The Neutralist always knew what Hilary was and is from 2002

Before the neutralist was The Neutralist, I wrote a column for a now defunct but delightful online magazine.  I won't identify it as the lads behind may not want to be associated with me.

Anyway the column, Winners and Losers in the WOT looked at who had gained or would do well out of the War on Terror.  My entry for herself was,

Hilary: Maybe, maybe not. We all remember the booing in New York. Still, if the war falters and she could claim that she is enough of what her detractors say (begins with "b") and start talking about how badly she wants to fight, hey who knows? You can say that reinventing herself as a warrior queen is out of character, but, truly there is nothing that is out of character for her.

Not all the predictions panned out but I believe this one has.

I am not sure I would vote for Trump and I would not trust him with my savings., but so far he has the edge.  Johnson, is too much of a globalist and for TPP and can't win.

Under no circumstances should Hilary Clinton be allowed near the nuclear button. 

Getting to Dead, Algeria shows the way

There is an industry of hostage negotiators and I've heard some interviewed and they sound a reasonable tribe.  Through talking and empathizing with the hostage takers they save lives.

There is an alternative theory.  The book, Getting to Yes apparently has not been read in Algeria.  the rulers of that country fought the French and despite getting handled roughly, refused to admit defeat sufficiently that the Gauls ended up doing the admitting.

Not so long ago they fought and defeated Islamists in a bloody conflict.  I know a little more than the average American about the Algeria and it's conflicts.  That is to say, I know a tad north of zilch.  What I do know is that these are a crew that don't roll over.  US style Rodney Kingism is not their method.

So in the recent hostage event, the algerians were not interested in compromise.  They were brutal and they won.  I wonder if they were also sending a message to us like screw you and the Arab Spring bs.

I was pointed to this article by Malcolm Pollak.  I know about as much about The American Interest as I do about Algeria.  Still, it rings true and I recommend it.  Mr. Garfinkle may not be a Neutralist, but the piece does not harm our beliefs.

From Antiwar.com, US Claims ‘Al-Qaeda Number Two’ Killed Yet Again

Headline says it all.  We keep getting more of these guys and yet it leads to nothing.  It's like the drug seizure headlines of record haul.  How close are we to winning the War on Drugs?  Despite the success, not at all.  How close are we to winning the so called War on Terror?  It has already been lost.

National Defense Authorization Act of 2012-finally and admission that fighting them over there was a sham

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 has passed and the president is to sign it.  So we used to say we were fighting them over there so we would not have to fight them over here.  Well the Neutralist never said it.  We believe the whole posture of our so called War on Terror is a scam.  When semi chicken hawk (is a legal guy in the army, medal for paper cuts maybe), Lindsay Graham said the bill would "basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield" he admitted as much.  If we are at this point, the terrorists have won.
Gene Healy's column, If America is the battleground, nobody has any rights at the Washington Times is worth reading.

Has any congress member, aside from those who voted no, ever read the Constitution?

I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks!

Not really/ What I believe in is conspiracy theories. Okay, believe in is a tad strong. When I was a kid, I heard it bandied about that the oil companies had paid to stop an inventor of a pill from marketing it. A teacher spouted this in a junior high class.

Hey, i want to be one of the cool people and dismissing conspiracy theories is the way to do it. Unfortunately, my government makes it hard.

No, there has to be at least some plausibility. Fortunately, your government is giving you stuff you have to question. The Iranian plot is so inane, that you have to ask, is this my country on crack?

So I'm waiting of another WTC7 explanation.

Lesson here kids; you don't have to believe any conspiracy theory, but your nuts if you think it ain't possible.

Why do the words Turner Joy pop into my mind?

The Iranian assassination plot may be what the government says it is, even putting aside the timing questions linked to on Drudge. Why would the Persians do this in DC? One guy questioned on NPR said they might want to provoke conflict to solve domestic divisions. Why not kill a US ambassador somewhere else with less effort required?

We at the Neutralist remember the Tonkin Gulf Incident and Resolution. It is not that the government always fabricates, but sometimes it does.

Justin thinks it's fake, and many of the commenters at Sic Semper Tyrannis were not gentle.

Boob bait for the Bubbas or are we wanting confrontation to take the nation's mind off our problems? What do we know?

Declare Victory and Leave

Yes, Bin Laden is dead. He will not be missed. Moi, I would have rather he had been captured and interrogated. "First question, how'd ya manage to live large instead of that cave you supposedly had to inhabit?"

Of course there are many questions for others as well. Our intel services, what took so long? The Paks, well, I've got a long list for our "allies."

Suffice it to say, our Afpak and Iraq advetures in revenge for 911 led to another equivalent in deaths of American military personnel. Yeah we slaughtered a lot of them, big whoop. We have gotten nothing real out of this. We are broke.

Come home America.

Ed Shultz, Chickenhawk

So your man, Ed Shultz, who was against any war W wanted has had an epiphany. Libya is a holy crusade according to the big guy. I think we can parse this. Bush devil, Obama god. I looked up himself on wikpedia and can find no evidence that he was ever in the military. Ed Shultz, the Rush Limbaugh chickenhawk of the left with a smaller audience.

Libya is no different from the other wars except this president is consulting congress even less. Shultz gets the Al Smith, no matter how you slice it, it's still baloney award.



Jeremy Scahill takes him to the cleaners.

Gene Healy says it all: Not even our leaders know why we are in Afghanistan

Country Joe and the Fish may have been a one hit wonder, but their song about Viet Nam resonates today,

and its 1,2,3 what are we fightin for?
don't ask me i don't give a dam

plus ça change, ya know. According to Gene Healy, nobody knows why. Going out on a limb here, but after the half decade mark, any war our country is in, the reasons will get murky and the original justifications will no longer be relevant (as if they were to begin with). Just ask Osama down in Gitmo getting ready for his trial.

It appears Mr. Healy has read the Woodward book so I don't have to. Thank you, Gene. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Anyway, here is a lovely quote,

Last October, Woodward reports, National Security Adviser James Jones called an emergency meeting with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "The president was not happy": After countless meetings and dueling memoranda, "they had not found a way to articulate why the United States was in Afghanistan. What were America's interests?"

Yeah, all we gotta do is find what we believe and then tell the lumpenistas. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Did it occur to any one of the assembled sinecure holders that if you can't explain the reason, there may be no reason?

Nahhhhhh.

Well, what do you expect. Of course you'd want a president to be a führer if your name was Donald the German

Donnie Deutsch and Pat Buchannan the constitution out the window to protect our soldiers over there. Arrest the Koran burner to protect the troops.

May I point out the supreme irony. A military is supposedly* deployed to protect us. We are not supposed to protect the troops. Anyway, you can watch Mr. Deutsch having the vapors here.

Hat tip to the Daily Burkeman. The link on Burkeman is "this speaks for itself. If a foreign policy gets to the point where we have to arrest our own people, no matter how goofy, because our armed troops, who are pretending to be building a free country overseas might be shot at, then res ipsa loquitur. I agree with Chris Dowd. Donnie and Pat are scarier than Terry.



*our military is not deployed overseas to protect us.

Interesting video from the other side-The Taliban speaks!

Interesting video from the comments section on Pat Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis site. A Norwegian was able to film them as they fought us due to their hatred of our freedom. Ah, wait a minute, at 3:14 your man talks about fighting for freedom. Who does he think he is, George Bush.




Well, I think these lads want Afghanistan more than we do. I know they want it more than I do. Heck, they probably want it more than Bennett and Kristol. And...what would you do if someone invaded your country. What those guys are doing I hope.

The man who posted the video goes by the cute name, Charlie Wilson. His actual comment was, "I don't think these guys can be beat. I think we need to redo Panama or Grenada." If we really want to feel good about ourselves, we can let the Japanese build another fleet and do Midway again.

Lest we forget

Another blogger thinks a 911 holiday is in order. Don't know about the holiday thing, but I commented on his blog.

As to remembering 911, I'm all for it. Remember that it led us into two wars that have no purpose and have aided in our collapse.

Let's remember the chickenhawks who cheerlead and never went.

Please tell me what is to win in Iraq and Afghanistan? OBL did not attack us with a carrier fleet. The thing to do was tighten the borders, not send an army to not catch the bogeyman.

On the AntiWar.com blog it has been noted that we have passed 1,000 dead in the Afghan debacle. It is the flower of our youth dead to no purpose other than that noted in Burkeman's comment.

The war against the "Taliban" is a jobs work program. It is a low level war with tolerably low casualties (for Americans) but supremely profitable overhead.

They know

The Southern Avenger, Mr. Jack Hunter, is accomplished in the art of the youtube video. Actually, I can’t say that the youtube video is art. Merely can I say that he goes farther with it than I could, which is not into the realm of overachieving.

Still, I generally agree with his thoughts even if he only hits a single. In his February 6, 2010 offering, he blasted it out of the park with just one tiny particle,

Comparing Paul’s foreign policy stance to that of the congressman’s fellow non-interventionist Pat Buchanan, Coulter added “Whenever I listen to Ron Paul or Pat Buchanan I always think ‘I can’t listen too long or they might convince me.”

Bingo. What Ann really said, once parsed is, I know they are right, but pretend they are wrong. I like to think she is not merely a shill, but if she abandoned neoconnery, to come over to the less financially lush side of non-interventionism, well maybe she would not be so fashionable. Ann doesn't really, really believe and the rest don't either.

Even if you hate the muzzies and think they all should be extirpated, you have to see, we are losing. It matters not how many of them we kill if we bankrupt ourselves. Granted, we are trying manfully and womanfully to ruin ourselves on many other non military fronts, but so what. Why waste the flower of our youth on a losing strategy.

Somehow, I think everyone with some modicum of intelligence, knows this. I’ll let others work out why they can’t say it. For now.

Also, the sensible policy of how to deal with Bin Laden was given us by Rep. Paul with a further comment by Mr. Hunter.

Despite what his critics portray, Paul’s approach to Islamic terrorism is not to ignore it, but to examine motive and develop a sound strategy by pinpointing our defense. Just one month after 9/11, Paul introduced the “Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001,” legislation that would have allowed Congress and the President to specifically target Bin Laden and his associates by placing a bounty on Al-Qaeda leaders. Paul said the Act “allows Congress to narrowly target terrorist enemies, lessening the likelihood of a full-scale war with any Middle Eastern nations. The Act also threatens terrorist cells worldwide by making it more difficult for our enemies to simply slip back into civilian populations or hide in remote locations… Once letters of marque and reprisal are issued, every terrorist is essentially a marked man.”

In hindsight, what would have been the more conservative, productive approach after 9/11—spending three trillion dollars in Iraq or placing a $1billion bounty on Bin Laden and every other Al-Qaeda member’s head?


Watch the video here:

Yoo hoo, you can come out now. Well, Maybe not. Hiding under the bed conservatism, Part III

We are in the ninth year of our struggle against the forces of evil in the War on Terrorism. We must watch our backs constantly in this desperate fight against a foe that is cunning and evil. He is seeking every chance to strike at us and if we just drop our guard for a second, why, probably nothing will happen.

Yes, folks, you have nothing to fear but fear itself. Actually, you do have things to fear. Lots of them.. Fortunately, an attack from the Sons of Jihad is not likely to be one. This does not mean our friends to the east love us. Au contraire, we should be surprised if they did, what with all the drones and bombings and troops in their countries. Heck, I would feel the same toward them if they had brigades over here. They don't and they are not likely to either.

I know, I know, you have been propagandized to believe that without the work of all the folks in the Department of Fatherland Security there would be widespread death and destruction across the country. Why, were it not for the vigilance of our guardians, a man with explosive underwear could just get on a plane and.......

Still, the great holy war of death is, to be honest, the least of your worries. Don't take it from me. Take it from Ryan Singel in Wired. He did one of those color coded thingies like the color coded terror threat level the government has. I can't reproduce the colors, but the breakdown is below:

Red
S E V E R E
Driving off the road: 254,419
Falling: 146,542
Accidental poisoning: 140,327

Kind of yellow.
H I G H
Dying from work: 59,730
Walking down the street: 52,000.
Accidentally drowning: 38,302

Brighter yellow
E L E V A T E D
Killed by the flu: 19,415
Dying from a hernia: 16,742

Blue
G U A R D E D
Accidental firing of a gun: 8,536
Electrocution: 5,171

Green
L O W
Being shot by law enforcement: 3,949
Terrorism: 3147
Carbon monoxide in products: 1,554

As I have a greater chance of being shot by a cop than a Bin Ladenist, maybe we should fire all our police and hire members of Al Qaeda to staff our constabulary.
Mr. Singel should not have published this. When people read that they have a much greater chance of shuffling off the mortal coil by going to work, productivity in this country is going to nosedive.

So my fellow countrymen and women, don't come out from under the bed. Well don't fall out of bed. After all, a fall is up there in the severe category.

Lest you think it has been a long slog up from America as free fire zone to a near terrorist free garden of Eden, you may want to read the words of Paul Jackson. Jackson said basically the same thing Singel is telling, but he said it back in 2005.

These lads are a bit too pollyanish for me though. I have met terrorism dead on. Ah, almost dead on a few months ago here in hillbilly Nova Anglia. I was driving on a mountain road when out of nowhere a deer jumped in front of the car and crashed into my windshield. Had I been going faster or had someone been tailgating, another casualty of the enemy combatants would have been counted. Clever of the foe it was. They know that that doe could not have been on the no fly list.

The War on Terror is merely theater.

If this is how our miltary prosecutes an offensive, they don't deserve to have any

Let’s imagine a bit of alternative history. In early May, 1944 newspaper headlines and radio broadcasts go out with the story, Allies to invade Normandy on or about June 6th. At German HQ, this conversation takes place. Dolph, “Zo, ist this ein trick?” Rommel, “Nein, Fuhrer, Das Allies have always announced before hand their plans.” Dolph, “Sehr Gut, General, plan accordingly.”

Fast forward to 2010 and the Coalition offensive at Marjah in Helmand Province. It was talked about for a long time in advance and was hardly unexpected. We telegraphed the punch and it appears the Taliban did what any good pugilist would. They ducked.

Anyone the Taliban wanted out of Marjah for strategic reasons surely left in time if only because they had all the time in the world to bug out. Anyone who stayed was part of a retreating defense. I have not been listening intensely but I have not heard any big body counts or pow takings. Not that one would feel confident in the reports. Have heard some happy talk about Afghan flags now flying above buildings. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Oh and we have reports of some senior Taliban leaders captured in Pakistan. Supposedly, the lads were so big, insurgent effectiveness will be vastly depleted. Since young, I’ve been hearing about drug busts that had reduced the supply on the street to a negative amount. The Taliban arrests have that flavor.

Lindsay will be Secretary of Obfuscation in the next Republican Administration

Senator Lindsay Graham gave the weekly radio response for the Republicans. Now, I did not hear the President's message so I am not completely aware of what the Senator is responding to. I do know he was upset that people would get a trial. Of course, it is not just any people. It's people he does not want to hear from.

Here are the Grahamster words,

Never before have we allowed non-citizen enemy combatants, captured on the battlefield, access to our civilian courts providing them with the same constitutional rights as American citizens. Al Qaeda terrorists should not receive more rights than a Nazi war criminal and now is not the time to go back to the pre-9/11 mentality of fighting crime instead of fighting a war.

He would be talking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Your man was not captured on the battlefield. That is of course unless you consider an arrest in a house in Rawalpindi a battlefield. Also, that more rights than a Nazi war criminal business is a little silly. The Nazi trials were conducted in public. At Nuremberg the Germans had access to first rate counsel and Herman Goering was able to put prosecution lawyers on the defensive at times.

He wants to go back to the glory days of the Bush Administration when guys like Shoes Reid were tried by Military Commission. Oh, right. Bush tried Reid in an American court.

I suppose the big reason that Graham and his ilk do not want the trials to be in the Big Apple is fear. They are afraid of what might happen. A man waterboarded once, maybe that is not torture. I think it is, but I'll let it go. A man who was tortured 183 time was tortued. Maybe we'll look a little Naziish.

What if these guys get top notch counsel who can turn the tables on the tax dollars at work barristers. That would be embarrassing.

The conduct of the so called war on terror has been inept from day one. Our nation's strength ebbs apace yet no one learns.