So, is this like the "credible threat" against airforce one, or is this the other kind? Why can't they just say what it is? I guess because it's something like "Mossad says so."
Anyway, I'm moving the /treehouse to highest alert. So you know what to do. Or not.
And what's up with this? Mushroom clouds north of Kabul? Not good. I've been saying it privately but I'll go on the record here - we are going to drop some nuclear weapons on someone, real soon. Here's the formula:
"Experts" and various other talking head types - including many politicians - sense a chance to gain some points in the American public's mind by hitting Bush for being too timid. McCain, to take one example, is strongly calling for ground troops to take and hold land in Afghanistan. Thomas Freidman is calling for similar action (what's up with this guy - he's starting to scare me.) In any case, Bush is going to be forced to do something to seem strong, but as soon as we send ground troops into Afghanistan they will immediately and soundly get their asses kicked. We have the technology, but I'm guessing that doesn't mean much in the chaos of battle. Being accustomed to battle conditions is the only thing that matters, and these people are clearly accustomed. The US military would have to take 10 years of strong defeats before we'd be toughened up enough to really duke it out with a nothing-to-lose islamic fundamentalist army with decades of experience fighting on their home soil.
So, after we lose a couple Somalia style battles (with our soldiers being tortured, gutted, beheaded, and otherwised dragged through the streets of Kabul) our people, goaded by the McCain types, will demand blood. They will demand a victory that our conventional forces will be unable to deliver. So Bush will have no choice but to use nuclear weapons. Even if it's clear tactically that they won't do much good. They will appease the psychic need for a big hit.
(And two days later the Russians will drop one on Chechnya.)
Hope I'm wrong.
you just get a job with the nsc? you forgot to mention invading iraq. at least there we know we can crush their army and they will not fight to the death like those nasty fanatics in their caves in afghanistan.
Russia Prepares 1-Million Man Army for Afghanistan -
A DEBKAfile Exclusive
29 October: The shape of the governments-to-be of Afghanistan and Iraq - “when the war is over” – seems to be uppermost in the minds of the US-led alliance engaged in the war against world terrorism. This may be a useful academic exercise, but while it is in process, the war itself shows strong signs of running out of steam.
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence experts ascribe this loss of momentum to two primary dilemmas:
1. In order to tackle its objectives of overturning the Taliban regime and rooting out Osama bin Laden’s terrorist apparatus, the United States needs to field a ground army of some 400,000 trained combat troops in Afghanistan alone. At a pinch, US and British strength combined amounts to less than a third of this figure – the 100,000 American troops stationed in bases around Afghanistan’s borders, the Persian Gulf and the Middle east, and another 20-35,000 British combat troops.
2. The United States and Britain have never invested in the kind of intelligence tools required for winning this war, focusing instead in recent years on satellite and electronic intelligence, which is of limited use in Afghanistan and the counter-terror campaign.
America’s deficiency of ground forces for combating terrorism is the direct outcome oft the collapse of the international anti-terror coalition doctrine. The diplomacy employed by US secretary of state Colin Powell to muster this coalition stripped the United States of the fighting strength needed for the campaign itself. The four nations with the right kind of fighting strength are India, Taiwan, Israel and Turkey. The first three had to be counted out, while Turkey was only retained as a pro-American reserve for securing the Turkish-Iraqi frontier and standing by in case anti-US turbulence got out of hand in Central Asia and Pakistan.
Therefore, Washington has painted itself into a corner with only two options: Declaring a military call up at home – partial, then full conscription, with all the political hazards entailed, or turning to the only other power which commands a substantial military force, whose enlistment will not jeopardize US long term goals - Russia.
DEBKAfile’s sources in Moscow report that in the last ten days, the lights in the planning and operations departments of the Russian armed forces have burned brightly round the clock, as staff officers draft the blueprints for the Russian army’s return to Afghanistan in a manner very different from its dismal experience in the 1980s.
This time, Russian troops will be going in on a huge scale to fight shoulder to shoulder with their erstwhile foes, the Americans. The Afghanistan intervention force will be made up of roughly quarter of a million combat troops and an equal number of rest air force, intelligence, logistical and services personnel.
The conditions posed by Russian army chiefs for meeting President Vladimir Putin’s demand for this force were:
A. The entire force would not be fully engaged before winter was over, ie April 2002.
B. The United States would carry all the costs – not only for the creation and training of the Afghanistan expedition army, but also for setting up a comparable force for operation in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and Chechnya.
According to DEBKAfile’s Moscow informants, Putin bowed to the generals’ demands whereupon they went to work on the new venture without delay. This means that the Russian military staff is in the process of building a combat ground force one million strong.
Yeah, I've been reading Debka. Interesting that they don't mention how many Soviet troops were used during their previous defeat. Why is it so clear now that 1,000,000 will do it? I mean, I guess then can take Kabul, or any of the other "cities," but the whole point was to get O.B.L. and the rest of the Al Queada network, and I thought those guys were up in the mountains. They can send 10,000,000 troops in there and they would still probably lose in the mountains, where "lose" means having a marginal amount of control over the ground during the day, but never really finishing off the guerillas who will keep inflicting hit and run casualties. I still think the only way to get O.B.L. and the rest of those hiding in deep mountain bunkers is with the use of nukes (either full scale, or the small b61-11.) Same thing with the bunkers in Chechnya, and Iraq for that matter. I don't want this to happen, mind you, I'm just saying I don't see how it can't.
It's analogous to the RIAA going after file sharing networks. They made all this loud noise about stopping the whole thing, but it's almost like they didn't realize that the thing is completely distributed, so you can fight, but you don't know where the enemy is, and worse, you can never know if you've won or not. So now the RIAA and the rest of the content industry is trying to do what I think the US will try to do - bring out the big gun and just shut the whole thing down. In the US case the "whole thing" means turning those cave and bunker containing mountains into a sheet of glass, and in the RIAA case it means using lobbying power to actually outlaw every type of general purpose computer. Probably the individuals in the government, as well as those working in the recording industry, don't want this to happen - but they've backed themselves into a corner with all their promises to do the basically impossible.
Of course the counter example is the war on drugs, which is similarly hopeless, yet they keep fighting it at a steady, continually losing pace. Blah, blah, blah...
By the way, let me retract any statements in support of McCain I may or may not have made in this forum. On one of the weekend talking heads shows, McCain was rather cavalier about civilian losses in the bombing campaign. It's bad enough that the bombing of innocent Afghans is the culmination of 20 years of cruel games the US has played in the region. But it's also bad military strategy.
Is Bush spreading stupid spores? Cuz it seems like an epidemic.
-Mark
Another sign of the stupidity epidemic is Scott Shuger's great idea of bringing back flame throwers for the current conflict. Jellied gasoline? Third degree burns? Asphyxiation? Why not? These people are evil, right? For a minute I thought I was reading Soldier of Fortune, not Slate. Then I remembered who owned the magazine...
I'm posting this sans cookie to test the add-a-comment feature.
I could have it check to see whether the name selected matches a real users name and disallow those cases. But on the other hand this feature will probably be used most often by real members who are somewhere without their passwords (or access to their mail.) In those cases you would want to be able to impersonate yourself. I guess the (not signed in) makes it clear.
Right on schedule (from ethel) [US Rep. Steve] Buyer said Thursday that it's too risky to send
large numbers of ground troops into mountain
hideouts. Instead, small special operation forces
could fight their way into caves and bunkers and
plant timer-detonated tactical nuclear devices
powerful enough to bring down entire mountains. Good plan Steve! And then this quote from Buyer which must be the greatest (where 'greatest' equals 'stupidest') political quote of all time:"We shouldn't fear this discussion," Buyer said.
"There's such a stigma attached to the word
'nuclear' that people don't even think rationally." If his plan worked it would be bad enough, but probably it won't work. Here's a scenario: US special operation forces fight their way into the mountains carrying a bunch of small time delayed nuclear devices. Bin Laden's troops (acting perhaps on information from their high level ISI contacts) surprise the force (Haq anyone?) kill them all except one man who is released to tell the story, and take control of all the devices. One week later a major American city is destroyed and Bin Laden gives us one day to surrender or the next city goes up.
For a similar scenario that might really have happened, see here. I've seen this reported more convincingly, but I can't find a better link at the moment. Seems like many of the cruise missles Clinton launched in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) and the Sudan on the eve of his impeachment did not explode (go figure! shotty military contract work?) and that bin laden later sold these to the Chinese.
Gee, I wonder how many nukes "won't explode" when we drop them. All it will take is one.
|
Anyway, I'm moving the /treehouse to highest alert. So you know what to do. Or not.
And what's up with this? Mushroom clouds north of Kabul? Not good. I've been saying it privately but I'll go on the record here - we are going to drop some nuclear weapons on someone, real soon. Here's the formula:
"Experts" and various other talking head types - including many politicians - sense a chance to gain some points in the American public's mind by hitting Bush for being too timid. McCain, to take one example, is strongly calling for ground troops to take and hold land in Afghanistan. Thomas Freidman is calling for similar action (what's up with this guy - he's starting to scare me.) In any case, Bush is going to be forced to do something to seem strong, but as soon as we send ground troops into Afghanistan they will immediately and soundly get their asses kicked. We have the technology, but I'm guessing that doesn't mean much in the chaos of battle. Being accustomed to battle conditions is the only thing that matters, and these people are clearly accustomed. The US military would have to take 10 years of strong defeats before we'd be toughened up enough to really duke it out with a nothing-to-lose islamic fundamentalist army with decades of experience fighting on their home soil.
So, after we lose a couple Somalia style battles (with our soldiers being tortured, gutted, beheaded, and otherwised dragged through the streets of Kabul) our people, goaded by the McCain types, will demand blood. They will demand a victory that our conventional forces will be unable to deliver. So Bush will have no choice but to use nuclear weapons. Even if it's clear tactically that they won't do much good. They will appease the psychic need for a big hit.
(And two days later the Russians will drop one on Chechnya.)
Hope I'm wrong.
- jim 10-30-2001 2:35 pm
you just get a job with the nsc? you forgot to mention invading iraq. at least there we know we can crush their army and they will not fight to the death like those nasty fanatics in their caves in afghanistan.
- dave 10-30-2001 3:38 pm [add a comment]
Russia Prepares 1-Million Man Army for Afghanistan -
A DEBKAfile Exclusive
29 October: The shape of the governments-to-be of Afghanistan and Iraq - “when the war is over” – seems to be uppermost in the minds of the US-led alliance engaged in the war against world terrorism. This may be a useful academic exercise, but while it is in process, the war itself shows strong signs of running out of steam.
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence experts ascribe this loss of momentum to two primary dilemmas:
1. In order to tackle its objectives of overturning the Taliban regime and rooting out Osama bin Laden’s terrorist apparatus, the United States needs to field a ground army of some 400,000 trained combat troops in Afghanistan alone. At a pinch, US and British strength combined amounts to less than a third of this figure – the 100,000 American troops stationed in bases around Afghanistan’s borders, the Persian Gulf and the Middle east, and another 20-35,000 British combat troops.
2. The United States and Britain have never invested in the kind of intelligence tools required for winning this war, focusing instead in recent years on satellite and electronic intelligence, which is of limited use in Afghanistan and the counter-terror campaign.
America’s deficiency of ground forces for combating terrorism is the direct outcome oft the collapse of the international anti-terror coalition doctrine. The diplomacy employed by US secretary of state Colin Powell to muster this coalition stripped the United States of the fighting strength needed for the campaign itself. The four nations with the right kind of fighting strength are India, Taiwan, Israel and Turkey. The first three had to be counted out, while Turkey was only retained as a pro-American reserve for securing the Turkish-Iraqi frontier and standing by in case anti-US turbulence got out of hand in Central Asia and Pakistan.
Therefore, Washington has painted itself into a corner with only two options: Declaring a military call up at home – partial, then full conscription, with all the political hazards entailed, or turning to the only other power which commands a substantial military force, whose enlistment will not jeopardize US long term goals - Russia.
DEBKAfile’s sources in Moscow report that in the last ten days, the lights in the planning and operations departments of the Russian armed forces have burned brightly round the clock, as staff officers draft the blueprints for the Russian army’s return to Afghanistan in a manner very different from its dismal experience in the 1980s.
This time, Russian troops will be going in on a huge scale to fight shoulder to shoulder with their erstwhile foes, the Americans. The Afghanistan intervention force will be made up of roughly quarter of a million combat troops and an equal number of rest air force, intelligence, logistical and services personnel.
The conditions posed by Russian army chiefs for meeting President Vladimir Putin’s demand for this force were:
A. The entire force would not be fully engaged before winter was over, ie April 2002.
B. The United States would carry all the costs – not only for the creation and training of the Afghanistan expedition army, but also for setting up a comparable force for operation in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and Chechnya.
According to DEBKAfile’s Moscow informants, Putin bowed to the generals’ demands whereupon they went to work on the new venture without delay. This means that the Russian military staff is in the process of building a combat ground force one million strong.
- dave 10-30-2001 6:56 pm [add a comment]
Yeah, I've been reading Debka. Interesting that they don't mention how many Soviet troops were used during their previous defeat. Why is it so clear now that 1,000,000 will do it? I mean, I guess then can take Kabul, or any of the other "cities," but the whole point was to get O.B.L. and the rest of the Al Queada network, and I thought those guys were up in the mountains. They can send 10,000,000 troops in there and they would still probably lose in the mountains, where "lose" means having a marginal amount of control over the ground during the day, but never really finishing off the guerillas who will keep inflicting hit and run casualties. I still think the only way to get O.B.L. and the rest of those hiding in deep mountain bunkers is with the use of nukes (either full scale, or the small b61-11.) Same thing with the bunkers in Chechnya, and Iraq for that matter. I don't want this to happen, mind you, I'm just saying I don't see how it can't.
It's analogous to the RIAA going after file sharing networks. They made all this loud noise about stopping the whole thing, but it's almost like they didn't realize that the thing is completely distributed, so you can fight, but you don't know where the enemy is, and worse, you can never know if you've won or not. So now the RIAA and the rest of the content industry is trying to do what I think the US will try to do - bring out the big gun and just shut the whole thing down. In the US case the "whole thing" means turning those cave and bunker containing mountains into a sheet of glass, and in the RIAA case it means using lobbying power to actually outlaw every type of general purpose computer. Probably the individuals in the government, as well as those working in the recording industry, don't want this to happen - but they've backed themselves into a corner with all their promises to do the basically impossible.
Of course the counter example is the war on drugs, which is similarly hopeless, yet they keep fighting it at a steady, continually losing pace. Blah, blah, blah...
- jim 10-30-2001 10:26 pm [add a comment]
By the way, let me retract any statements in support of McCain I may or may not have made in this forum. On one of the weekend talking heads shows, McCain was rather cavalier about civilian losses in the bombing campaign. It's bad enough that the bombing of innocent Afghans is the culmination of 20 years of cruel games the US has played in the region. But it's also bad military strategy. Is Bush spreading stupid spores? Cuz it seems like an epidemic. -Mark
- anonymous (guest) 11-01-2001 7:48 am [add a comment] [edit]
Another sign of the stupidity epidemic is Scott Shuger's great idea of bringing back flame throwers for the current conflict. Jellied gasoline? Third degree burns? Asphyxiation? Why not? These people are evil, right? For a minute I thought I was reading Soldier of Fortune, not Slate. Then I remembered who owned the magazine...
- tom moody 11-01-2001 8:20 am [add a comment]
I'm posting this sans cookie to test the add-a-comment feature.
- tom moody 11-02-2001 9:37 pm [add a comment]
Now I'm posting under the name of a really good movie.
- Buffalo 66 11-02-2001 9:39 pm [add a comment]
I could have it check to see whether the name selected matches a real users name and disallow those cases. But on the other hand this feature will probably be used most often by real members who are somewhere without their passwords (or access to their mail.) In those cases you would want to be able to impersonate yourself. I guess the (not signed in) makes it clear.
- jim 11-02-2001 9:45 pm [add a comment]
The "not signed in" makes it clear if members are posting. For non-members it potentially creates anxiety. See my comment under systemnews/suggestions (members).
- tom moody 11-02-2001 10:14 pm [add a comment]
Right on schedule (from ethel)
Good plan Steve! And then this quote from Buyer which must be the greatest (where 'greatest' equals 'stupidest') political quote of all time:If his plan worked it would be bad enough, but probably it won't work. Here's a scenario: US special operation forces fight their way into the mountains carrying a bunch of small time delayed nuclear devices. Bin Laden's troops (acting perhaps on information from their high level ISI contacts) surprise the force (Haq anyone?) kill them all except one man who is released to tell the story, and take control of all the devices. One week later a major American city is destroyed and Bin Laden gives us one day to surrender or the next city goes up.- jim 11-03-2001 2:14 pm [add a comment]
For a similar scenario that might really have happened, see here. I've seen this reported more convincingly, but I can't find a better link at the moment. Seems like many of the cruise missles Clinton launched in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) and the Sudan on the eve of his impeachment did not explode (go figure! shotty military contract work?) and that bin laden later sold these to the Chinese.
Gee, I wonder how many nukes "won't explode" when we drop them. All it will take is one.
- jim 11-03-2001 5:31 pm [add a comment]
no problem with the new cluster nuke
- Skinny 11-03-2001 5:40 pm [add a comment]