This is what we have to endure, part two
Continuing directly . . .
and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.
Prove it. Either of these assumptions are specious at best. Any sources for them?
Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
I thought we saved them? "There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much or anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism." Remember?
Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a million. Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war.
Perhaps. But they didn't, and the Nazis didn't. We'll never know the answer to your counterfactual proposition, will we?
Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941,
With what? They had little to no surface navy in comparison to the British, and little to no ability to convoy troops/materiel across for a sustained invasion. Do you honestly think an invading Nazi Wehrmacht, under those conditions, could have defeated the entire British populace? You're dreaming, pal.
instead, there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today would be very different and much worse.
Jesus; I don't know where to begin. We concentrated on the Nazis with the vast majority of our force because we wanted to. That was agreed upon at the Arcadia Conference, held between Churchill and Roosevelt in late December 1941-mid January 1942. We fought the Japanese at the same time because we could. You don't think we would have wiped the floor with the Japanese a lot sooner if we had chosen to fight them first? In any case, Hitler was planning on invading Russia sooner or later, so he would have had a 2 front war eventually, even without a GB to be kicked around by. Besides, the British didn't "contribute much" anyway, remember?
I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And we are at another one.
Right. Your illustration is filled with counterfactual mumbo-jumbo, and completely irrelevant to what we are facing now. How is an industrialized, secular, hell-bent for land conquest Germany in any way comparable to the religious zealotry of the jihadists who want to convert heathens or at worst, get us to stop polluting their culture and economies through terrorist acts?
There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.
They will not have the "ability to deliver" weapons "anywhere in the world", because they do not currently have the capacity to build missiles capable of doing so. Unless we provide them, of course. In any case, they would have no reason to do so if we stopped raping their lands of whatever resources we can get our hands on.
France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.
As did we, as long as these countries were helping us fight Communism. We are, by far, the most prodigious armers of the countries that now hate us. Try reading a book, bub. Here's one. And here's a link to the government data on arms transfers/sales to other countries.
The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.
Where? Sources? Aside from your racist statement ("Nazis in Kaffiyahs" indeed), you offer nothing other than your word on these goals. Even if that were true, since these extremists are not a majority in many (if any) countries, a little properly applied diplomacy would do wonders, I imagine. If we could get out from under the thrall of rightwing militaristic nutjobs like yourself in our gov't, that is.
There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation.
Again, that is something we could do something about, quite peacefully. The Wahhabis hate us because of our policies (mostly having to do with Israel, to be sure, but also our greedy acquisition/theft of their natural resources). Change the policies and we deprive them of their greatest recruiting tools.
If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.
Rational Saudis? Like the ones who destroyed the WTC on 9/11? Or the corrupt ones we've kept in fine fettle over the decades by propping up their rightwing anti-Communist/leftist government with our cash?
You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.
I've got news for you, guy. Gasoline is running out. Whether that happens this year, or next, or the next decade, or 100 years from now, it will happen. (Among the many books out now about this, see this one.) The Jihadists will have nothing to hold over our heads then. They wouldn't now, except we continue our stupid cheap oil addiction. And what on earth does our job market have to do with this? The dollar is plummeting because we don't offer anything the world wants to buy; we've outsourced almost all of our manufacturing base in the haste to lower costs. Jihadists got nothin' to do with that; that's simply good ol' American economic free market ideology bereft of any governmental oversight or restriction. Thanks, Republicans since 1981!
If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.
Just as they had been until we stepped in and "fixed" things there to fight off the Communist "menace" from the 1950s to the 1980s. Read this.
We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere. And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.
Not through violence against a stateless group of radicals we don't. Violence feeds on itself, and if you don't think so, you are completely deluded.
Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.
Iraq, where your Jihadists have never been in power? Why?
(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not,
"Or not"? Um, you must be an absolute troglodyte if you don't know that he wasn't. At all. Seeing as how Saddam was a secularist violently opposed to religious fanaticism, it is extremely unlikely that any government he was a part of would have been a party to any jihad.
it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist.
Bzzzzt. Wrong again. Unless your definition of "terrorist" means "despotic rightwing tyrant interested only in preserving or extending his own statist power". Terrorism is a tactic of political outsiders borne of frustration, and in this case, Saddam Hussein was the ultimate insider in total control of his country.
Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.
Yeah, when we gave him all the weapons and money to do so. Remember that? Iraq was our ally right up until Saddam invaded Kuwait, because those nasty Iranians had kidnapped a bunch of our citizens. In order to protest our policies, by the way.
(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle.
Really? Then why do Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and a lot of the 'stans from the former Soviet Union all hate us as well? We haven't focused anything except by our mere presence. Our soldiers get killed because they are there and they represent us. In any case, why is that a good thing? Shouldn't we want to minimize and diffuse hatred of the US instead of concentrating it?
We are killing bad guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else.
What a load of rubbish. If we don't create bad guys, we don't have to kill anyone. How are all these jihadists supposed to get here anyway? We are providing them with easy targets, which is not my idea of smart.
We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq,
Right. And how are we supposed to do that? By forcing groups that have hated each other for millennia to simply stop doing so and behave? Sure thing. Let me know how that works out as it has in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. I hear the Turks and the Armenians are having each other over for pie and punch this afternoon.
which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East,
How so? The domino effect in reverse? When has that ever worked?
To be continued . . .
and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later and turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse in the late summer of 1940.
Prove it. Either of these assumptions are specious at best. Any sources for them?
Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany.
I thought we saved them? "There were no other countries of any size or military significance with the will and ability to contribute much or anything to the effort to defeat Hitler's Germany and Japan, and prevent the global dominance of Nazism." Remember?
Russia lost something like 24 million people in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow, 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a million soldiers. More than a million. Had Russia surrendered, then, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire campaign against the Brits, then America, and the Nazis would have won that war.
Perhaps. But they didn't, and the Nazis didn't. We'll never know the answer to your counterfactual proposition, will we?
Had Hitler not made that mistake and invaded England in 1940 or 1941,
With what? They had little to no surface navy in comparison to the British, and little to no ability to convoy troops/materiel across for a sustained invasion. Do you honestly think an invading Nazi Wehrmacht, under those conditions, could have defeated the entire British populace? You're dreaming, pal.
instead, there would have been no England for the US and the Brits to use as a staging ground to prepare an assault on Nazi Europe, England would not have been able to run its North African campaign to help take a little pressure off Russia while America geared up for battle, and today Europe would very probably be run by the Nazis, the Third Reich, and, isolated and without any allies (not even the Brits), the US would very probably have had to cede Asia to the Japanese, who were basically Nazis by another name then, and the world we live in today would be very different and much worse.
Jesus; I don't know where to begin. We concentrated on the Nazis with the vast majority of our force because we wanted to. That was agreed upon at the Arcadia Conference, held between Churchill and Roosevelt in late December 1941-mid January 1942. We fought the Japanese at the same time because we could. You don't think we would have wiped the floor with the Japanese a lot sooner if we had chosen to fight them first? In any case, Hitler was planning on invading Russia sooner or later, so he would have had a 2 front war eventually, even without a GB to be kicked around by. Besides, the British didn't "contribute much" anyway, remember?
I say this to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And we are at another one.
Right. Your illustration is filled with counterfactual mumbo-jumbo, and completely irrelevant to what we are facing now. How is an industrialized, secular, hell-bent for land conquest Germany in any way comparable to the religious zealotry of the jihadists who want to convert heathens or at worst, get us to stop polluting their culture and economies through terrorist acts?
There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.
They will not have the "ability to deliver" weapons "anywhere in the world", because they do not currently have the capacity to build missiles capable of doing so. Unless we provide them, of course. In any case, they would have no reason to do so if we stopped raping their lands of whatever resources we can get our hands on.
France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology at least as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan, paid for with billions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the UN with the complicity of Kofi Annan and his son.
As did we, as long as these countries were helping us fight Communism. We are, by far, the most prodigious armers of the countries that now hate us. Try reading a book, bub. Here's one. And here's a link to the government data on arms transfers/sales to other countries.
The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs - they believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world, and that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.
Where? Sources? Aside from your racist statement ("Nazis in Kaffiyahs" indeed), you offer nothing other than your word on these goals. Even if that were true, since these extremists are not a majority in many (if any) countries, a little properly applied diplomacy would do wonders, I imagine. If we could get out from under the thrall of rightwing militaristic nutjobs like yourself in our gov't, that is.
There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East - for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win - the Inquisition, or the Reformation.
Again, that is something we could do something about, quite peacefully. The Wahhabis hate us because of our policies (mostly having to do with Israel, to be sure, but also our greedy acquisition/theft of their natural resources). Change the policies and we deprive them of their greatest recruiting tools.
If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, and the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies, the techno-industrial economies, will be at the mercy of OPEC - not an OPEC dominated by the well-educated and rational Saudis of today, but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis.
Rational Saudis? Like the ones who destroyed the WTC on 9/11? Or the corrupt ones we've kept in fine fettle over the decades by propping up their rightwing anti-Communist/leftist government with our cash?
You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.
I've got news for you, guy. Gasoline is running out. Whether that happens this year, or next, or the next decade, or 100 years from now, it will happen. (Among the many books out now about this, see this one.) The Jihadists will have nothing to hold over our heads then. They wouldn't now, except we continue our stupid cheap oil addiction. And what on earth does our job market have to do with this? The dollar is plummeting because we don't offer anything the world wants to buy; we've outsourced almost all of our manufacturing base in the haste to lower costs. Jihadists got nothin' to do with that; that's simply good ol' American economic free market ideology bereft of any governmental oversight or restriction. Thanks, Republicans since 1981!
If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.
Just as they had been until we stepped in and "fixed" things there to fight off the Communist "menace" from the 1950s to the 1980s. Read this.
We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. We cannot do it nowhere. And we cannot do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle now at the time and place of our choosing, in Iraq.
Not through violence against a stateless group of radicals we don't. Violence feeds on itself, and if you don't think so, you are completely deluded.
Not in New York, not in London, or Paris, or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we did and are doing two very important things.
Iraq, where your Jihadists have never been in power? Why?
(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not,
"Or not"? Um, you must be an absolute troglodyte if you don't know that he wasn't. At all. Seeing as how Saddam was a secularist violently opposed to religious fanaticism, it is extremely unlikely that any government he was a part of would have been a party to any jihad.
it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist.
Bzzzzt. Wrong again. Unless your definition of "terrorist" means "despotic rightwing tyrant interested only in preserving or extending his own statist power". Terrorism is a tactic of political outsiders borne of frustration, and in this case, Saddam Hussein was the ultimate insider in total control of his country.
Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.
Yeah, when we gave him all the weapons and money to do so. Remember that? Iraq was our ally right up until Saddam invaded Kuwait, because those nasty Iranians had kidnapped a bunch of our citizens. In order to protest our policies, by the way.
(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle.
Really? Then why do Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and a lot of the 'stans from the former Soviet Union all hate us as well? We haven't focused anything except by our mere presence. Our soldiers get killed because they are there and they represent us. In any case, why is that a good thing? Shouldn't we want to minimize and diffuse hatred of the US instead of concentrating it?
We are killing bad guys there and the ones we get there we won't have to get here, or anywhere else.
What a load of rubbish. If we don't create bad guys, we don't have to kill anyone. How are all these jihadists supposed to get here anyway? We are providing them with easy targets, which is not my idea of smart.
We also have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq,
Right. And how are we supposed to do that? By forcing groups that have hated each other for millennia to simply stop doing so and behave? Sure thing. Let me know how that works out as it has in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Balkans. I hear the Turks and the Armenians are having each other over for pie and punch this afternoon.
which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East,
How so? The domino effect in reverse? When has that ever worked?
To be continued . . .
posted by bryduck at 8:57 AM
1 Comments:
Pie and punch. I like it! You tell 'em, Sweet Boy!!!
Post a Comment
<< Home