Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Just the Libyans' way of saying 'Thanks!'


If you see a Libyan in one of your military cemeteries, and he's kicking over headstones and trying to fell a large cross with a sledgehammer, do not be alarmed.

He's just saying "thank you."

Unfortunately, irresponsible journalistic rabble-rousing could lead some among the British people to believe the worst as they assess certain cultural differences between the Western and Arab worlds, and thus be needlessly gobsmacked by online videos of freedom-loving Libyan rebels desecrating one of their World War II cemeteries in the north African sh*thole emerging democracy.

It would have been most helpful if Libyans had helped some of the more confused Brits bridge the cultural divide -- say by sending a nice exploding floral array to No. 10 Downing Street with a sentimental card attached.

Something like,
"We care enough to vandalize the infidels' very best."

THAT COULD HAVE
gone a long way toward ameliorating this kind of bad press in The Telegraph:
In the videos posted online, headstones marking the final resting place of the famous Desert Rats in the Benghazi War Cemetery were torn down and crucifixes attacked with hammers.

More than 1,000 soldiers from the 7th Armoured Division were buried there after serving in the battle for control of Libya and Egypt between 1941 and 1943.

The men in the footage, seen by the Mail on Sunday, are heard saying: "They are dogs, they are dogs."

Among the graves defiled by the extremists was the gravestone commemorating the Reverend Geoffrey Bond, who was the chaplain to the forces until his death in 1941 at the age of 30.

His nephew, David Bell, told the newspaper the cemetery attack was "greatly upsetting, a disaster."

Describing the reverend, he said: "I was only a baby when he died but my mother absolutely adored him.

"She spoke of his special aura, a way he had of making everyone feel better about themselves."

Others buried at the cemetery include Geoffrey Keyes, who was the youngest lieutenant colonel in the British Army when he was killed aged 24 during a raid on the suspected headquarters of Rommel.

Former diplomat Edward Chaplin, who heads the War Graves Commission, said: "Clearly it’s a terrible thing to have happened. It’s shocking that attacks of this nature should be carried out against a cemetery. We take very seriously the preservation of these memorials to those who have given their lives in wars."

Speaking on the Sky News Murnaghan programme, Foreign Office minister Jeremy Browne said the Libyan government has been "extremely apologetic" about the desecration.

But he said the attacks were not aimed particularly at Britain or Christians, and did not represent a Libyan response to last year's military action when British aircraft took part in a campaign which toppled Colonel Gadaffi from his role as dictator in the North African country.
THANK THE Mythological Opiate of the Masses Formerly Known as "God" there is at least one evolved life form -- namely, Jeremy Browne -- in the British Isles. Perhaps he can persuade the average dolt (like newspaper writers who can't tell a cross from a crucifix) how absurd it is to think Muslim mobs whacking away at crosses and kicking over headstones in a British military graveyard might be casting the slightest aspersion on either Britannia or followers of Jesus Christ.

I only wish he would have added, for diversity's sake, how idiotic it would be to infer that the population of a Muslim country might have some problem with Judaism just because this particular cultural expression also involved destroying headstones featuring the Star of David while repeating "They are dogs, they are dogs." Not to mention "kafir."

That truly would be unfortunate. If left unchecked, taxpayers in any number of NATO countries might get the wrong idea about the rightness of spending billions and billions of pounds, dollars and euros -- and endangering the lives of thousands of allied military personnel -- on helping Libyans build a bigger, smellier sh*thole modern liberal democracy in the Islamic world.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Your Daily '80s: The year that was almost our last

Somewhere near Moscow.
Sept. 26, 1983.

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow.


It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute.

Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky.

He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement - anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching a nuclear attack.

This was the height of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. Both sides packed a formidable punch - hundreds of rockets and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of reducing the other to rubble.

It was a game of nerves, of bluff and counterbluff. Who would fire first? Would the other have the chance to retaliate?

The flying time of an inter-continental ballistic missile, from the U.S. to the USSR, and vice-versa, was around 12 minutes. If the Cold War were ever to go 'hot', seconds could make the difference between life and death.

Everything would hinge on snap decisions. For now, though, as far as Petrov was concerned, more hinged on just getting through another boring night in which nothing ever happened.

Except then, suddenly, it did. A warning light flashed up, screaming red letters on a white background - 'LAUNCH. LAUNCH'. Deafening sirens wailed. The computer was telling him that the U.S. had just gone to war.

The blood drained from his face. He broke out in a cold sweat. But he kept his nerve. The computer had detected missiles being fired but the hazy screens were showing nothing untoward at all, no tell-tale flash of an missile roaring out of its silo into the sky. Could this be a computer glitch rather than Armageddon?

Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait.

The warning light flashed again - a second missile was, apparently, in the air. And then a third. Now the computer had stepped up the warning: 'Missile attack imminent!'

But this did not make sense. The computer had supposedly detected three, no, now it was four, and then five rockets, but the numbers were still peculiarly small. It was a basic tenet of Cold War strategy that, if one side ever did make a preemptive strike, it would do so with a mass launch, an overwhelming force, not this dribble.

Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake.