operation to The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material — it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment.

The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth “tens of millions of dollars.” A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors.

“We are pleased … that we have taken (the yellowcake) from a volatile region into a stable area to produce clean electricity,” he said.

Secret mission
The deal culminated more than a year of intense diplomatic and military initiatives — kept hushed in fear of ambushes or attacks once the convoys were under way: first carrying 3,500 barrels by road to Baghdad, then on 37 military flights to the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia and finally aboard a U.S.-flagged ship for a 8,500-mile trip to Montreal.

And, in a symbolic way, the mission linked the current attempts to stabilize Iraq with some of the high-profile claims about Saddam’s weapons capabilities in the buildup to the 2003 invasion.

Accusations that Saddam had tried to purchase more yellowcake from the African nation of Niger — and an article by a former U.S. ambassador refuting the claims — led to a wide-ranging probe into Washington leaks that reached high into the Bush administration.

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The following comments are from another blogger.  Countrymen, we have TWO very serious battle fronts on our hands. 1.) The Caliphate  2.) The U.S. Congress who are little more than puppets of the 40 owners of THE FEDERAL RESERVE corporation – which is thousands of times the financial size of Halliburton and which is fueled not only by every nickel our income taxes, according to The Grace Commission, but also has the power to print all the money this private company wants for anything it wants.  .  Both of these entities are trying to do anything they can to destroy our rights, our freedom (from Government), and force poverty on us so that WE THE PEOPLE can be taken and placed into bondage either by a Theocracy ran by “The Twelfth Imam” or in the case of Congress, the Banker private owners of THE FEDERAL RESERVE company:

A national defense analyst says President Bush should be commended for keeping quiet about a discovery that could have blown his critics out of the water.

Retired Major General Jerry Curry is a decorated combat veteran who served as an Army aviator, paratrooper, and Ranger during a military career that began during the Korean conflict. He recently wrote on his blog about a very under reported story by the Associated Press. 

According to the report, a large stockpile of concentrated natural Uranium, known as “yellowcake,” reached a Canadian port to complete a top secret U.S. Operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad, and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. The Uranium material had been housed at a former Iraqi nuclear complex 12 miles from Baghdad.

Curry says the president kept mum about the discovery in order to keep terrorists in the dark. “He made a very brave stand, a resolute stand…, in which he decided that he wasn’t going to blab everything to the press,” Curry commends. “…And in the meantime while he kept it quiet, he was buying time from the terrorists to get all that stuff out of the country. So that’s what was done – he just very quietly kept his mouth shut.”

“The press beat him to death for the last several years,” he continues, “and now it turns out that, yes, there were weapons of mass destruction….” Curry also maintains that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear program and the material could have been made into a nuclear weapon.

President Bush’s actions took courage, he notes, and all Americans should be thankful to have such a brave president who puts the welfare of the American people above personal considerations.

Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) — Barack Obama said the surge of American forces in Iraq has “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” though Iraqis still haven’t done enough to take responsibility for their country.

“The surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,” Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a recorded interview broadcast tonight on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor” program.

Obama has come under repeated criticism from Republican rival John McCain for opposing President George W. Bush’s decision last year to send 20,000 extra combat troops to Iraq. While Obama said before that the additional forces have damped insurgent violence, his comments on the program were some of the strongest he’s made on the issue.

The Illinois senator, who has promised to pull most U.S. combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months if he’s elected president, repeated today his call for Iraqis to take more control of their own nation.  (The Liberty Tree Lantern would note that Iraq has completely taken over what was the worst area of Iraq, the Anbar Province.  The area is so settled that they had a full public parade where American soldiers marched to the “turn over” ceremony in the parade with no helmets, bullet proof vests or guns)

“Understand this, the argument was and continues to be when are we going to turn over responsibility to the Iraqis for their own country,” Obama said during a campaign stop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

McCain’s Night

Obama’s interview aired on the same night that Arizona Senator McCain gave his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

McCain, 72, has argued that the Iraqi government needed a substantial and sustained increase in troops to help establish its own security authority throughout the country.

“I fought for the right strategy and more troops in Iraq, when it wasn’t a popular thing to do,” McCain said tonight.

Obama, who has made his early opposition to the Iraq War a key part of his campaign, was among Democrats in Congress who spoke out against the troop increase and predicted it would fail to end the violence.

Anthony Cordesman, an analyst on Middle East security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, today challenged Obama’s remarks that “nobody” expected the surge to succeed so well.

“There was a very clear military plan that set clear goals,” Cordesman said. Success wasn’t “a certainty, but it also certainly wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination something based on dreams and goals that nobody could have anticipated would succeed.”

Most Violent

Anbar province, once Iraq’s most violent region, experienced on average two attacks a day in the four months ending May 31, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s June 30 quarterly assessment of Iraq.

For the four-month period ending Nov. 10, 2006, before Bush ordered the troop surge, Anbar experienced an average of about 41 attacks a day, the highest in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.

Bush, in announcing the troop surge in January 2007, said the Iraqi government by November 2007 would take responsibility for all 18 provinces. On Sept. 1, Bush said Iraqi authorities had taken over security control in Anbar.

Obama today defended his opposition to the surge when pressed by O’Reilly to say he was “wrong.”

“There’s an underlying problem with what we’ve done,” Obama replied. “We have reduced the violence, but the Iraqis still haven’t taken responsibility.”

Highest-Rated

Obama has appeared 10 times this year on the News Corp.- owned cable station’s interview shows. Today marks Obama’s first appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” the highest-rated cable- news program.

The first-term senator was also asked about Iran, Pakistan and capturing Osama bin Laden.

Obama said he “absolutely” believed the U.S. is in a war against terrorism and identified the enemies as al-Qaeda, the Taliban and “a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America who have a distorted ideology.”

Iran also is a “major threat,” he said, though warned against the danger of lumping different groups together as a common foe.

Obama said it would be “unacceptable” for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. “It would be game -changer,” he said. “I would never take a military option off the table.”

Military Force

When pressed as to whether, if elected, he would prepare for possible use of military force against Iran, Obama, who has repeatedly called for greater diplomatic efforts with Iran, said it wouldn’t be “appropriate” for someone who might become president to start “tipping their hand in terms of what their plans might be with respect” to the country.

Obama said he ratchet up pressure on Pakistan to take a more aggressive approach toward weeding out terrorists, including bin Laden.

Right now, Obama said, Pakistan is using U.S. military resources “with no strings attached.”

“They are preparing for war against India,” he said.

Obama, 47, said the Bush administration “wasted” $10 billion with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who was forced to resign last month after 17 months of political protests and violence. The U.S. failed to hold him “accountable for knocking out those safe havens” for terrorists, Obama said.

Reaching an Audience

Obama’s appearance on the O’Reilly show came as the presidential contender is wooing independents and Republicans. Fox is a good venue because many swing voters watch, and the network likely would have high viewership during the Republican convention, Obama adviser Robert Gibbs said.

“It makes sense to talk to all of your audience,” Gibbs said. While some Democratic candidates criticized Fox’s primary- campaign coverage, Gibbs said “we think we can get a fair shake.”

Fox News topped this week’s ratings with its Republican convention coverage, beating Time Warner Inc.’s CNN and NBC Universal’s MSNBC. About 9.2 million viewers tuned in to Fox last night to hear a speech from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The night marked Fox’s highest-rated convention telecast ever in cable news and the third-biggest audience since Fox News began in 1996, according to the network.

The interview with Obama followed a meeting earlier this summer between Obama and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who built Fox into a top-rated news channel in less than a decade, and Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News.

Obama, who resisted for almost a year O’Reilly’s calls to appear on the program, expressed concern in the meeting about the coverage he was receiving on the channel, according to the Washington Post.

Ailes says he told Obama that Fox wasn’t boycotting or retaliating against him, the newspaper said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kim Chipman in St. Paul, Minnesota at kchipman@bloomberg.net. ]]> http://captkarl.blogivists.com/2008/09/05/obama-surge-has-suceeded-beyond-wildest-dreams/feed/ 2 http://captkarl.blogivists.com/2008/07/22/big-news-the-surge-worked/ http://captkarl.blogivists.com/2008/07/22/big-news-the-surge-worked/#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:24:24 +0000 Capt. Karl http://captkarl.blogivists.com/?p=113

The Liberty Tree Lantern is both amazed and worried about the fact that so many Americans do not know what the Caliphate is, where they get their marching orders from or about their Mufsidun army that is spread out amongst all the population centers around the world, including in the United States.

While The Liberty Tree Lantern is for FREEDOM and fights side by side with our fellow countrymen, the Constitution Party and We The People Congress for FREEDOM (from Government) and forcing especially the U.S. Congress and the rest of the U.S. Government to comply with the supreme Law above all Laws as laid out in The Constitution itself, we do not support ending the War on Terror until the Mufsideen gets it in their heads to ignore those parts of the Koran that forces them to kill us Americans who are not Muslim. 

The War on Terror has captured or killed many tens of thousands of Mufsidun who have wanted to come to America to blow us infidels up, as required in the Koran (and to have a good time with 72 virgins) if we do not convert and take orders from the “supreme twelfth imam”, at restaurants or even wipe out entire cities.   To a reasonable thinking man it should be quite obvious that we have been saved another 9/11 style attack or our children getting blown up at McDonald’s Play-lands because of the Mufsidun killing mosquito magnet of Iraq. 

That being said I would agree that we could and should have done the proper procedures to formally declare war on the Caliphate, where ever they may be, whether it be just a single person, a group or an army in accordance with Constitutional Law.   

Why?  Because the Caliphate exists whether or not certain individuals want to believe it or not we American “infidels” stand in constant danger due to the orders laid down, to the Mufsidun army, as written in the Koran; The way to get to heaven is to either convert the infidel or if that doesn’t work, to kill him or her.

America as a nation seems to be divided between those who wish to deal with reality as it ‘TRUELY’exists and those who do not; and rather chose to ignore the reality, refuse to accept it out-a-hand, or just simply do not want to deal with it and choose to put on their blinders and “just go on with their lives” regardless of reality.  In the long run ignoring reality will harm these people and our country.  This fact can be applied to the ravages of both enemies and battle fronts that we have folks; The Caliphate and The U.S. Government, particularly both houses of The U.S. Congress who constantly legislate constitutionally contemptuous legislation which results in unaffordable energy, food and necessity costs.

Now here is the BIG NEWS to those who refuse to grasp the reality of the Caliphate who are the same people who believe that there are no people who want to kill ordinary innocent Christian American citizens and who, therefore, wish America to lose the Iraq War and, therefore, want to either believe that the “SURGE” is a failure or just choose to close their eyes and place their hands over their ears and chant loudly so they do not find out what happened with THE SURGE.

BIG NEWS FLASH:  THE SURGE WORKED!

 But THEN THERE WAS Barack Obama with his white flag, as he visited Iraq yesterday, hoping against hope to surrender to the Caliphate in Iraq:. 

Sorry, Barack.  Too late to make us lose and surrender the war and allow more Mufsideen to live so they can come into our country to kill us “infidels” and our children off. 

Perhaps as President you will be better able to help the Caliphate cause to kill us here in America, by supporting them in the Middle East.  Perhaps us taxpayers could even provide money for their training camps, as you might “negotiate” with the one who calls himself “The Twelfth Imam”, President of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so they can come back here to kill us more effectively and efficiently.

After all, who are we to stand between a Mufsidun and his 72 virgins?