Bloodthirsty Liberal

Before I create the Aggie’s Famous Potato Salad™, can I take a moment to make an unemotional comment about Memorial Day?

If you look at the news on any day in your lifetime, you’ll notice that there are dictators and bullies running terror groups who are making life miserable somewhere. And there are always appeasers telling us that if we just twist ourselves into ever more complex pretzels and deny reality even more completely, these people will bake cookies and bring them to the cookout.

It isn’t true. In every generation, we are faced with awful choices. We can either set limits on bullying and back them up, if necessary, with the military, or we can watch various genocides unfold. That is the choice. Thinking back to WWII – how many millions of lives would have been saved if the world have responded more quickly to the obvious? Easily tens of millions.

Each situation is different. We can choose to ignore Iran and Syria, for whatever reason, or we can negotiate, and when that fails either ignore the obvious or fight a lame war – a war of containment. Or we can get serious, but who has the will for that? Nearly eleven years after September 11th, almost no one wants to be involved in war.

Still, thinking back on my misspent youth – the 1960s – I am always a bit surprised that the generation that was born immediately after the men came home from that miserable war decided to firmly stick their heads in the sand leaving their butts hanging in the air.

- Aggie

It’s a real pity what’s going on in Syria:

“Widespread, systematic and gross human rights violations” amounting to crimes against humanity in Syria have been conducted with the “apparent knowledge and consent” of the country’s “highest levels,” a U.N. commission said Thursday.

U.N. bodies probing the crimes should identify perpetrators and hold them accountable, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic said, stressing that “urgent, inclusive political dialogue” is needed to end the crisis.

“The government has manifestly failed in its responsibility to protect the population,” the report said. “Anti-government armed groups have also committed abuses, although not comparable in scale and organization with those carried out by the state.”

The commission said it has documented “crimes against humanity and other gross violations.”

It made similar assertions in November, underscoring its belief that policies to mistreat civilians were issued at the “highest levels of the armed forces and government” and that the state is “responsible for wrongful acts, including crimes against humanity, committed by members of its military and security forces.”

November?

Try last March!

Here is a transcript of the March 27 exchange:

10:31AM ET

BOB SCHIEFFER: Madam Secretary, let me start with you. Tens of thousands of people have turned out protesting in Syria which has been under the iron grip of the Assads for so many years now. One of the most repressive regimes in the world, I suppose. And when the demonstrators turned out the regime opened fire and killed a number of civilians. Can we expect the United States to enter that conflict in the way we have entered the conflict in Libya?

HILLARY CLINTON: No. Each of these situations is unique, Bob. Certainly we deplore the violence in Syria. We call, as we have on all of these governments during this period of Arab awakening, as some have called it, to be responding to their people’s needs, not to engage in violence, permit peaceful protests and begin a process of economic and political reform.

…

There is a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer. What’s been happening there the last few weeks is deeply concerning. But there’s a different between calling out aircraft and indiscriminately strafing and bombing your own cities than police actions which frankly have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see.

Ah well, who among us hasn’t said something so extraordinarily and criminally stupid? It’s like when I said of the sweaty terrorist, Samir Kuntar, that he just had funny taste in facial hair and gestures of greeting:

I thought he was just saying “Hi mom, check out the ‘stache I grew in prison!” I still blush over that one.

Thank goodness Secretary Clinton said this on CBS News’ Face the Nation. If anyone had actually seen it, she’d never live it down!

First WikiLeaks, now WickedLeaks:

The video that emerged in recent days appearing to show four U.S. Marines urinating on several dead Taliban fighters has outraged many people in this country. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta have condemned the act, the military has promised an inquiry, and some experts are even suggesting that the act could qualify as a war crime.

Mainly, however, people seem simply to not understand it. Why would America’s warriors — for that matter, why would anyone — urinate on a dead body?

I spent a year, off and on, with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. There was a lot of fighting, a lot of casualties and an enormous amount of stress on the men I was with. I never saw anyone do anything like this, but then again, I never saw any dead Taliban fighters — the enemy always recovered their casualties before we could get there.

Nevertheless, the things the soldiers shouted during combat were very revealing of the state of mind that war produces. (For the record, I’m sure the Taliban was screaming pretty much the same things about us.) At one point a Taliban fighter had his leg shot off during a firefight and was crawling around on the hillside, dying, and the men I was with cheered at the sight. That cheer deflated me. I liked these guys tremendously, but that celebration was just so ugly. I didn’t want them to be like that.

Later, I asked one of them about it, and he explained that they had been happy because they were that much closer to all going home alive. They weren’t cheering the enemy’s death; they were cheering their own lives. That particular fighter would never again be able to kill an American soldier.

There’s the answer right there. Can we be done now?

Guess not.

There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it’s okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.

When the war on terror started, the Marines in that video were probably 9 or 10 years old. As children they heard adults — and political leaders — talk about our enemies in the most inhuman terms. The Internet and the news media are filled with self-important men and women referring to our enemies as animals that deserve little legal or moral consideration. We have sent enemy fighters to countries like Syria and Libya to be tortured by the very regimes that we have recently condemned for engaging in war crimes and torture. They have been tortured into confessing their crimes and then locked up indefinitely without trial because their confessions — achieved through torture — will not stand up in court.

For the past 10 years, American children have absorbed these moral contradictions, and now they are fighting our wars. The video doesn’t surprise me, but it makes me incredibly sad — not just for them, but also for us. We may prosecute these men for desecrating the dead while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living.

I hope someone else knows how to explain that to our soldiers, because I don’t have the faintest idea.

I will cede that Sebastian Junger has more experience in battle than I do (mine being zero). But I can think (in a way, after a fashion). So I ask (rhetorically): what the [bleep] is he talking about? I honestly don’t know.

Who talked about whom in inhuman terms? What self-important men and women? What enemy fighters have we sent to Libya and Syria? Whom did we torture into confessions that we were inadmissible? I’m not saying he’s wrong, I just don’t know what or whom he’s talking about.

This is the same moralizing codswallop I came to hate after 9/11. This pointless self-blame. Moments before whizzing on the Taliban, the Marines and their enemies were trying to kill each other. As in you’re dead or I am. I happen to value life more than death (some Moslem fighters proclaim the opposite), so my happiness that the four Marines lived to pee on their vanquished enemy is lessened imperceptibly by the manner in which they celebrated their day’s victory.

Sometimes, a leak is just a leak. If you don’t like war (and who does), don’t have one.

PS: For the record, this is my second comment on the story. The first is here.

He must be trippin’ on something!

A Geneva-based watchdog group called on UN chief Ban Ki-moon to clarify remarks made today that seemed to draw a moral equivalence between the imprisonment of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and Hamas terrorists.

“I am very encouraged by the prisoner exchange today after many many years of negotiation,” Secretary-General Ban told Reuters today. “The United Nations has been calling for (an end to) the unacceptable detention of Gilad Shalit and also the release of all Palestinians whose human rights have been abused all the time.”

“Mr. Ban needs to clarify whether, as it appears, he was referring to the Palestinians who committed such gruseome crimes as the bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro pizzeria that killed 15, the bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub that killed 21, and the bombing of Netanya’s Park Hotel that killed 29 people attending a Passover Seder,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.

“We call on Mr. Ban to recognize that those who masterminded and carried out terrorist attacks against women and children are despicable criminals, not innocent victims, and that their detention is a moral and security obligation rather than a so-called violation of human rights,” said Neuer.

“The UN was founded on moral clarity, and its highest officials should know better than to engage in false moral equivalence. They should instead be condeming all of those today who obscenely celebrated cold-blooded murderers as heroes.”

With all due respect to Mr. Neuer and UN Watch (whom I cite all the time), the UN hasn’t stood for any of that moral clarity stuff for a very long time, if ever.

Still, I’ve rarely been sicker to read something to come out of the UN—and that includes their peacekeepers bribing starving underage boys and girls with food and money for sex. And pimping out their moms.

Remember you read this next time you read about the fight Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is waging to withhold funding from the UN over its developing recognition of a Palestinian state.

Oh wait, maybe not. Frying pan, fire…

When the sun sets on the refugee camp for black Africans that has sprung up at the marina in this town six miles west of Tripoli, the women here brace for the worst.

The rebels who ring the camp suddenly open fire. Then they race into the camp, shouting “gabbour, gabbour” — Arabic for whore — and haul away young women, residents say.

“You should be here in the evening, when they come in firing their guns and taking people,” one woman from Nigeria said Wednesday as she recounted the nightly raids on the camp. “They don’t use condoms, they use whatever they can find,” she said, pointing to a discarded plastic bag in a pile of trash.

As she spoke, other women standing nearby nodded in agreement.

There is no way to know how many women have been raped here, where hundreds of Africans have settled in and around the boats of a marina. No one keeps statistics in the camp, and foreign aid workers say they are prohibited from discussing the allegations on the record. International Red Cross representatives say only that they have spoken to rebel leaders about “security concerns.”

But the story that women tell is part of a larger picture of abuse of black Africans in Libya that is emerging in the wake of the rebel victory, born of allegations that Gadhafi often hired sub-Saharan Africans to fight for him.

I’m on record as saying really nasty stuff happens in war. Really nasty. Not to excuse it—quite the opposite—but if you decide you are going to war, you sign up for everything: civilian deaths, friendly fire, atrocities, “gabbour, gabbour”.

So, let’s count up Obama’s tally, shall we? Under his leadership from behind, we have weapons to Palestinian terrorists, chemical weapons possibly gone walk-about, and A&P bags (paper or plastic?) as prophylactics. Not to mention the unknowable gallons of blood shed in a kinetic military activity that took months, not weeks (and certainly not days). That’s a hell of a lot of “known knowns”, as Donald Rumsfeld might say.

If Bush’s name is tied to Abu Ghraib, Obama’s should be tied to the “gabbour” sisters.

To quote so many of my friends, “what would we do without the United Nations?” Is that “what would we do” or “who would we do?”

United Nations peacekeepers in Ivory Coast enticed underage girls in a poor part of the West African nation to exchange sex for food, according to a United States Embassy cable released by WikiLeaks.

The cable written in January 2010 focuses on the behavior of Beninese peacekeepers stationed in the western town of Toulepleu, an area that has been at the crosshairs of the nation’s 10-year-long conflict.

A random poll of 10 underage girls in Toulepleu by aid group Save The Children U.K. in 2009 found that eight performed sexual acts for Benin peacekeepers on a regular basis in order to secure their most basic needs. “Eight of the 10 said they had ongoing sexual relationships with Beninese soldiers in exchange for food or lodging,” the diplomat wrote in the cable, citing information shared with the embassy by a protection officer.

On Tuesday, United Nations spokesman Michel Bonnardeaux confirmed that in April, 16 Beninese peacekeepers were repatriated to Benin and are barred from serving in the U.N. following a yearlong investigation.

Eight out of 10 underage girls serviced UN piecekeepers—sorry, peacekeepers? That’s like… uh…80%! The other two must have been really ugly.

Sorry, but UN vice weakens my resistance to crude humor. Anyhow, it’s not exactly an isolated incident:

Sexual misconduct by U.N. troops has been reported in a number of countries including Congo, Cambodia and Haiti — as well as in an earlier incident involving Moroccan peacekeepers in Ivory Coast.

In 2007, a 730-strong battalion of peacekeepers from Morocco was asked to suspend its activities in the northern Ivorian city of Bouake after the U.N. received allegations of sexual misconduct involving local girls.

A report published a year later by Save the Children U.K. identified Ivory Coast as one of the places where sexual barter between peacekeepers and girls was occurring. The peacekeepers traded food as well as mobile phones for sex, the report said.

The recently released cable identifies for the first time the Benin peacekeeping contingent.

It also makes clear that the sexual exploitation continued through at least the last month of 2009, quoting a protection officer with Save the Children who spoke to the embassy in January 2010. The officer said that the “sexual exploitation and abuse problem among (United Nations) personnel is more extensive than is recognized.”

Not here, it isn’t. Bloodthirstan has recognized the UN’s sexual exploitation for years.

I wonder if there isn’t a basic problem with the whole model. If you send one group of people to patrol another group, they may not recognize them as equals, as full human beings. But then I looked at a map of Africa:

Benin is in the same friggin’ neighborhood! If they’re not going to recognize Ivorian girls as, you know, girls, then who will they?

I actually see an even more basic problem, one that at least explains UN peacekeeper behavior, if not excuses it.

Soldiers rape. Well, some do. They always have, and likely always will. Maybe the better-trained ones rape less (fewer?), and certainly the better-trained forces punish the rapists more severely. As far as I can tell, the UN forces who diddle young girls are sent home—no more Ivorian tail for you, young man. In America, we send our soldier-rapists to Leavenworth. Which one is a greater deterrent?

As an aside, I wonder when Brian DePalma will be making his next film on the subject? Redacted, which was based on a real-life gruesome atrocities by American GIs, inspired a Kosovo Muslim to shoot up a bus of other American GIs, who were in Kosovo presumably to protect Muslims, killing two. Imagine the greater impact of seeing UN peacekeepers, in their impressive powder-blue berets, getting up to all kinds of naughtiness with the American Girl set? Oh, to be a part of that casting agency!

So, let’s cut the UN some slack (if that’s not an unfortunate choice of words). Their peacekeepers are only doing what occupiers have always done: sampled the local flora and fauna.

The girls’ parents understand how it works:

Parents were encouraging their daughters to sleep with the peacekeepers so they would provide for them, according to the cable.

See? Everybody was getting something.

PS: For those who take this more seriously, you can watch a video of four Uruguayan UN peacekeepers sexually assaulting a Hatian man here. I’ll pass.

When the Egyptian or Jordanian Ambassador to the United States hosts a seder, y’all be sure to let me know, hear?

Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren hosted a dinner Thursday honoring the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. The event took place as Islamist terrorists in Gaza launched at least 17 rockets and mortar shells at civilians in Israel’s south.

Oren’s guests included officials from the White House, Congress and the State Department as well as imams and rabbis.

The dinner included time for traditional Muslim prayers to be recited. The food was prepared with supervision by a Muslim chef to ensure it would meet Muslim dietary requirements.

“There’s a lot of misinformation about Israel and we want to show we’re open to dialogue and reconciliation,” Oren told CNN. “We can begin to build bridges on an interpersonal level.”

Now, Michael Oren is an accomplished writer and a highly intelligent man. So, he knows that every bridge he builds is going to be dynamited by Arab propaganda, eroded by left-wing, antisemitic media sympathies, and crushed under the weight of UN, EU, US, Quartet, et al bureaucratic bull crap.

Hark, I hear it now!

Robert Serry, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, expressed deep concern Thursday over a ‘resurgence of violence’ Gaza and southern Israel.

“In the interest of protecting the lives of civilians and for the calm to succeed, a complete halt to the firing of rockets from Gaza and a display of maximum restraint by Israel are required,” Serry told reporters.

Serry urged both sides “to immediately take steps to prevent any further escalation.”

Serry’s comments are consistent with the UN’s insistance Israel – a member state – not take effective action to protect its citizens from terror groups who consistently violate the norms of international law by cynically placing legitimate military targets in densely populated areas.

The onus for civilian casualties during strikes on such facilities is legally borne by the terror groups, not Israel.

The UN official did not call the attacks on Israel ‘terrorism’ and instead lumped them in with Israel’s retaliatory strikes as ‘violence,’ thereby insinuating there is moral equivalence between unprovoked terror attacks and Israel’s attempts to defend innocents.

Now, I’ll give the UN credit: however many of these gray, faceless bureaucrats there are, they are all the same, as if they had cloned a tax accountant from Delaware. This guy, Serry, is Dutch, and has been on the job for almost four years. Whatever. If you say so. I’ve been hearing about restraint for a lot longer than that.

Now, I don’t actually expect this, but what if the UN reconsidered its position? What if it told Israel, a member state, that the safety of its citizens demanded that it act on their behalf? It might even say, for it is not unaware, that since Israel’s citizens are deliberately targeted because they are Jews, each rocket or mortar is not simply a munition round fired—but an instrument of genocide. How does “maximum restraint” sound in that context?

And you know what? I do expect that. I may hold the UN in lower esteem than athlete’s foot fungus, but if it’s going to portray itself as an independent arbiter of peace, the very least it can do is condemn the acts of war. And sanction every effort toward self-defense. That we do not have that from the UN tells you what the UN really stands for: Ultimate Nullity. (Yes, Unctuous Ninnies is good too.)

The Obama administration loves its drones

A U.S. drone aircraft fired on two leaders of a militant Somali organization tied to al-Qaeda, apparently wounding them, a senior U.S. military official familiar with the operation said Wednesday.

The strike last week against senior members of al-Shabab comes amid growing concern within the U.S. government that some leaders of the Islamist group are collaborating more closely with al-Qaeda to strike targets beyond Somalia, the military official said.

The airstrike makes Somalia at least the sixth country where the United States is using drone aircraft to conduct lethal attacks, joining Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen. And it comes as the CIA is expected to begin flying armed drones over Yemen in its hunt for al-Qaeda operatives.

Again, I have no problem with the technique, but I certainly wonder where the peace crowd has been hiding?

Maybe BTL will post his secret crickets audio here?

- Aggie

Do we all remember when Bush was scornfully referred to as a cowboy because he unilaterally acted in the best interests of the United States by going after terrorists – without saying “Mother, May I?” to the United Nations and to Europe? With a Democrat in the White House, unilateral cowboyism is cool again!

The man described by counterterrorism officials as al Qaeda’s “military brain,” Ilyas Kashmiri, was killed in a drone strike Friday night in Pakistan, a spokesman for his group, the jihadist Harakat-ul-Jihad-Islami, said.

Pakistani and U.S. officials, however, said they have not confirmed Kashmiri’s death.
…

“The oppressor U.S. is our only target and, God willing, we will take revenge on the U.S. soon with full force,” he said.
[Notice that Obama administration policies are making them hate us. Lefties, where are you???? - Aggie]
A senior Pakistani military official said that in all, nine were killed by the drone strike. The official reiterated that they had not confirmed Kashmiri’s demise.

Kashmiri, who was known to operate in North Waziristan, had moved to South Waziristan and was seen at the site of the attack on Friday, the official said.

If confirmed, his death would be the first major kill or capture since Osama Bin Laden, and the highest profile drone target since Beitullah Mehsud in 2009.

It could also be seen as an embarrassment for Pakistanis, who have twice in just over one month, had a major al Qaeda figure killed on their territory without their participation.

U.S. drones now operate entirely autonomously in Pakistan, a Pakistani intelligence source has told CNN. Whereas before the United States cooperated with Pakistan and used their intelligence, today, the Americans have an intelligence network that allows them to go after terrorists unilaterally.

Readers of this blog realize that I agree with the policy of using drones but cannot stand the hypocrisy of the Left. When Bush did it, it was a WAR CRIME. When the Israelis did it, it was a WAR CRIME. But when Cowboy Barry does it, it’s just really awesome, isn’t it? No one that can think for him or herself will ever be able to seriously listen to a leftist argue about anything again. They are really just sports fans.

- Aggie

It gives me no pleasure, but:

Army prosecutors filed charges Tuesday against a sixth Washington state-based soldier in a plot to murder Afghan civilians for sport during patrols in Kandahar province last year.

Staff Sgt. David Bram, of Vacaville, Calif., faces charges that include solicitation to commit premeditated murder, aggravated assault on Afghan nationals, failing to report crimes including murder, planting evidence and unlawfully discussing murder scenarios with subordinates.

Prosecutors say the soldiers from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Seattle, killed three Afghan civilians during patrols, in each case by finding isolated men, pretending they posed a threat, and slaughtering them with guns or grenades. They are accused of planting weapons by the bodies to give the appearance that the victims were combatants, and one soldier, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs of Billings, Mont., is accused of keeping fingers as war trophies.

Abu Ghraib was a birthday party, complete with magician and pony rides, compared to this, yet the press is silent. Mute. Guantanamo is Camp Indian Name, no matter how you slice it. Even the unacknowledged hell-holes in eastern Europe, where we held, waterboarded, and otherwise inconvenienced terrorist suspects pale in comparison.

Yet it might as well have never happened. The only difference, beyond the gravity of the offenses, is the Commander in Chief, Obama or Bush.

[I]n his plea agreement, [Jeremy] Morlock claimed Bram’s involvement went beyond that. He told prosecutors that several times Bram overheard Gibbs discussing situations in which they might kill civilians, and moments before the first killing, on Jan. 15, 2010, Morlock asked Bram whether it was “clear” to stage the killing of an unarmed man in a field.

“Bram communicated that it was clear to implement the scenario to kill the unarmed Afghan male,” the plea agreement reads.

When you Google Jeremy Morlock you get 128,000 hits; when you hit Abu Ghraib you get 1,760,000, almost 14 times as many. You can’t believe anything.

ANYTHING.

You can’t believe anything.