Hat tip to Cox and Forkum for the cartoon, which they titled "Disproportionate Response II". You can read their related commentary and links HERE.
One of their excerpts, from Jules Crittenden at the Boston Herald:
In recent weeks, France stepped forward to act as a broker of peace in Lebanon. “Act” is the key verb in that last sentence, as it now would seem that the only other verifiable part of the sentence is “in recent weeks.”
To correctly parse that sentence, one must understand that when France suggested it wanted to broker peace in Lebanon, it did not necessarily mean “broker” or “peace” or “Lebanon” in the way we might understand those words. The same is true when France further suggested it wanted to “lead” a “strong” “multinational” “force” there.
I don’t speak French, so I have no idea what the actual French words are for those concepts or what possible nuances there may be. I’ve been relying on news reports in English, which now inform me that the French do not intend to send any significant number of troops to what is supposed to be a force of 15,000 in Lebanon, like everyone thought they said they would.
The heady moment of peace brokering having passed, upon sober reflection, the French now say they already have a general and some staff in south Lebanon ordering about UNIFIL, the U.N. monitoring entity there. That’s plenty of leadership, the French suggested: All France needs to contribute now is another 200 combat engineers.
In tactical terms, when it comes to securing a Middle East conflict zone, that can be referred to as “squat.”
(bold emphasis mine) I was going to title this post "France Drops the Ball", but I couldn't, because to drop it, they would have had to caught it in the first place. They haven't even come close.
I am incredulous that our State Department ever thought anything good would come from this. I'm very disappointed in Condi Rice. I sincerely hope she isn't going to become the Republican party's version of Madeline Albright.
Meanwhile, the Iranian nut-case president AhMADinejad, who wasn't even really elected, continues to work at creating global chaos, violence and death, which he believes will open the way to bring about the return of the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, from the bottom of a well somewhere...
Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu offers this chilling scenario to explain what the Iranian leader could be up to. Iran has been working closely with North Korea to improve their missle technology. His scenario is based on the missle tests both countries have been conducting, and the current actions of Iran and it's proxies. It's worth reading; even if there is no Aug. 22nd suprise, this scenario could still unfold in the not too distant future.
Related Links:
Jihad and European Multiculturalism
...Western European multicultural programmes, which traditionally structured themselves around a liberal governance of individuals regardless of religion, race, colour and creed, are no longer sustainable for the societies they govern. They are gently becoming the human societies fit for different herds of religious savages, equipped with rights but not responsibilities, provided with authority but no elective legitimacy, administered with intensive social policing without a true realm of private activity, filled with a countless number of illegal and unmeasured migrants far removed from common social mores of both work and leisure. Such societies seemed condemned to tragedies on an apocalyptic scale.
An ongoing trend is the social disaffection brought by the infusion of Muslim immigrants into those European societies. The most disquieting of all those immigration (mis)measures is the pockets of private space given delivered to violent Muslims, or jihadists, unable to withstand opposition to the Islamic doctrine – and frequently so uneducated as to no longer understand the meaning of their doctrine and how the modern world relates to it – hoping for the devastation of the society which originally contracted each of them the right to live freely. In the hands of fundamentalist Islam, Western society and all its fruits have become pearl before the swine...
(bold emphasis mine) This is a meaty article by James McConalogue at the Brussels Journal, which demonstrates so clearly why the tolerance of Multiculturalism must not be extended to those who are intolerant of of other cultures, if one wants to avoid disaterous concequences.
“A car decorated with Hezbollah flags drives on the Lebanese side of the Israel-Lebanon border, near the northern Israeli town of Metula, Thursday Aug. 17, 2006.”
This Failure Of A War
...In warring with a religion, decades of secularism have left us utterly disarmed. We are trained to think of faith as either irrelevant or benign: and when it is undeniably malign, we ascribe its malignancy to “fundamentalism,” which is (in direct negation of the meaning of the word) somehow separable or diversionary from the fundamentals of the faith in question. See Andrew Sullivan for a shining example of this self-contradictory foolishness; or worse, see the President of the United States on Islam. Mark Steyn noted it well: these days, when Muslims slaughter our own, the political leaders of the victims generally rush to a mosque to make friendly overtures. We are assured that “real” faith does not do awful things, nor encourage them, nor give succor to those who do: and in the very hour of grief, as the bodies are lifted, or unearthed, or scraped, from the scene of the latest horror, that is what we must remember. We are not to believe the perpetrators, nor their sympathizers, nor the Palestinians celebrating the news of thousands dead in New York City. The true interpreters of Islam are not Muslims themselves — though they certainly deserve that basic respect — instead, we must listen to John Esposito, Juan Cole, Karen Armstrong, and George W. Bush...
(bold emphasis mine) This article by Joshua Trevino is also from the Brussels Journal. Political Correctness and Multi-culturalism are preventing us from even naming the enemy. How can you defeat an enemy when you can't even refer to them by name or criticize them? I recommend seeing the full article, it's filled with embedded links.
Update 08-22-06:
Europe to Israel: Nevermind
After all the huffing and puffing and instance on a cease-fire, Euro nations have decided everything's a bit too vague for them to commit troops for the international force that's supposed to guard the Lebanon-Israel border.
This after all of them signed off in the first place regarding the conditions and expectations of the cease-fire and the peace-keeping force. But then again it's safe to say that they never intended on contributing to the force. They just noticed Israel was indeed winning and they needed a way to save Hez, which would save Iran, which would keep money rolling into the right EU pockets.
(Bold emphasis mine) What an interesting idea! Seeing how Europe was complicit in the Oil-for-Food kickback scandal, I wouldn't be suprised if this were true, and it would explain why they backed a cease-fire proposal that they were not prepared to actually support in any meaningful way.
I had read somewhere that some believe that while Iran does fund Hezbollah, they do not have total control over it; that Hezbollah acted against Israel too agressively, and provoked too strong a response too soon, before Hezbollah and Iran were ready.
If that is true, then this fake cease-fire would also buy them much needed time. But ready or not, Hezbollah's intentions have been exposed, as well as their militant entrenchment in Lebanon. The only question now is how much longer will they be allowed to draw this game out? As for France: Thanks for nothing (other than helping our enemies once again). France has a history of betraying it's allies for it's own short-term gain. I fear they are at it again.
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