Liquid Mettle

My home email application has been down for the past week, and with blogging at work impossible due to even the ordinary workload, if I can't send articles home to write about in the evenings, I pretty much can't blog at all. So I pretty much haven't been able to blog at all, which is maddening coming off a week's vacation that was anything but what I consider a true vacation to be. I.e. I took two family-related trips that severely curtailed my internet access - though even if they had been pure frivolity, I still would have been hosed, since my idea of leisure is to barricade myself in my house like a hermit and do nothing and go nowhere. Not quite Howard Hughes level, but within a few country miles or so.

Consequently there was a ton of fodder I did not, and will not, get to comment on. But since the itch just HAS to be scratched, if even for a moment, I offer up this morsel:

Michael Yon’s latest dispatch from Iraq has just been posted. It’s amazing stuff. The British soldiers he’s embedded with notched 26-27 kills and suffered no casualties of their own while engaging the enemy in a major gun battle. Michael said to me in an email about the Brits he’s riding with, “These guys fight like animals!”

They do? British soldiers? Hard to believe in light of recent events. Guess it's a good thing they weren't fighting Iranian troops. Or a good thing that British marines weren't deployed in their place. Sticky wicket, and all that rot.

Even more difficult to take seriously is a recent poll of European martial spirit vis-a-vie those same mullahgarchists:

Over half of Europeans would support a preemptive military strike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a poll released last week by a London think-tank reports.

A survey commissioned by the pro-business think tank, Open Europe, found that a majority of those surveyed in eighteen EU member states including France and Britain, backed military action as an option in dealing with the threat of Iranian nuclear proliferation, while majorities in nine nations including Germany and Spain were opposed.

However, the April 4 survey of more than 17,000 Europeans in March conducted by the French polling firm TNS-Sofres found little support for increasing military expenditures to counter or contain the threat.

In response to the statement, "We must stop countries like Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, even if that means taking military action", 52% of Europeans agreed, 40% disagreed and 8% stated they were undecided.

Support for the military option varied widely, with Danes giving the greatest support at 68% and Slovaks the least at 37%. Support for military action amongst the great powers was closely divided; France 53%, Britain 51%, Italy 49%, and Germany 45%.

The Jerusalem Post's definition of "great power" is a bit more elastic than my own. Nevertheless, what the above boils down to is slightly over half of all EUnuchs have realized that they're about to be within range of Iranian ICBMs and are hoping (they forgot how to pray a long time ago, though if their even more pacifistic comrades get their way, they may yet have occasion to re-learn) that the United States strategically castrates Iran (at minimum) before the atomic lights start flashing on all over Europe. They'd never think of doing it themselves, and would condemn us up and down as "imperialist cowboy warmongers" the whole time we were saving their bacon, but what else is new?

The poll doesn't mean anything in practical terms, of course, because the European Union is a bureaucratic oligarchy, not a democracy or even limited republic, and its ruling class is solidly and complacently with the "peace at any price" 40%. But if we don't de-nuke the mullahs, you can count on the EUnuchs blaming us for the disasters their own history-ignoring spinelessness helped make inevitable.

It's the only time they'll ever consider "fighting back to be an option." Aside from the British soldiers who mowed down Islamist terrorists by the hundreds, once upon a time.