No Runny Eggs

After being challenged about the validity of the recent “election,” a spokesman for Robert Mugabe, “president” of Zimbabwe said that any one who questioned the election could “go hang!”  He followed up that simple retort with one that was more illustrative:

They can go and hang a thousand times.”

Some reporters have been puzzled as to the meaning or the need to “hang a thousand times.” After all, shouldn’t one hanging do the job? The answer is quite simple: Yes, most brutal, thug dictators would find it sufficient to silence their critics with one hanging.  I believe “presidential ” spokesman George Charamba was just recognizing the obvious and trying to cover his bases. I mean if you’re a brutal, thug dictator and you can’t manage to rig an election to get 99.9% of the vote on the first try, how likely is it that you’ll be smart enough to manage to kill someone on the first hanging try?

On Thursday Hamas offered a six month cease fire to Israel.  Yesterday, Israel rejected that offer saying that the offer did not “appear serious.”

Not serious?  How could they possible come to that conclusion?  Could it have had anything to do with Khaled Mashaal, the Damascus-based Hamas leader saying,

“It is (the cease fire) a tactic in conducting the struggle … It is normal for any resistance … to sometimes escalate, other times retreat a bit. … Hamas is known for that. In there was a cease-fire and then the operations were resumed.”

or maybe it was this reassuring comment that gave the Israeli’s pause:

“We are ready to cooperate seriously from a place of power,” he said. “If Israel does not accept, then we welcome confrontation,” Mashaal said in the interview from Doha, Qatar.

Wow, those Israeli’s are pretty sharp. I’ve never had the pleasure, but I’ve been told that their airport security folks can just look at you and know whether you’re up to no good. They must have needed every one of them to poor over these comments to cipher out Hamas’ real intent.

As a parting shot, the same Hamas leader warned,

“If the blockade is not to be lifted from Gaza, then the Gaza Strip will explode.”

I don’t normally hold populations responsible for their thuggish governments. In most cases they had nothing to do with the thugs being in power. However, as Jimmy Carter pointed out last week, the Palestinian people, fully aware of who they were and what they stood for, elected Hamas into power.  Until the Palestinian people awaken to the fact and change having a ruling party with a goal of exterminating another soverign country, they may get our sympathy but should not get anyone’s assistance.

No, it’s not here, and it’s definitely not from me, but Wineaholic left this gem about Paul-Nuts on a Hot Air thread on a Condi-endorsed “grand compromise” in Iran:

Siren song? Come on, it’s not like people are going away anytime soon… once the rEVOLution is over, they’ll just shift back from whence they came. Like white-power groups, the Democratic party, mental hospitals with liberal policies about internet usage. These people (and their message) are here to stay, bless their delusional little hearts.

Since this post is likely going to generate a trackback there, I may as well throw in my two cents on that “grand compromise. I wish I could believe the Iranians would be honest, but we’ve been burned before.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to Duncan Hunter, and to a leser extent, Fred Thompson, pay attention. Jeff Head has been tracking the growth and modernization of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (that would be the Red Chinese), and he’s come out with his beginning-of-2008 update. There are two big areas of concern from where I sit:

- The biggest is the explosive growth in the amphibious capacity. Many naval observers have said the only thing that has kept Taiwan from being absorbed by Red China has been the inability of the ChiComs to get their massive army over water; they’re rapidly rectifying that oversight.

- Almost as troubling, especially with the de-emphasis on ASW in the US Navy, is a modernization of the PLAN’s submarine fleet, both attack and missile subs. Those quieter attack subs give them the theoretical ability to make the Western Pacific a very dangerous place for the 7th Fleet, while modern missile subs give them a second-nuclear strike capability.

I’m not as concerned, at least yet, about the continuing work on the ex-Varyag. At the point the Red Chinese are in their quest to be the worldwide empire, it does not really enhance their offensive capability. However, it does in the interim give them another way to bloody the 7th Fleet and in the longer term, it gives them expertise in carrier operations that, barring another paradigm shift I can’t yet forsee, they will need to march beyond what the Japanese called the Southern Resource Area 70 years ago.

(H/T - LGF)

Or so says the unclassified version of a fresh National Intelligence Estimate. I’m certain the Left half of the blogosphere, like the media already has, is seizing upon the opening phrase of the ‘Key Judgements’ section - “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons
program;…”. Allow me to point out a couple of key equivocations.

The first is the footnote to that phrase - “For the purposes of this Estimate, by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.” Given that the particular method of “declared civil work” selected by the Iranians is at the least approximating one of the popular methods used to create weapons-grade uranium rather than simply the much-less-militarily-useful reactor-grade uranium, I have to strongly question the claim that the program has been completely stopped.

The second is the phrase immediately following - “…we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.” That is an understatement. Judging by what the Iranians have claimed about that “declared civil work” noted above, Iran has transitioned the semi-open portion of its nuclear program to a “turn-key” nuclear weapons program, requiring upon full implementation simply a directive to assemble nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, the NIE notes that the Iranians had spent “considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons.” I don’t exactly remember hearing too much about the Iranian nuclear weapon program until after the fall of 2003. Related to that time frame, I also remember another WMD program not in a country that started with an “I” that very-publicly stopped, rather than the covert “stop” the Iranian program supposedly had, right about that 2003 timeframe, and that stoppage was directly attributed to a unique certain event that happened in 2003.

This part is chilling; “We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program.” Given that a possible American pincers movement from Iraq and Afghanistan undoubtedly weighed in on the “cost-benefit approach” the NIE claims the Iranians are using, given the kick-the-can-down-the-road assessment of 2010-2015 for sufficient HEU uranium, and given the claim that Iran was spending “considerable effort” on its nuclear program through the 1990s, I’ll guess that the election of a Democrat or Ron Paul would be all the criteria Iran would need to resume a full “Manhattan Project” program.

The laugh of the day, however, comes from point F, which says that the Iranians might use covert facilities, had in fact used covert facilities in the past, and stopped using covert facilities in 2003. Wasn’t that the assessment of North Korea’s nuclear program between 1994 and 2002, which was completely invalidated by the discovery of said covert facilties and their use between 1994 and 2002?

Revisions/extensions (4:48 pm 12/3/2007) - There’s a lot more linkage to the Right half’s react over at Hot Air.

Patrick Poole over at PajamasMedia reports on the latest attempt by the DhimmiRATs in Congress to systematically kill this country’s relationship with every country that continues to help fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliated Islamokazi groups. This week’s target, Ethiopia.

Ostensibly, the proposed prohibition of the American arming of Ethiopia as well as travel to the US by Ethiopian leaders is a delayed reaction to intimidation after Ethiopia’s 2005 elections. This ignores significant steps undertaken by the Ethiopian government to atone for that.

I strongly suspect the real reason was because the Ethiopians liberated Somalia from the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic Courts Union with a bit of backing from American air power. Not only did they dare oppose the Islamokazis successfully, but they succeeded where their hero Bill Clinton failed spectacularily.

(H/T - Uncle Jimbo)

When Saudia Arabia’s King Abdullah stepped out of his limo on the first state visit by a Saudi king to Great Britain, the Buckingham Palace band broke out “Imperial March” from “Star Wars” (the first 35 seconds of the linked YouTube slice of Britain’s Channel 4 coverage).

Bravo Zulu.

Soviet Premi…er, Russian President Vladimir Putin, fresh from ignoring a “threat” on his life in Tehran, joined the Mad Mullahs and their sock puppets in reasserting Sovi…er (damn, there I go again) Russian control over its former empire by threatening Azerbaijan should it help the United States in any response to Iran’s attempt to get nuclear weapons, as well as any country that wants to get Caspian Sea oil and natural gas out of the area without going through either the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (ah, tahellwitchit, if Pooty-Poot wants to go back to the Cold War, let’s bring back all the old Soviet terms) or Iran.

The Cold War’s back on the menu, boys.

Why am I not at all surprised that Red China has resumed helping Iran get nuclear weapons?

(H/T - HAL9000 at Free Republic)

Surprise, surprise, surprise. If it’s the end of May and North Korea isn’t getting their way, it’s time for a missile shoot into the Sea of Japan (note for those confused by the Korean references, they call it the East Sea). Because those missiles were anti-ship missiles, it is speculated that the launches were in retaliation for the launching of South Korea’s first Aegis destroyer. Nonetheless, South Korea (for reasons that are incomprehensible) and Japan (because the missiles were reportedly short-ranged missiles that couldn’t reach Japan) weren’t exactly concerned.

Of particular note are a series of posts at FR between FReepers AmericanInTokyo and expatguy, a couple of Americans on the far side of the Pacific, starting at #10. Just a sampling (this one from #39 by expatguy) -

Had lunch with a Eastern European diplomat today, we were talking about Iraq and the WOT ~ and he said to me ~ “You guys can’t even defend yourselves from being invaded by Mexico … what makes you think you can succeed in Afghanistan or Iraq?”

I highly suggest reading that thread.

Thoughts, AB?