El Jefe is busy with work and other matters, and the next blog projects are not quite ready for prime-time. In the meantime...
The Nation sees the recent deployment of the Nimitz class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) Strike Group as a straw in the wind indicating a US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Possible, but I doubt it.
Look up Jacques Dhervillez's piece "A Warning to Islamofascist Terrorists" from back on 31 August. I had not seen this article till recently, but it summarizes my own thinking almost perfectly as to the "martyrdom" our enemies seem determined to bring on themselves. A similar theme appears in Thomas Lifson's "The Dark View of Islam and the American Street" (which led me to the Dhervillez essay). Read the whole thing, but here's (for me), the money quote:
. . .Gradually, more and more Americans are beginning to entertain the concept that drastic measures may well be necessary to ensure our survival. It is only a half-thought position, outside of the circle of passionate advocates who write on the web or occasionally break into media notice on talk radio or a cable news channel. But it is part of a growning acceptance that we might need to go a bit Roman . . .
My own view of our prospects (or rather, the plans of our enemies and the degree to which the Left will permit us to deal with them in the first instance) -- is similarly bleak, which makes me tend to agree with Mr. Lifson. But "going a bit Roman" is going to be a very bad thing indeed.
Have a look at Niall Ferguson's 11 September 2006 article "The Next War of the World" which is available on Real Clear Politics. Professor Ferguson discusses the political, economic and social causes of the first two world wars, and shows how much of the same tinder is lying all round the Middle East. Most anything by Professor Ferguson is worth reading, including his excellent book on the First World War: The Pity of War: Explaining World War I. I disagree with many of his conclusions, but it is still a fine book.
I am presently reading Jeffrey Record’s “External Assistance: Enabler of Insurgent Success” in the Autumn 2006 issue of Parameters, the US Army War College Quarterly. Chock full of good stuff, and I hope to have some comments on it soon.
1 comment:
the next war of the world........
jeebus cripes.
next time tell us to bring a sack lunch.
i don't get some of his claims.
he states that the old hot spots will not be new ones.
the balkans of the 1910 is/was the balkans of the 1990.
another claim that many historians make is the rise of democracies in the twentieth century world.
i look around and see either tyranny or socialist nanny states.
i got so confused about whether he was looking at history as being fluid or decades chopped out of history to be examined as events occured separate and only in that decade.
from the end of one paragraph discussing and speculating on sectarian violence, he goes to the beginnning of the next paragraph and declares a civil war in iraq. without any further supporting evidence.
he may be a history professor, but because the university at which he teaches furnishes the state dept. with employs, it confirms why we have the foreign policy we currently have.
Post a Comment