core they've been manufacturing weapons in Afghanistan and Pakistan's Northwest territories for centuries. Oh, and you might note the weapon of choice for these guys, and it didn't come from the West.
Pork Chop
JoinedPosts by Pork Chop
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117
To the people of Spain
by Amazing1914 in.
this terrible event in your land saddens us all ... i am sorry that those responsible are likely doing this to get revenge upon your nation for its support of the united kingdom, the usa and other coalition of nations devoted to the war on terror ... you and your loved ones killed so tragically are in our thoughts and prayers ... your natioin is honored among us all ... and may you heal from this as quickly as possible.
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24
Political Party Loyalty
by Greenpalmtreestillmine ini am very new to the political process and this year will be the first time i enter a voting booth, but something has been on my mind of late and i hope you all can help me sort it out.. if george bush had been a democrat and from day one of his presidency had done everything exactly as he has done would most of the republicans be supporting the war in iraq?
would most of the democrats still be against the war?.
or would each party fall in line with most republicans against the war and most democrats for the war?.
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Pork Chop
I could maybe live with a McCain Kerry ticket but not the other way around. Kerry is a complet sleeze, and an empty suit.
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117
To the people of Spain
by Amazing1914 in.
this terrible event in your land saddens us all ... i am sorry that those responsible are likely doing this to get revenge upon your nation for its support of the united kingdom, the usa and other coalition of nations devoted to the war on terror ... you and your loved ones killed so tragically are in our thoughts and prayers ... your natioin is honored among us all ... and may you heal from this as quickly as possible.
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Pork Chop
Hey, I love the UK, London is my favorite large city.
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Pork Chop
OK Yeru, except for that low life avishai, and then there's the rest of these leftist, appeasing morons.
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117
To the people of Spain
by Amazing1914 in.
this terrible event in your land saddens us all ... i am sorry that those responsible are likely doing this to get revenge upon your nation for its support of the united kingdom, the usa and other coalition of nations devoted to the war on terror ... you and your loved ones killed so tragically are in our thoughts and prayers ... your natioin is honored among us all ... and may you heal from this as quickly as possible.
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Pork Chop
Thank you Charles Krauthammer (probably the brightest columnist at work today) and the Houston Chronicle.
This has gone beyond appeasement
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
When confronting an existential enemy -- an enemy that wants to terminate your very existence -- there are only two choices: appeasement or war.
In the 1930s, Europe chose appeasement. Today Spain has done so again. Europe may follow.
One can understand Europe's reaction in the 1930s. First, it could almost plausibly convince itself that Hitler could be accommodated. Perhaps he really was only seeking what he sometimes said he was -- the return of territory, the unification of the Germanic peoples, a place in the sun -- and not world conquest.
Today there is no doubting the intentions of Arab-Islamic radicalism. It is not this grievance or that (U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia). It is not this territory or that (Palestine, Andalusia). The intention, endlessly repeated, is the establishment of a primitive, messianic caliphate -- redeeming Islam and dominating the world. They have seen the future: Taliban Afghanistan, writ large.
Moreover, Europe in the 1930s had a second excuse. The devastation of World War I, staggering and fresh in memory (France and Germany lost a third of their young men of military age), had made another such war unthinkable. This does not excuse appeasement -- it cost millions more lives in World War II -- but provides context, and possibly humility. One has to ask oneself: Am I sure I would not have chosen the cowardly alternative?
Nonetheless, it was still the cowardly alternative. And today, Spain has chosen it -- having suffered not Europe's 20 million dead of the First World War, but 200 dead in the Madrid bombing.
The Socialist Party placed the blame for the attack not on the barbarians who detonated the bombs, but on the Spanish government that stood with the United States in its war against the barbarians. The Spanish electorate then voted into office the purveyors of precisely that perverse view.
Spain will now withdraw from Iraq, sever its alliance with America and, as Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has promised, "restore magnificent relations with France and Germany."
Nonetheless, Spain is just Spain. The really big prize is Europe. Which is why the most ominous development of the week was the post-Madrid pronouncements of Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission.
"Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone." Sounds reasonable until you hear Prodi's amplification of the idea just two days earlier. "We know that international terrorism wants to spread fear," said Prodi. "Fear generates not so much justice, but rather vengeance, which chooses war to answer the need of security. ... We become prisoners of terror and of terrorists." In other words, making war on terror is unjust, fearful, mere vengeance and ultimately a victory for terrorism.
If not war, then what? A centerpiece to Prodi's solution to terrorism: a new European constitution. I'm not making this up: "to defeat fear we only have democracy and politics. ... Today for us, politics means building Europe completely with its constitution and its institutions. ... "
This is beyond appeasement. This is decadence: Terror rages and we tend our garden.
Prodi is right that the war on terror is not resolved by force alone. How is it won apart from hunting down terrorists and destroying terrorist regimes? By reversing the Arab-Islamic world's tragic collapse into oppression, intolerance and destitution, in which popular grievances are cynically deflected by repressive regimes and clergy into the virulent anti-Americanism that exploded upon us on 9/11. Which means trying to give desperate and oppressed people a chance at the kind of freedom and prosperity that we helped construct post-World War II in Europe and East Asia.
Where on this planet is this project most engaged? Iraq, where, day by day, the U.S.-led coalition is trying to build a new civil order characterized by pluralism, the rule of law, and constitutional restraints. Even a modicum of success in this enterprise would constitute a monumental strategic advance, a historic change in the very culture of the Middle East.
Spain's response to this challenge? Abandon the effort.
So when Zapatero and, more importantly, Prodi speak of nonmilitary means to "resolve" the "conflict with terrorists," they don't mean draining the swamp by gradually building free institutions. They mean buying off the terrorists, distancing themselves from America and seeking a separate peace.
Sure, they will continue to track down individual al-Qaida terrorists. But that's no favor to anyone. They want to make sure there's not another Madrid, in case European appeasement is not quite thorough enough to satisfy the terrorists. But on the larger fight, the reordering of the Arab world that produced the terrorists, they choose surrender.
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117
To the people of Spain
by Amazing1914 in.
this terrible event in your land saddens us all ... i am sorry that those responsible are likely doing this to get revenge upon your nation for its support of the united kingdom, the usa and other coalition of nations devoted to the war on terror ... you and your loved ones killed so tragically are in our thoughts and prayers ... your natioin is honored among us all ... and may you heal from this as quickly as possible.
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Pork Chop
Thank you John Podhoretz and the New York Post.
March 19, 2004 -- IN Iraq, as in the War on Terror, we're the good guys. In fact, rarely in the course of world history has the essential goodness of a nation been revealed so starkly as in America's conduct of the war against Saddam Hussein.
The question is: Why is it so hard for so many Democrats, liberals and Europeans to accept it?
What is it about the liberation of 25 million people and the removal of a barbaric tyrant - a tyrant who either directly or indirectly murdered at least 1 million of his own people and waged wars that killed another million in neighboring countries - they don't like?
Why can't they celebrate the ouster of a monster who paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 a pop - in essence helping to recruit new mass murderers by making a public offer of an insurance policy to ease any concerns a bomber might have about leaving his loved ones in the lurch?
And why do they struggle so fiercely to believe that the dictator who paid off those terrorists - and who housed others, among them the devil who pushed a wheelchair-bound American Jew off a boat into the Red Sea - had no interest in collaborating with other terrorist groups?
Have they forgotten that the dictator's refusal to abide by the terms of the 1991 ceasefire that left him in power forced the international community to keep restrictive sanctions in place against his nation - sanctions that helped contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children?
Did they pay no attention when the humanitarian exception to those sanctions - the "Oil for Food" program - simply became a means for Saddam to enrich himself? Have they failed to read the news stories revealing how Saddam used "oil for food" to bribe hundreds of foreign politicians, businessmen and opinion leaders whose identities we are only now getting to know?
There was nothing good about Saddam's regime. Nothing.
And there was nothing bad about the liberation of Iraq. Nothing.
It was carried out in three weeks' time with astonishing care taken to keep the war from bloodying the suffering Iraqi people. The problems that arose after the war - problems relating to water and electricity, primarily - were the result not of allied action but rather of sabotage by demented remnants of the regime.
Indeed, most of the post-war problems were caused by saboteurs - including the looting that became the subject of such hysterical and overblown coverage by a mass media eager to find a bad-news story that might tarnish the brilliant success of the war effort.
What is so striking about those who criticized it before the fact and have criticized ever since is their tone of moral outrage - not against Saddam, but against President Bush. He misled us, they say. He lied his way into war. He tricked everybody.
This is arrant nonsense. But let us try a thought experiment. Assume that Bush deceived the nation and the world: What are the results of that deception?
Yes, let's see. The nation of Libya has unilaterally disarmed itself as a direct result of the war. In addition, the world has now learned of a nuclear-proliferation network stretching from North Korea through Pakistan into Libya that somehow managed to escape the attention or knowledge of the United Nations agency we are supposed to think knows all about this matter.
There are now more than 70 newspapers publishing freely in Iraq, and the country's three major religious-ethnic groups have agreed to an interim constitution that is the most radically advanced document ever to come out of the Arab-Muslim world. There are increasing signs of democratic unrest inside Iran and even in Syria.
The world is an unambiguously better place today, March 19, 2004, than it was on March 19, 2003, when Saddam and his two disgusting sons were still the dominant figures in the Fertile Crescent. Indeed, it's a better place today than it was a month ago, because the Iraqi interim constitution was signed.
There's something especially horrible about the way these facts are ignored and disregarded. More than 500 brave Americans have lost their lives in Iraq since the end of hostilities.
Those who deny the justice of the American cause are essentially saying that these heroes died for nothing. And that may be the biggest outrage of all.
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117
To the people of Spain
by Amazing1914 in.
this terrible event in your land saddens us all ... i am sorry that those responsible are likely doing this to get revenge upon your nation for its support of the united kingdom, the usa and other coalition of nations devoted to the war on terror ... you and your loved ones killed so tragically are in our thoughts and prayers ... your natioin is honored among us all ... and may you heal from this as quickly as possible.
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Pork Chop
My, my, the left loves living in a state of denial. Black will always be white, truth will always be lie, as long as the agenda moves forward.
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Pork Chop
I'm certainly glad you cleared that up for me. One must observe the forms.
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24
Political Party Loyalty
by Greenpalmtreestillmine ini am very new to the political process and this year will be the first time i enter a voting booth, but something has been on my mind of late and i hope you all can help me sort it out.. if george bush had been a democrat and from day one of his presidency had done everything exactly as he has done would most of the republicans be supporting the war in iraq?
would most of the democrats still be against the war?.
or would each party fall in line with most republicans against the war and most democrats for the war?.
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Pork Chop
Unfortunately, most people, certainly most politicians, are in lock step with their parties. The Democrats seem a little more so than the Republicans, but not much.
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Pork Chop
Proud to be a Freep! Yes, if you buy into this Euro trash nonsense, you're a groveler.
"If Islamic terrorism were as rational as Irish or Basque terrorism, it would be easier. But Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, summed it up very pithily: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." You can be pro-America (Spain, Australia) or anti-America (France, Canada), but if you broke into the head cave in the Hindu Kush and checked out the hit list you'd be on it either way.
So the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the terrorists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. Despite the sneers that terrorism is a phenomenon and you can't wage war against a phenomenon, in fact you can ? as the Royal Navy did very successfully against the malign phenomena of an earlier age, piracy and slavery.
Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway."
Clark was a lousy officer, roundly despised by those above and below him, and he nearly started WWIII until a British general shut him down. CLINTON removed him! What does that tell you?