Saudi royal family pays 'protection money' to bin-Laden

The conspiratorial left and activist neo-nazi leftists are exerting their influence.

Well, with the Saudis pulling money out of the US around about the latest market slide (1/3 of total assets by some accounts), and the principled stance of "you're with us or against us", and the Saudis playing nice promising to keep prices at the gas pump cheap in the event of an Iraqi disruption, and Iran contemplating transacting oil in Euros; the administration may have decided that the economic consequences of making enemies of nearly the entire Middle East would be less than desirable at this moment. The patriotic call probably went out instructing the media to tone it down and keep the focus on one enemy at a time.

Probably the same reason that I stopped watching all so called tv news about 10 years ago. They only show what they want to show to push a pro agenda for the maggot side or an anti conservative hit piece.

Fox News is the only tv news that I will watch and even there, you have to have your finger over the off button to keep your home free from Bravo Sierra.

You know Grandpa, I was just looking at your cartoon and it struck me that no-one has complained that this historic image of Uncle Sam does not reflect America. I wonder when they'll get around to bitching about this and demand a change?

Glad you pinged me.

You posted a question earlier about why the liberals do what they do for the Saudis.

One of these days hopefully, we be able to follow the blood money trail from the Opecker Princes to America. Besides the documented buying of Jimmy Carter, McKinney, the Clintoons and other politicians. We will probably see massive money trails from the Opecker Princes to many liberal organizations. There will be an Opecker Blood Money trail to the enviral organizations, to the professors in our colleges, and to most of the vile anti American phoney non profits.

Put that way, I guess you're right. I had never heard of that official meeting before, nor of the ISI direct participation in it. I had seen them as using the Taliban and bin Ladin as proxies. Good catch.

I've suspected for some time that ISI may have had a direct involvement in the events of Fall, 2001. I don't think it's just a peripheral supporting group (like perhaps Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, or the Islamic extremists in Indonesia or Nigeria); there are hints that it may play a more central role than is ascribed to it in media coverage.

This article seems to equate the Al Oueerda, Taliban and OBL. I will have to read it again later but it clearly has some flaws.

The remark was in the context of the Soviet-American Cold War, which alone produced a realistic prospect of Armageddon. Fat Man and Little Boy each caused fewer casualties than LeMay's fire raids on Tokyo. But point taken.

I knew what you meant, of course, and I don't want to seem picky. But I thought it was important to recall that atomic weapons have been used in war.

On the question of whether the vaccines being newly produced are intended as defenses against other's biological weapons or protection against our possible use of biological weapons, you wrote:
This would be the strategy of idiots. Unless the US had the exact genetic signature of every pathogen the enemy possessed, and enough lead time to generate a vaccine for each, it could never build up an anticipatory defense. If the US did have 290 million doses of smallpox vaccine, how would it help against anthrax or the Ebola mutant Saddam is reputed to possess? If on the other hand, we had 290 million doses of vaccine against a strain of smallpox we ourselves have weaponized, then we have viable counterforce weapon, and the stockpile makes much more sense.

I'm still not at all convinced, for a variety of reasons.

First of all, it's not idiotic to build the best defense you can, even though recognizing that it cannot be perfect. It's possible that the vaccines would simply work; for example, the anthrax used this past Fall was not engineered to be resistant to antibiotics, and our stock of Cipro was quite effective. Also, even in the event of a variant of some sort, it's likely that the vaccination will confer partial immunity on many people and reduce the effects of the bioweapon.

Nevertheless, it is clearly true that, ultimately, the only defense is the certainty of severe retaliation. I believe our retaliation would be of traditional explosives or, if necessary, nuclear weapons.

The use of biological weapons by us would backfire due to its consequences; if a contagious disease were used, the resulting epidemic would sweep the third world, with its inadequate medical services and hygiene, and the world would unite against us. Internally, our own population would disown such an action. Even the use of anthrax would give justification to anybody who wanted to use biological weapons against us; why would we want to eliminate the taboo against a WMD that is so easily produced by our enemies (much more easily produced than nuclear weapons)?

By the way, you refer to our hypothetical use of biological weapons as "counterforce." This is not correct; this would not be force brought to bear on the weapons of the other side. It would be retaliation, pure and simple, against the population of the other side, just as in our Cold War nuclear strategy. And again, I fail to see why the U.S. would resort to biological weapons for retaliation, when they do not appear to be the weapon of choice for us.

One difficulty with a strategy of retaliation is that it may not be clear who to retaliate against. The failure of the U.S. government to identify publicly the source of last Fall's anthrax attack must be particularly encouraging to our enemies.

After all, there are three essential elements to a strategy of deterrence through the certainty of retaliation:

the ability to determine the identity of an attacker when an attack occurs;
the military might to carry out the necessary retaliation;
the will to carry out the retaliation.

(We actually need one thing beyond these elements: we need the truth of these three things to be so clear that our enemies have no doubt of their truth.)

In any case, of these three elements, unfortunately only the second is clearly true right now of the U.S. This is one reason that the source of the anthrax must be clearly and convincingly identified in public; the consequences extend beyond this particular case, since it affects the believability of element #1, and therefore affects our ability in general to carry out a policy of deterrence successfully.

However, there is no alternative to deterrence as our major defense. Every other defense will only work some fraction of the time; reliance on any defense strategy other than deterrence therefore means conceding that some significant percentage of attacks will succeed. When our enemies have weapons of mass destruction, this is unacceptable. Therefore, we must ensure that (1), (2), and (3) are all true and that their truth is obvious to our enemies.

I'd like to add that I have phrased everything entirely in military terms, without reference to moral judgments at all. But it's important to recognize that moral judgment, both by our own population and by the rest of the world, will significantly affect whatever action we take, and might even effectively undo it.

i believe the correctness of your thoughts regarding evidence against SA and iraq is extremely important...if incorrect, we are going to have a most difficult time creating even a minimum coalition and without that we may be dealling more muslims than we can handle alone...surely you must be right

"you refer to our hypothetical use of biological weapons as 'counterforce'; this is not correct"

It began as a typo, then I realized it was absolutely correct. Historically, counterforce methods have relied on identifying loci of enemy weapons in order to strike them preemptively. But enemy biological weapons do not have "signatures" like silos, separation centrifuges, security perimeters. They could be built in the basement of a mosque, in a high-school lab or a 40-foot container. What sort of counterforce weapon would have the persistence and coverage to reach that? Look at the problem another way: why would the United States, the possessor of thousands of nuclear weapons, be interested in biological weapons at all?

Because they exceed, in certain respects, the destructive power of nukes. In particular, they have the potential to exterminate virtually every Muslim man, woman and child. Islamic civilization as the Maya. Smallpox, for example, which can be spread by aerosol and which posseses a 12-day incubation, can seep into every crack, crevice and hovel in the Middle East. If a WMD factory in every mosque and slum is weapons dispersal taken to an extreme then countervalue taken to its limit becomes counterforce.

This proposition is so monstrous as to resemble the ridiculous plotline from Rainbox Six. It is as ludicrous as the idea of an airplane crashing into the Capitol in Debt of Honor. Yet it is technically feasible. And Saddam is working on doing it to us. Every American dead and Islam the proud posessor of an undamaged United States. The freeways will be perfectly usable. He is well aware of the requirement "to determine the identity of an attacker when an attack occurs", as you so aptly put it -- and of the existence of deniable proxies.

Our mores and traditions are not a death pact. We are moving into uncharted ground, requiring new modes of thinking. Historically, the US did not possess a coherent framework on the use of nukes until the 50s. The words "deterrence", or "counterforce" were all invented to think about the unthinkable, because the pre-Atomic age did not have the logical primitives to deal with these extreme concepts.

My sole consolation lies in the conviction that our leadership is fundamentally sane and will not employ these methods except in extremis, when all your other considerations, such as world opinion, etc, lose their meaning. But it is not the American way to have an empty holster going into a gunfight, especially when you know what is ranged against you.

What you're saying is that there can be no counterforce method that's effective against biological weapons, stashed and distributed secretly in the targeted country. (In fact, it's difficult even to target production factories and laboratories, since they can be mobile and, in general, much smaller, less expensive, and easier to hide than comparable nuclear facilities.) Once again, the only defense is the certainty of retaliation, however difficult that may be.

But your discussion of smallpox is flawed, because, contrary to your suggestion, there is no known method of limiting the target to Arabs, or to Americans, or to any other group of people. Whoever uses such a weapon must realize that it will devastate much of the world, including countries completely uninvolved; the world will unify against anyone who uses such a weapon. (The only way around this that I can see if the perpetrator of the action can be kept secret, or if one could get one's enemy blamed for the attack. Such a strategy would be very likely to fail, however.)

One can imagine anthrax, instead of smallpox, used in the capacity that you suggest; since anthrax is not contagious, it will not spread to areas other than the intended target. But then there is no need to vaccinate one's own civilian population, invalidating your original argument.

It is probably best to quote President Bush's recent West Point speech:

"...But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence -- the promise of massive retaliation against nations -- means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.

... If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html

Across the spectrum from the Washington Post www.kison.org/ekn/ washingtonpost_com Bush Developing Military Policy Of Striking First.htm to the National Review http:// www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry060402.asp, people have recognized that this administration, at least, is no longer pinning its hopes soley on deterrence. The new doctrine is most widely described as preemption, but it is really our old friend, counterforce, in new garb.

I never argued that "there can be no counterforce method that's effective against biological weapons, stashed and distributed secretly in the targeted country." Quite the contrary, my previous post asserts that against an enemy armed with dispersed biological weapons of mass destruction, the one sure method of counterforce is countervalue taken to its limit: literal extermination.

Just today, Vice-President Cheney said:

"If the United States could have preempted 9/11, we would have; no question. Should we be able to prevent another, much more devastating attack, we will; no question. This nation will not live at the mercy of terrorists or terror regimes."

I am simply saying that Homeland Defense and the US nuclear and biological capabilities have to be understood within this context of preemption. If a biological strike against America impends, then preemption means ... What? You tell me?

It is not true that "there is no known method of limiting the (smallpox) target to Arabs ... or to any other group of people". That method is called vaccination. And if our stock of vaccines is not effective against our pathogens in the first instance, what hope does it have against one of unknown composition? It will be effective against our own, if nothing else.

A fair number of Freepers (in particular one Mohammed El-Shahawi) are entirely convinced that the shadow a biological exchange is behind the apparent slowness in the campaign against Iraq. But things are now moving to a head. I don't relish finding out what is one the other side of the hill. Yet tomorrow will come, whatever I do, and it will bring what it may.

The emergence of militant Islam has been both a boon and a bane to the Left. One the one hand, they welcome it as an ally against their ancient enemy, "US Imperialism". On the other hand, it is cannibalizing their membership and reducing the once-proud Vanguard of the Proletariat to a mere camp follower.

The Left has always needed a radical, armed wing to pull along its vast caravan of socialist fellow travelers. Anthony Blunt could go on to be an art critic because a John Cornford was fighting in the Spanish Civil War. People in Berekely could comfortably inhabit the trendy fringes of the Cause because people like Che Guevarra, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro were out there. But no longer.

The collapse of armed, hard-core Marxism around the world, and the demise of Iron Curtain secret services has deprived them of the Underground: the wellspring of their pathology. Consider Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat. Early in their career, they espoused Marxism and adopted it's trappings. Sometime in the 1980s, they crossed over to Islam, which was where the money was. Today, the burka has replaced the beret on the heads of Arab women radicals.

Western Marxists are acutely aware of this loss of status. Their ideas are worse than out of date. They are corny. People like the BBC reporter Yvonne Ridley might have shocked an earlier generation by becoming open Communists. But in today's Europe, that will arouse no more interest than joining the Rotary Club. So she has announced (publicly of course) that she has converted to Islam.

When (not if) the credit bubble bursts for us, we will have to take the oilfields to prevent collapse of our economy.

That's the real reason why we pay for the largest military in the world, isn't it ?

BUMP

Your point is well-taken. Preemption is not the same as deterrence; it is the position we are being forced into because of the apparent failure of deterrence as a defense.

There are three potential failures of deterrence that are emerging in the post-Cold War era:

the difficult of identifying one's attacker;
once an attacker is identified, the difficulty of retaliating against that attacker if it's al Qaeda-like (a small, widely dispersed network without strong geographical concentration and without the desire or need to protect any particular geographical area);
the existence of opponents motivated either by such extreme religious tenets or by such psychopathology that they simply do not care about possible retaliation.

Ultimately, these three problems are based on technological improvements which are making weapons of mass destruction easier and less expensive to make, bringing them within the reach of people who formerly would not have had access to them.

With the failure of deterrence, one is left with preemption. One can call preemption "counterforce," and I see that there is justification for doing so, but it will be perceived by everybody as "countervalue." This is just nomenclature, however.

It is not true that "there is no known method of limiting the (smallpox) target to Arabs ... or to any other group of people". That method is called vaccination.

I still don't agree with this part. We cannot limit the target to any particular group of people. We can protect some group of people through vaccination. There is a big difference between being able to target some small percentage of the world's population (which we cannot do) and being able to target everybody not in some small percentage of the world's population (which we can).

The point is that we could vaccinate everybody in the U.S. and achieve a good measure of protection for us. Maybe the Europeans can do the same. But we will not be able to vaccinate everybody in Latin America, or India, or Africa, for example. We would be killing everybody but us. It's hard to imagine rebuilding the world we want afterwards. I fail to see why we would take this approach rather than using nuclear weapons on specific locations, in a case of dire extremity. (Even anthrax would be less counterproductive than smallpox in this regard, since it's not contagious.)

A fair number of Freepers (in particular one Mohammed El-Shahawi) are entirely convinced that the shadow a biological exchange is behind the apparent slowness in the campaign against Iraq.

I agree with this general assessment, although I don't think it's clear yet exactly what roles are being played by the various participants.

But things are now moving to a head. I don't relish finding out what is one the other side of the hill. Yet tomorrow will come, whatever I do, and it will bring what it may.

Indeed. This is a discouraging situation in the long term. I believe we will succeed this time around. But the long-term problem (over the next few centuries) will be particularly difficult, given that technology will continue to make it easier and easier for small groups of people to wield large amounts of power.

We agree on the fundamentals and such minor differences as exist can't be settled without special knowledge. Whether or not there is a smallpox weapon, or the smallpox vaccine stockpile has a dual character is nothing I can positively prove.

Agreed. In fact, it's fair to say that the U.S. could produce a smallpox weapon on short notice, and that, by its very nature, the vaccine stockpile has the dual character you pointed out. Where we differ is that I just can't imagine any situation in which the U.S. would benefit from using smallpox as a weapon. I hope I'm never proven wrong.