Once the US squandered its post-Sept. 11 leverage with Pakistan it was left with only bad options for coping with the nuclear-armed jihadist incubating country. And these too, it has ignored in favor of the chimera of democracy and elections.
After Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared war on the forces of global terror and their state sponsors. But as the years have passed since then, he has done more to lose the war than he has to win it simply by ignoring it.
Bhutto’s murder is not a sign that elections and democracy frighten al-Qaida and therefore must be pursued. It is a sign that the Taliban and al-Qaida – together with their supporters in the Pakistani military and intelligence services and Pakistani society as a whole – don’t like people who are supported by the US. Her assassination was yet another act of war by the enemies of the West against the West.
If democracy and freedom are the US’s ultimate aims in this war, the only way to achieve them is to first fight and win the war. Bhutto – like her Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese counterparts – was a sideshow.
Military Affairs
Daimler Dingo
It is funny how things work out sometimes.
I am a big fan of reading about armored cars and other types of scouting vehicles from the WW2 era. There have been millions of pages written about the famous tank battles like Kursk. On top of that, there are many, many picture books that feature WW2 tanks. A few subjects that don’t get quite as much attention are armored cars, scout vehicles, and transports. Heck, Patton once said that his greatest weapon was the good old two ton truck.
Verdun, Passchendaele, Berlin, Cassino
One of the great things about being a military historian is that you get to ask yourself and others a lot of “what if” questions. They don’t really solve any mysteries but are fun to run through, and help your understanding of certain situations.
Just recently I was doing a purge of my library at home as I need to do every five years or so. I took stacks and stacks of books to Half Price Books and got a little scratch from the sale of those. Others I sent to my friend Carl to get them out of my house as a Christmas present.
Bleg: Wounded Veterans Charity
What is the best charity to make a donation to, to support wounded veterans of our current wars?
If any of our readers have any reliable information on this, please leave a comment.
I want to make a donation in the next couple of days.
Zen Meditation
Zendpundit posed a bunch of provocative questions over on his site, and I thought they might start some lively discussion over here if we took a stab at them. Here’s my favorite, because it touches on a couple of themes we’ve been exploring on this site over the past few weeks:
If the EU has genuinely changed the twenty century-long warlike character of Europeans to apathetic, bureaucratic, declinists why does the idea of Germany with nuclear weapons still give everyone pause ?
Or for that matter, who’s up for the Japanese Prime Minister announcing a successful test of a hydrogen bomb ? If you’re not but you are also ok on a nuclear Iran, can you give an intellectually credible explanation as to the difference?
Here’s my take: what we are looking at in Europe is a metastable state. In physics, that is a state that should have undergone a phase transition, but is being held back by inertia. One small perturbation, and the whole thing goes up, though. It is the packed snow waiting for a footstep to start an avalanche. The roulette ball perched on the wall between two numbers, waiting for a breath of air to push it over. Not a long-term tenable position, energetically.