Nuclear Ships, Passing In The Night
While the Iranian mullahgarchy is frenetically working toward building a massive nuclear arsenal - no matter what the intel defeatniks that put together the latest National Intelligence Estimate hallucinate - that they, unlike we, will promptly use against us and our allies, the United States, under the gelded, beknighted direction of the gutted, emasculated Bush Administration, is sailing suicidally in the opposite direction:
What strikes me in particular is the reference to "reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons." During the Cold War we relied upon a strong nuclear deterrent to defend Europe from the Warsaw Pact because we were so hopelessly outnumbered in conventional forces and unwilling to invest in the level of manpower and weaponry it would have required to maintain parity with that enemy. After President Reagan won the Cold War (by BUILDING our nuclear stockpile, among other "warmongering" remedies), and our "holiday from history" passed, we found, and find, ourselves in both a new war and new KIND of war, one that doesn't focus as much on the faceoff of massive land armies and more on far-flung, small-scale guerrilla (or "insurgency") campaigns scattered across the globe, but with the paradoxically greater likelihood of the use of weapons of mass destruction - including nukes - against our homeland. The surest and most straightforward means of winning such a conflict is to deprive Islamist terrorists of the support and sponsorship of like-minded regimes who are hell-bent on gaining access to WMD for the sole purpose of using them against us.
Regimes such as the one that used to dominate Iraq, and the ones that still exist in rogue outposts like North Korea and....Iran.
Yet how is the Bush Administration handling the metastasizing Iranian nuclear threat? Do you really want to know?
It also had the intended effect of cutting off any embryonic decisive move by the Bush White House to "neutralize" (or sterilize) the mullahgarchy once and for all at the proverbial knees. Not that any such move was remotely in the offing, but now it's bloody impossible. Which both limits Dubya to futile multilateralist diplodiddling about meaningless UNSCRs and toothless sanctions measures and anything and everything but the only thing that can stop the mullahs from getting the nuclear weapons they are making no secret of seeking: regime change by American military force; and guarantees a bloody end to this process, with most of the blood being spilled out of American civilian veins.
The greatest irony? By not employing our conventional military superiority where it is most needed - and whose very existence had already, at least I THOUGHT, "reduced our reliance upon nuclear weapons" - that reliance will only INCREASE as hostile, irrational regimes build ever large nuclear stockpiles and distribute them out the tentacles of the terrorist networks they animate. And that's in addition to the still vast Russian nuclear arsenal, in the hands of Time's Man of the Year who has shown a nascent desire to revive the Cold War of late, and the ever expanding Red Chinese nuclear and conventional military machine.
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we seem determined to divest ourselves entirely of the means of both.
And that's BEFORE Hillary Clinton moves back into the White House.
Perhaps it's not so ironic that the shadow of war looms over this season of ostensible "peace on Earth." "While they are saying, 'Peace and safety!' then destruction will come upon them suddenly like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape."
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: to modify an old Maoism, "Peace and safety come out of the barrel of a gun; that gun must never slip from the grasp of the United States of America."
And we're throwing it away - on (almost) every front.
How's that for a stocking-stuffer?
The United States has dismantled its nuclear weapons stockpile faster than anticipated and will meet President George W. Bush's goal of reducing the arsenal by half at the end of this year - five years early, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.I am disquieted by the notion of unilateral nuclear disarmament just on general principles. It takes far longer to build a nuclear arsenal than it does to heedless throw one away, after all, and history shows that disarmament inevitably necessitates re-armament by the encouragement such overt displays of weakness give to our enemies. Only in this case and these circumstances we may not even get the chance to rearm before our willingly embraced vulnerability destroys us.
Bush in 2004 announced a goal of halving the U.S. nuclear stockpile by 2012, which will now be met by year's end, a National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman said.
The number of nuclear weapons is classified and the agency is working to reduce the stockpile by another 15%, John Broehm, an NNSA spokesman said.
"We are reducing our nuclear weapons stockpile to the lowest level consistent with America's national security and our commitments to friends and allies," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement.
She said the reduction would put the U.S. stockpile at less than one-quarter its size at the end of the Cold War.
"It is a comprehensive effort to reduce U.S. reliance on nuclear weapons and streamline and modernize our nuclear infrastructure," Perino said.
What strikes me in particular is the reference to "reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons." During the Cold War we relied upon a strong nuclear deterrent to defend Europe from the Warsaw Pact because we were so hopelessly outnumbered in conventional forces and unwilling to invest in the level of manpower and weaponry it would have required to maintain parity with that enemy. After President Reagan won the Cold War (by BUILDING our nuclear stockpile, among other "warmongering" remedies), and our "holiday from history" passed, we found, and find, ourselves in both a new war and new KIND of war, one that doesn't focus as much on the faceoff of massive land armies and more on far-flung, small-scale guerrilla (or "insurgency") campaigns scattered across the globe, but with the paradoxically greater likelihood of the use of weapons of mass destruction - including nukes - against our homeland. The surest and most straightforward means of winning such a conflict is to deprive Islamist terrorists of the support and sponsorship of like-minded regimes who are hell-bent on gaining access to WMD for the sole purpose of using them against us.
Regimes such as the one that used to dominate Iraq, and the ones that still exist in rogue outposts like North Korea and....Iran.
Yet how is the Bush Administration handling the metastasizing Iranian nuclear threat? Do you really want to know?
US President George W. Bush said Monday that Russian deliveries of nuclear fuel to Iran only fed the need for the world to clamp down more firmly on Tehran's home-grown atomic work.The Russian deliveries of nuclear fuel to Iran resumed only after the brain-dead "The mullahs stopped seeking nukes four years ago despite their crash-course enrichment drive" NIE was vomited onto the global news nets, handing Tehran a load of propaganda largesse that Santa Claus couldn't have managed. Coincidence? I think not.
And the US State Department announced consultations Tuesday with five other powers on a draft UN Security Council resolution imposing tougher sanctions on the Islamic republic for refusing to freeze uranium enrichment.
"Iran was a threat to peace, Iran is a threat to peace, and Iran will be a threat to peace if we don't stop their enrichment," which can be a critical step towards getting nuclear arms, Bush told a town-hall style audience here.
It also had the intended effect of cutting off any embryonic decisive move by the Bush White House to "neutralize" (or sterilize) the mullahgarchy once and for all at the proverbial knees. Not that any such move was remotely in the offing, but now it's bloody impossible. Which both limits Dubya to futile multilateralist diplodiddling about meaningless UNSCRs and toothless sanctions measures and anything and everything but the only thing that can stop the mullahs from getting the nuclear weapons they are making no secret of seeking: regime change by American military force; and guarantees a bloody end to this process, with most of the blood being spilled out of American civilian veins.
The greatest irony? By not employing our conventional military superiority where it is most needed - and whose very existence had already, at least I THOUGHT, "reduced our reliance upon nuclear weapons" - that reliance will only INCREASE as hostile, irrational regimes build ever large nuclear stockpiles and distribute them out the tentacles of the terrorist networks they animate. And that's in addition to the still vast Russian nuclear arsenal, in the hands of Time's Man of the Year who has shown a nascent desire to revive the Cold War of late, and the ever expanding Red Chinese nuclear and conventional military machine.
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, we seem determined to divest ourselves entirely of the means of both.
And that's BEFORE Hillary Clinton moves back into the White House.
Perhaps it's not so ironic that the shadow of war looms over this season of ostensible "peace on Earth." "While they are saying, 'Peace and safety!' then destruction will come upon them suddenly like labor pains upon a woman with child, and they will not escape."
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: to modify an old Maoism, "Peace and safety come out of the barrel of a gun; that gun must never slip from the grasp of the United States of America."
And we're throwing it away - on (almost) every front.
How's that for a stocking-stuffer?
posted by JASmius at 5:39 AM
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