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When the party's over, all the guests split.
The destroyers may be getting ready to fall in line behind the last ship in the middle column, USNS Tippecanoe (T-AO 199), for a quick top off.
Who cares! I look great in my new ascot!
What a dork. Ruined a prefectly good shot. How can we hold off the Chinese if we can't hold station.....
BALAD, Iraq (AP) - The U.S. military has begun sending thousands of battered Humvees and other war-torn equipment home as more Iraqi units join the fight against insurgents and American units scheduled for Iraq duty have their orders canceled.In the last four months, the Army has tagged 7,000 Humvees and 17,000 other pieces of equipment to be shipped to the United States to be rebuilt.
"This is all a byproduct of Iraqi forces accepting battle space and U.S. forces being displaced, which has allowed our government to decide not to send more forces," said Col. Jack O’Connor, commander of the U.S. Army Materiel Command’s sustainment brigade in Iraq.
Recently there has been much talk and speculation about the US conducting a pre-emptive bombing of North Korea in order to prevent their missile test. I tend to believe that a pre-emptive bombing of North Korea would be giving the North Koreans exactly what they want and should be the last course of action for the US to pursue.
The North Koreans have a tendency for brinkmanship to get what they want and this current missile test is no different. The North Koreans have tried continuously over the past few years to get the Bush administration to agree to direct talks in order to meet their current demands. However, the Bush administration, rightfully so has continued to tell North Korea that all talks will only be handled within the six party framework which includes North Korea's neighbors in the negotiation process and not one on one talks. Simultaneously the US has vigorously been cutting off the Kim Jong-il regime's sources of financing through money laundering, drugs, and weapons deals. Kim is backed into a corner, strapped for cash and is now pushing the envelope, but he has pushed the envelope before.
via FInancial Crimes Enforcement Center dot GOV
SUMMARY: The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Board) are reviewing the threshold in the rule requiring banks and nonbank financial institutions to collect and retain information on funds transfers and transmittals of funds. FinCEN is reviewing the threshold in the rule requiring banks and nonbank financial institutions to transmit information on funds transfers and transmittals of funds.
Time to refocus on Iran.
Austin Bay posts on a change in focus from Iraq to Iran, and references Wretchard at The Belmont Club. Bay and Wretchard both remark on recent talk of amnesty as “a new peace feeler” from the Iraqi government to Sunni holdouts. Bay agrees with Wretchard, that the Iraqi "insurgency" is dying, gangs and militias are a growing threat, and Iran is shifting its strategy of relying on proxies Hezbollah and Qods in southern Iraq.
Wretchard in his post goes on to remark on the possibility of a shifting US strategic focus:
The recently announced Iraqi government peace proposal to the Sunnis was in all probability already known to both Rumsfeld and Casey when they gave this briefing. If I were to guess, and I emphasize guess, it means that the US is now in the process of shifting its strategic focus from al-Qaeda and Sunni threats to Iran.Here’s Bay’s conclusion:
Maliki’s amnesty looks very similar to the program Allawi wanted to implement. The difference is Maliki has the political power of a democratically-elected national unity government behind him. The Sunnis holdouts have also suffered another two years of defeat. The old Sunni line in Iraq was “the Shia are sheep.” The Saddamists running the Sunni insurgency thought they could terrorize the Shia into submission. They also banked on “the Vietnam syndrome” to get the US to leave– set off bombs, rely on the global media to magnify the bombs, and slowly erode US national will.I can only thank God our President and our Military leadership don’t make strategic, national security decisions based on polls, public opinion, or media reporting.
Bay accurately gauges the Sunni insurgency, what they were counting on as a central tenet of their strategy. Note how completely it’s failed on all fronts. The Shia reacted not with fear, or violence and reprisals, but steadiness, restraint, and no small amount of courage. So the current American Administration and its military have . The only effect that Sunni holdouts and their erstwhile Al Qaeda in Iraq terrorist conspirators was the last, that of global media eroding US national will, at least as can be surmised from the recent bottoming out of the President’s poll numbers, Democratic caterwauling, or polls showing US public increasingly demoralized over the course of the war, which US and Iraqi security forces are winning handily.
Cross-posted at Dadmanly)
Please, please, please, please.
If you currently subscribe to the New York Times, cancel your subscription. Don’t buy it, discourage anyone you know from buying it. It is the primary mouthpiece of sworn enemies of the United States, and happy to be so.
If you care about the national security of the United States, cancel your subscription.
If you think Americans need to be Americans first before we start yielding our freedoms to those in the world who hate and despise us, cancel your subscription.
If you think America is just about the most free place in the world, if you value our freedoms, cancel your subscription.
If you are afraid of what the US would become if we fell under the control of the UN, Europe, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, CAIR, or others who think we are the biggest security problem in the world, cancel your subscription.
Because the Editorial Board of the New York Times thinks only the Editors at the Times can decide what are national security secrets, and what aren’t.
It isn’t about legal or illegal, separation of powers, checks and balances, it’s what a few, unelected, self-appointed Protectors of the Public Interest think the way things should be.
They don’t care about laws, they don’t care about America, they don’t believe we are a good people in a good nation, which is the beacon of liberty and freedom in the world.
They believe only their own misguided philosophy and deranged delusions, in which the US is run as a Fascist State by an Evil Religious Extremist, supported by an entire Political Party of Nazi Sympathizers and Racist Corporate Barons, and therefore should be fought against with every means at their disposal.
Al Qaeda and the terrorists are their friends, they sympathize with their hatred of America and our American President. They want to help them, and they do.
Anything that hurts our efforts in the Global War on Terror, that they will do.
If you currently subscribe to the New York Times, cancel your subscription.
(Cross-posted at Dadmanly, with added links.)
This is a story I haven’t seen anywhere else, Saddam and his aides went on a hunger strike a couple of days ago to protest the killing of his lawyer. It lasted all of one meal.
...how about a continuance of the Interservice Intramurals, Army Version?
For those who are interested in the ongoing evolution of the SCO (China & Russia's new "security" organization of sorts), Stephen Blank has an important read for us to consider. Taking a long view of the future of Central Asia and America's options, he notes that differing visions of what the SCO should become could offer rich opportunities for the US to wreak havoc in, frustrating the efforts (especially of China) to turn it into a lasting coalition against American interests in Asia.
Prior to 2005, Russia did not take the SCO so seriously, tending to see it as Beijing’s creature. But with the sudden turn of events in 2005, which saw the United States lose its military base in Uzbekistan, while China pursued bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, Russian interest in the SCO rapidly increased. Moscow found itself determined to breathe new life into the SCO and advance its own agenda for the organization. Russia favors a US withdrawal only from Central Asia, not the entire Asian continent. Keeping a US presence on the Korean Peninsula, for example, would serve as a check on China’s growing power-projection capabilities. Russian officials worry that without a US presence in East Asia, China would establish itself as the dominant partner in the SCO and other multilateral groupings -- an unsavory prospect for Russian elites.Thus, behind the shared anti-American feelings, China, Russia and the other SCO members and observers harbor serious differences of opinion. Given these, it is unlikely that the SCO can develop anytime soon into an anti-NATO-like grouping along the lines of the Warsaw Pact. The SCO’s consensus is a negative one, in which the parties agree only on what they don’t like.
(Hat Tip Foreign Policy Passport Blog/
Someone's surprised that military folks are not politically monolithic. Hat tip Instapundit.
ﻫ <==That's, if I typed it right, the Arabic letter "heh". Didn't know Instapundit was everywhere...
Oops....
The assistant to Al Qaida's new network chief has been killed in a foiled insurgency strike.Iraqi security sources said a lieutenant of Al Qaida network chief Abu Ayoub Al Masri was found killed in a car on its way to an insurgency strike. The sources said a bomb inside the car blew up prematurely and killed the lieutenant and three other Al Qaida operatives.
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