2011-12-23

 

Democracy Will Prevail

Let's hope so Chen Wei, let's hope so. Either way, history will be written that you were a great man, while the slimebag dictators of China will end up in the garbage bin of history. And arsehole Chinese who support their dictator and call Hu Jintao a kind man should hang their heads in shame. It would be good to see the Chinese making another attempt to get a democracy. The military may not be willing to open fire this time around. It's a terrible tragedy that unarmed Chinese need to face automatic weapons though. There will be no help from the West for this country. Although there are other plans to implement trade sanctions with the Chinese economy now dependent on exports. Let's see, let's see. Need some other ducks to fall into a row before we can make progress on this warfront.

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2011-12-22

 

Afghan Kids

Our militaries have done their part by breaking open freedom of speech and democracy so that people are now in charge of their own future. I wouldn't give anything to anyone until that pillar is in place. But it is indeed in place in Afghanistan, and I had Waheed as an intermediatry. So I gave him some money and asked him to buy some school supplies for kids and get some photos, which he did. So here are the photos (all taken back in 2006). I asked Waheed to tell the kids that the supplies were from Australia, not USA, because I want them to know that this action has nothing to do with America. There are plenty of non-US troops in Afghanistan and the mission has nothing to do with America in particular. Spreading freedom is something common to many countries. I spent hours looking at the first picture when I received it (by itself). It was wonderful to be able to bring a smile to someone's face for such a small gift. Afghanistan is great value for money. The tall guy in the blue shirt in the first picture might be 18 now and might even be signing up to the Afghan National Army. He looks like the sort of guy who would be good to have on your team.












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2011-12-19

 

Time for Nuclear War

Great news! Kim Jong Il is dead. The heir apparent unfortunately does not appear to be a reformer who will introduce democracy, but is instead someone who is just as big a bastard as his father and grandfather. And the guy is young, which means we can look forward to his despotic rule for another 50 years, during which they will almost certainly be able to perfect their nuclear capability.

No thanks.

It's time to seize the moment. Survival of the human race is at stake. I don't want to see this peanut threatening the world with nuclear annihilation in 40 years from now. Whatever he has - let's get it out into the open now. And if China wishes to join in - let's get that rogue nation to show its true colours too so that we can fight a proper Cold War with it.

My recommendation is to forget about Syria and Iran for now. Do an airborne landing in North Korea, secure an airfield, then strike out to a port city. Do all this from aircraft carriers, not South Korea. Let South Korea scream obscenities about all this so that hopefully North Korea doesn't attack Seoul, which is in artillery range. If Seoul is attacked by artillery, then don't fuck around - literally nuke the artillery positions.

Hopefully there will be a short period of confusion in North Korea, as Kim Jong-un hasn't solidified his position yet. That's why now is the time to strike. The US troops have left Iraq now, and had a chance for a short break, so now it's time to redeploy to where they're needed for the future of humanity. Oh, and a good thing about this war is that it already has UN approval, as the previous UN approval never expired.

Nuclear weapons are a real downer, and we need to be honest about these damn things and get the threat out into the open. Collect Pakistan's nukes too. We just need to live with whatever damage they can do before we get our hands on them. Better that than our descendants needing to deal with a larger arsenal.

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2011-12-18

 

They're Out!

The US troops have finally left Iraq. That is fantastic news and the screws can now finally be turned on the "war for oil" argument, with all troops gone and no evidence of a drop of oil being stolen. All that's been left is a democracy. Exactly as stated all along. The anti-war has always been completely morally and politically bankrupt. They just repeated the same lie again and again.

Now it's time for a short breather and then send them in again to some appropriate place like Iran or Syria. And from now on it's all hit and run. No more nation-building. Just the initial 3.5 week war or whatever it takes, then out. Let's see what we get from that. We should get something that looks like Libya today. I can explain and defend why nation-building was important in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that's what many blog posts in the past have been about. But from now on, it's wham, bam, thankyou ma'am. Let's do it boys!

The future is looking very bright when we know we can topple a country like Iraq in 3.5 weeks for the loss of about 100 allied lives. So long as we seize opportunities like Syria instead of squandering them, we should be able to turn the world to our ideology instead of the bankrupt challengers. We're so bloody close. All that's required is a bit more patience and a bit more violence.

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2011-12-15

 

Friendly Dictators

It's good to see that the US is planning ahead by courting Uzbekistan. But they should never have pissed off Uzbekistan in the first place. We do not have the luxury of being able to piss off friendly dictators. We've never had that luxury. We still haven't defeated our actual enemy governments. With Pakistan cutting off our supply routes into Afghanistan, we need to be thankful that the Uzbek dictator is willing to forgive the Americans for past criticism. And hopefully that will include the regular yearly criticism from the State Department when it does its sweep of all countries in the world honestly pointing out their flaws (ie produce a list of things that would be compulsory fixed if the US had a magic wand, which it doesn't). The US should have just left its quiet yearly criticism in, and left it at that. It should never ever have poked the Uzbek dictator in the eye.

Of course there's another route into Afghanistan - via Iran. I would take a dual strategy of being nice to the Uzbek dictator as well as liberating Iran and seeing if that opens up new options.

Syria is hanging on a thread too. With the Russians able to cut their supply route, and having to rely on the Uzbeks, we're between a rock and a hard place. Basically we're forced to say "no" to Syrian freedom fighters, or forced to pull out of Afghanistan. We need some more liberations to give more options. Even invading Pakistan is an option. We need to collect their nukes, after all. And also do something about those tribal territories, such as give them to Afghanistan and bring them under control.

Well that's a tough calculation to do. There is evidence that the US government is competently working the problem. Also evidence that it is being incompetent - poking friendly dictators in the eye. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. It's difficult to predict how they're going to sort out this mess. Difficult to give advice too. There doesn't seem to be a good solution. Just some bad options to choose between.

I'd say that you can't go wrong by liberating Iran - so get that out of the way first. It's way overdue anyway. And be prepared to abandon Afghanistan - the important work there has already been done. Afghanistan has an undefeatable military already - and it is loyal to Afghan's constitution rather than some dictator. I would like to see how Afghanistan copes on its own anyway. It would provide a missing military data point I'd like to have for my calculations.

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2011-12-13

 

UK Please Liberate Syria

Open Letter to David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK

Dear Sir,

I recently worked out an agreement of terms with a Syrian citizen for a war of liberation. You can see that at http://www.mutazilah.org/liberation_contract.htm .

Since I am an Australian citizen, I then requested my government to take action based on the terms of that contract. You can see my letter at http://www.antisubjugator.blogspot.com/2011/11/syrian-contract.html . Unfortuntely I didn't even get a "no" response from my apparently closed government (or maybe Julia knows I didn't vote for her).

Unfortunately Australia has a left-wing government (I voted for the right-wing party), and our left-wing governments have a recent track record of ignoring cries for freedom, e.g. by pulling our troops out of Iraq before the job was done.

I am thus appealing to the UK, a fellow liberal democracy, to do what Australia is too immoral to do - liberate Syria. My Syrian contact has appealed to me again, here is what he said:

"Assad's army has been sent tanks into the Kurdish areas, we are what we do after the arrival of tanks? we really want to help, we are what we do without help?".

He is quite right in recognizing the harsh reality of the situation. I know enough about automatic weapons to know that there is nothing that he can do. If there isn't already, there should be a concept known as "free people's burden", ie anyone who is already lucky enough to be free should be freeing others. Please don't let my unarmed Syrian friend be brutally crushed by Assad's tanks. I know it is within your power to prevent that from happening. I know that you have a volunteer army at your disposal that is trained and willing to help those who are unable to help themselves. Note that the signed contract even stipulates that once they are out of this unjust situation they will do their best to help liberate others. I hope you can help both me and him reach that stage.

Yours faithfully,
Paul Edwards.

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2011-12-07

 

succinct pro-war argument

This is a very old post from the old "thinktam" site, quoting something from one of the Iraqi blogs. I reproduce it here because I find that while I can express things logically, things sound heaps better if someone else's words are used to express the exact same idea.


Point of complaint raised against Bush and answered by someone else (Caroline). The answer is so sublime I can't imagine how anyone can possibly not be a Bush fan after reading the answer. Can you?


He is diminishing the military of which he is so proud now as commander in chief. The invasion and occupation of Iraq (news - web sites) have obviously not worked out the way he imagined -- naked torture was not the goal. But the far greater problem for the future is that our proud commander has revealed the hollowness behind the unilateral superpower. From the top down, we have not been able to win Iraq, much less the world. And going into Iraq has compromised or crippled the war on terror he declared himself.


The Dems are diminishing the military through propoganda like Michael Moore's that portrays pre-invasion Iraq as some peaceful idyll and our military as dupes of some crazed imperial power, fighting an immoral war. This is the only respect in which Iraq resembles Vietnam - the left has made it so. There were at least half a dozen excellent reasons to go into Iraq - the supposed WMD's (which all educated parties assumed) combined with the fact that Saddam did not yet have an effective nuclear capacity, the fact that we were technically still at war with Saddam due to his failure to comply with his ceasefire agreement after Gulf1, the fact that he ignored 17 UN resolutions re WMD inspections and was making a mockery of the UN and thereby setting a precedent for other rogue regimes (exhibit 2 - Sudan) , the devastating effects of the sanctions which were penalizing the Iraqi citizens but could not be lifted due to Saddam's ambitions, assorted evidence that Saddam was friendly to Anti-US causes such as al-Quaeda, the neo-con idea that since Iraq was a largely secular society of highly educated and competent people it could be a germ for spreading democracy in the middle East, thereby making the rest of the world eventually safer by getting at the roots of terrorism, and last but not least - in fact at the top of the list for any humanist - and I had thought that American democrats were humanists - the fact that Saddam was one of the most brutal murderous dictators in human history - holding a country of 25 million people hostage to terror. It is entirely sound foreign policy - from both a practical and moral standpoint - to use military force precisely when so many relevant factors converge. Instead of appreciating this the Dems are quite willing to throw in the towel because we face a more vicious enemy than we imagined - an enemy willing to shield themselves behind civilians, willing to blow up infrastructure, willing to use mosques and schools as ammo dumps, willing to indiscriminately blow up hundreds upon hundreds of innocent civilians just to derail what they call an "occupation" but which as any idiot can see is a temporary attempt to maintain some semblance of order in the lead up to free elections so we can get the hell out of there. Might we lose? Hell yeah - and it will be in no small measure due to the help of the Democrats in America who have driven me - a lifelong Democrat into the Bush camp. I hope to God Bush wins reelection in November and defeats my stupid immoral fellow Americans who are willing to sacrifice ordinary Iraqis for their political ambitions.


P.S. Also see this other list of arguments from Ann Coulter.


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2011-12-04

 

Spilling the Beans

We've now got access to the neocon thinking from inside the US government courtesy of General Wesley Clark. It looks like it has been available for some time, but I've only recently found it.

As I expected, their thinking is largely in line with mine - and completely logical - and has nothing at all to do with oil. Clark calls it "cockamamie", due to his completely different worldview, but it is intensely sensible from my worldview.

Basically it starts with the Cold War. During the Cold War there were tinpot dictators causing us grief by aligning with the despotic Soviet Union. Those dictators should all have been brought to justice at the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, the Cold War didn't have a swift end, and to this day the Russians are still pointing their nuclear weapons at the free world.

Negotiating some sort of soft ending to the Cold War has been a tortuous process, and still continues today. It was only in 2004 that the Baltics were secured in NATO. In 1991, we were not in a position to bring justice to the Middle Eastern dictators, but that's what the neocons (including me) wanted to do. This is an instinctive reaction when fighting a war.

So they wanted to "clean up the Middle East", but were constrained by the fact that the Soviet Union was peacefully collapsing and while progress was being made, they didn't want to interfere with a good thing by spooking the Russians. Then at the end of 1992 they lost control of the US government and didn't get it back until the beginning of 2001. My guess is that if it hadn't been for 9/11, they would have continued to sit on their hands on this, as Europe was not yet fully secured (notably the Balkans weren't in NATO).

9/11 provided an opportunity. An excuse for taking wide-ranging action now. Hopefully that action wouldn't interfere with securing the Balkans, but even if it did, that was a risk worth taking given the opportunity offered by 9/11 which shouldn't be squandered. There was a chance to turn Afghanistan away from a horrible regime that beat women, and there was an opportunity to finish off Saddam - someone who wouldn't even listen to US bombs. And depending on the success of Iraq, there were many more opportunities available - they named Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Iran. And the idea was to convert these countries to allies of the free world before some other superpower (like China) came along and converted these countries to be their own allies. Once again - an opportunity not to be squandered.

Of course, as we now know, it's not a simple matter to get these strange people to change sides. In fact it wasn't even simple just to let them choose their own path via democracy. Some people (ie Sunni rejectionists) opposed the establishment of democracy, preferring instead to have some Sunni ruler installed by force. So that was a real spanner in the works of dealing with the remnants of the Cold War. However, that spanner is the same spanner that caused 9/11, so it needs to be dealt with regardless, and Iraq was the ideal place for a mixture of Arab Sunnis, Arab Shiites and Kurdish Sunnis to forge a peaceful liberal democracy together (which would in turn would hopefully not be hostile towards the US). An experiment in nation-building. An experiment that didn't work out as well as hoped, but it's a hell of a lot better than the worst-case scenario (complete rejection of democracy, less than 5% turnout at elections, 95% supporting insurgency against the US invaders and anyone who tries to sign up to new security forces, Sistani declaring jihad, Islamic radicals getting elected).

Clark made another point - that the neocons didn't know how to deal with terrorism, but did have a US military that was capable of toppling governments, and that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. There is a lot of truth in that. Us neocons instinctively see that tinpot anti-American dictators cannot be a good thing in the world, and we want to topple them using our available militaries. There is no direct equation that says that toppling those dictators will reduce terrorism. But it is hoped that by doing something that makes the world a better place (end of cruel dictators), that it will by some means (not yet fully understood) have a knock-on effect of reducing the causes of terrorism. So we want to see what the world looks like with the dictators gone, so that we can reevaluate. Maybe that reevaluation will lead to a realization that the British had it right with their empire after all - and these nations should never have been allowed to become independent actors as they are inherently anti-western. Whatever. First knock over the dictators. Then reevaluate. The reevaluation may actually come to the conclusion that genocide is required. Whatever. First knock over the dictators. Then reevaluate.

You need to understand the neocon paradigm if you don't want to get trapped in your silly rut of "they did it for the oil", with no evidence of a single drop of oil being stolen, with all the US troops gone in less than a month, and no evidence of any war supporters at all (not even 1%) saying "I did it for the oil" any more than they said "I did it for the sunflower seeds".

One last point - Clark says that we don't need this to become World War 3. This is him speaking from his different paradigm, where the absence of war is considered to be the goal. Rather than forging a free world to be considered the goal. World War 3 is a good thing - it shows that we're actively working the problem instead of being apathetic about state-slavery.

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