And by that question I do not mean ‘might they give nukes to Al-Qaeda’ or sundry other Islamic loonies, but rather is the claim that they would promptly nuke Israel as fast as they could strap a warhead onto a missile actually credible?
The author of the linked article, Edward Luttwak, is a good but uneven commentator and analyst. His book Coup d’Etat: a practical handbook is probably the definitive ‘how to do it’ book on the subject… however his prediction on the outcome of the western attacks on Iraq were embarrassingly off-target. Luttwak says that Iranian government figures said:
Some members of the government have even boasted how they would use them: to destroy Israel. “Islam could survive the retaliation,” they insist, “but Israel would be gone forever.” The thought of ayatollahs with nuclear bombs should terrify everyone – especially in Europe, because the Iranians could soon put those bombs on the top of rockets that could reach European capitals.
And whilst I feel it is entirely possible they said exactly that, given the nature of the Islamic theocracy in Iran, I do not think I can just take Luttwak’s word for it. Oh how I look forward to the day when newspapers do what blogs do: always always always link to a supporting source when you say “they said this”.
Can anyone helpfully provide links to other reports where Iranian government figures have actually said such things? Forming a sensible view on how to react to the Iranian state is far too serious a matter and the more sources of information that can be gathered, the better we can form theories about what would be the best course of action and what sort of policies should be supported by whom.
The link I have is: Iran Press
It is at the http://www.iran-press-service.com website under archives of December 2001, there is also a subsequent post where the Iranians issue a denial
Editor’s note: thanks very much for the links but please embed them, it just makes life easier
I remember reading that Rafsanjani said that.
They might not use it, but blackmail is never fun.
From Memri: http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP32502
You take your fascinacion with the litteral word to extreme ends. Is it really that important what exact words this or that mullah uses ? Are they under solemn obligation to forewarn you and tell you exactely what they are going to do ? Are they under divine obligation to say the truth, and only the truth and then stick to what they say ? Aren’t they under strict obligation to lie and mislead the kuffar ?
What is the great fascination with words they said ?
Words are used in different cultures for different purposes. Words are used in the Arab world to create or preserve honor. Words are used to create an alternate reality to cover up unpleasant aspects of this one. But even on that you can’t rely. Sometimes words (incitement) create a new reality which was maybe unintended, but turns out catastrophic.
Given the facts of the muhllas’ behaviour so far, with their fomenting and build-up of terrorism against Israel and Iraq – presume the worst. That would be the sensible assumption, the safe one.
The exact quotation from the Iranian press, together with it’s customary denial aren’t important.
Gibberish deleted by Samizdata Admin.
Isn’t this the same place where a sixteen year old retarded girl was recently sentenced to death for committing adultery?
No, I don’t feel comfortable with such primitives having possession of nuclear-tipped theater ballistic missiles. I would be surprised to learn that anyone living within range of such weapons (those of our friends in Europe for example), wielded by such a government, was comfortable either.
and we’re still the Great Satan.
After they approved moving forward w/the technology, IIRC, some in their senate stood up and chanted Death to America.
I’m taking this stuff seriously.
And for those who want to keep an eye on the world from a military POV, Rantburg is a useful site, tho it can be a rough place.
Thank you for the link to Edward Luttwak’s book Perry, can’t wait to get my hands on it! 😉
Jacob: people (including politicians) may give themselves away by what they say – consider the internal rivalries between Iran’s politicos in the run-up to their next set of elections; to nuke Israel will be controversial over there simply due to the risk of killing a great many Palestinians. Such talk may inform our best guesses as to what exactly the mullas in charge will be up to. Our best guesses about the risk of the mullas actually nuking Israel may at the very least inform our decision of how we attempt regime change.
I really hope nobody responds to Sean’s trolling, it’d be such a shame to spoil this thread with daft punch-ups with commies. We might all agree on regime change in Iran, but the thrust of Perry’s article seems to me to be aimed at the how questions of our future actions toward Iran more so than the whatquestions. In any case, I think I should give way to those more informed than myself (and see about that book..).
In reality a more possible outcome is that they (shia) nuke saudi arabia (sunni) in a power struggle over control of Iraq. clouds, silver lining etc
Personally, I don’t think the Ayatollahs would do it, and certainly not with a ballistic missile. They might well supply a warhead to terrorists, but they know damn well that the moment US launch-detection satellites detected a missile launch heat bloom and tracked it as heading for Tel Aviv would be the same one that Israel was notified and retaliated. They have too much power to risk it.
Jacob, excuse me if your words do not count for much:
The Iranian government are not Arabs. Duh.
Somehow discovering at least what the stated position of the Iranians is seems a fairly worthwhile question to ask.
This runup in propoganda about Iran looks to me to be a precursor to military activity there. Who knows if they are making nuclear weapons, Iran says they’re not, the Bush Administration says they are, however the Bush Administration are proven liars when it comes to WMDs.
If they want to attack Iran nonetheless it won’t be a walkover, Iran is a much bigger, richer country than Iraq with a lot more people and a bigger military. They haven’t been starved by 10 years of sanctions and haven’t had their defences pulverised by almost daily air-raids. The country is not the most pleasent place in the world in which to live, however by the very low standards of that region it’s pretty OK.
Evidently the Iraqis just wanted to give up at the time of GWII, however things have gone so badly there since then that time the Iranians might think that simply giving up would be a bad idea.
I also really wonder how an attack on Iran would be done, the US doesn’t have a lot of free conventional military resources, the Iranians would almost certainly retaliate, the US now has two borders with Iran in Iraq and Afganistan, it would be nessesary to fortify these borders, how would this be done without a lot more troops? This would at the very least mean that the draft must be instituted. If they want to invade Iran it will be a much bigger deal than Iraq. It is possible the US could use nuclear weapons to intimidate Iran but how would they do this without alianating any support they have in the world, and isn’t doing that a tad hypocritcal anyway?
Yo dude, if the Son of Sam puts his .44 up against your forehead and says he is going to squeeze one off, that is not a threat, it’s a promise. The Son of Sam was a lot more stable then these Mullahs are. I mean, GOD TALKS TO THEM. Get a grip on that.
Meanwhile, it’s not Iran that has nukes, it’s the mullahs that have them. Big difference there. If Iran had a President with some power and a Legislature that was more then a rubber stamp, then who cares if they have nukes or not?
The DPRK has spent the last decade plus working to build nukes. It would take South Korea 6 months or so. South Korea doesn’t want to waste the money. I don’t think there is a single Western democracy that couldn’t build nukes if they wanted them. No point in spending the money on what you don’t need and won’t use.
Why do the mullahs want nukes? Protection from Afghanistsn, or Iraq? There are no logical reasons for the mullahs to have nuclear weapons, and many reasons why they shouldn’t.
Either Europe tries to stop them with diplomacy, or Israel and the USA stop them with war. There is no 3rd choice.
Della writes:
“Who knows if they are making nuclear weapons, Iran says they’re not, the Bush Administration says they are, however the Bush Administration are proven liars when it comes to WMDs.”
Well, that’s all right then. Let’s believe the people who hang 16 year old girls from cranes.
Do try to grow-up, Della. I wonder, whatever you are, how you would feel if it were you or your sister who was being winched up to your death because you had somehow offended a mullah?
Della, Iran will be easier then Iraq.
Size isn’t much of a factor in conventional warfare anymore. That is why China and Russia are downsizing their armies. And Iran would be ideal for a Bosnia type air campaign. We hit the mullahs and the barracks were the troops that keep them in power stay. Drive them underground and keep them there, the citizens of Iran can do the rest. Take out the command structure and the army will go home. 21st century conventional warfare means killing the generals and waiting for the conscripts to surrender.
Iran has plenty of practice at holding elections, it’s just that the people they elect have no power. The mullahs keep that. Kill the mullahs (whoops, send them to paradise) and the Iranians will take it from there. We don’t need to put anything other then special ops guys inside Iran. Hitler and Saddam were not able to run a country from inside a bomb shelter and the Mullahs won’t be able to either. I call it JDAM diplomacy.
the Mullahs have also not done their arithmatic.
Israel has 2oo warheads. I suspect that Iran wont be able to build more than a handful. Ok tel aviv goes but so does Tehran, Bam, Mecca, Mediana etc 200 times. Not a wining scenario.
NB one question I have is would Iran nuke jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock? Its a holy site but if they dont then Israel will survive. Bit of a dilemma there methinks.
Stehpinkeln,
“And Iran would be ideal for a Bosnia type air campaign. We hit the mullahs and the barracks were the troops that keep them in power stay. Drive them underground and keep them there, the citizens of Iran can do the rest. Take out the command structure and the army will go home. 21st century conventional warfare means killing the generals and waiting for the conscripts to surrender.”
Yeah, because the citizens of Iraq have shown what a good job they can do defending themselves, rounding up rogue remnants and groups and protecting against bombings and the like haven’t they…
They were proven wrong, which is not the same as proved to be liars. Saddam’s behavior made deducing he had nukes a pretty smart move… he just turned out to be bluffing when his cards were called.
“Words are used in the Arab world to create or preserve honor.”
“The Iranian government are not Arabs. Duh.”
In may cultures, why in most cultures words are used differently than in the anglo-saxon culture.
That goes for Arabs, Chinese, South Americans, Latins (French and Spanish and Italian), Slavs. Each culture has it’s own nuances. None of them assign so much importance to “truth” contents as the only role of words.
For many words are just adornment, poetry, song etc.
> Editor’s note: thanks very much for the links but please embed them, it just makes life easier
Especially for goatse.
Would Iran nuke Israel if they thought they would retaliate? Possibly, after all the mullahs glorify martyrdom and what better way to guarantee yourself some virgins than to take out evil Israel? But then again there’s always the possibility that they don’t believe a word they’re saying and quite like staying alive.
Would Iran nuke Israel if they thought they could get away with it? Absolutely. Iran secretly gives nuke to Hizbollah, Hizbollah nuke Tel Aviv (along with any incriminating evidence), Iran points finger at North Korea, North Korea points the finger at American Aggression(TM), and no-one knows who’s responsible. Israel are certain that it was Iran, but there’s enough wiggle room for say France or Russia to stand by Iran, saying they’re innocent, their nuclear program is only for civilian purposes, and if Israel retaliates then they will nuke Israel for good. End result, half of Israel wiped out, and they can’t strike back.
Gazaridis – I remember Euan Grey saying something about fallout patterns being distinctive, and thus traceable to specific programmes, ergo regimes. I don’t always agree with some of Euan’s views, though I do agree with some, too! Regardless, he is very knowledgeable about such things, and more besides, so I believe him.
Della – the Bush administration turned out to be wrong about WMDs in Iraq. Most probably wrong, I should say – I wouldn’t at all be surprised if some turned up in due course. Perhaps outside Iraq. There was an awful lot of smoke for no fire in regards to Saddam’s WMD. So anyway, Bush&co being wrong does not mean they lied. Clinton conceded in an interview on Australian TV that the information provided to Bush was most probably the same as what he was getting :
I think it’s fair to say all the major nations had pretty much accepted that Iraq possessed WMDs. If I remember rightly, the nations that demanded further weapons inspections couched their demands in a “we’ll find them peacefully” manner, rather than a “it’s all a beat up!”, which seems to be the retrospective spin afforded to the relevant past statements of Old Europe. At best, these nations cannot claim anything better than accidental vindication. They were wrong, too. Did they lie as well, Della?
I’m Suffering…writes:
“So anyway, Bush&co being wrong does not mean they lied.”
Precisely. But it’s a distinction certain to be lost on those who have adopted the “Stop The War Coalition” mindset.
The hatred of George Bush felt by such people seems to be quite beyond reason. It’s not even a passion – more a delirium and, as such, not amenable to reason.
So just how big a threat would a ‘Nuclear Iran’ be?
Too big to tolerate, for a couple of reasons.
First, of course, is the scenario where they supply it to one of the terrorist groups they are so tight with, ably described above.
Second, is that even if you believe the current mullahs aren’t so nuts as to use a nuke, what about their successors?
Would you bet millions of lives that a mullahcracy that is increasingly under seige, both on its borders and within, will never have a leader (or even a faction with access to the damn things) that would be willing to fire off a nuke or sneak one to its Islamist allies?
That’s not a bet I’m willing to make.
Gazaridis: I cannot see how anybody (even the ayatollas) could claim a direct link between N.Korea and a nuclear war in the ME.
I see Straw getting his act together, but a question remains whether, should EU diplomacy with Iran fail (or is judged to have failed by the US) there will be enough wiggle room for Blair to support Bush again. Should any action be confined to air strikes, perhaps Blair could lend Bush his support, but for anything more than that it would be truly astounding if Blair even tried to get another yes vote in the Commons.
R.C.Dean,
The U.S. could use that argument to try to strip any current nuclear power of their weapons:
What if France got another Napoleon?
What if Russia got another Stalin?
What if China got another Mao?
What if Britain got another Lord North or Earl Jenkins (prime ministers during the period of the US civil war and war of 1812-1814)
So far the only people that have been “so nuts as to use a nuke” are the Americans.
When I said civil are I meant war of Independence
Whoops, some bad quoting there. It’s Mozilla’s fault! Not my HTML coding ineptitude!
Does the notion of different degrees of risk mean anything to you Della? At least do yourself the compliment of actually thinking about what the other chap is getting at before you presume to argue with good fellows like RC Dean again.
GCooper,
Della writes:
I wouldn’t like that one bit, however, China has nuclear weapons, and they have an appaling human rights records, the communist goverment has killed more of its own citizens than any other coutry has ever. The Russians, although they have got better recently have commited all manner of attrocities, and no doubt continue to do all manner of bad things in Chechenya. France had the Terror, which showed the way in post revolutionary murder, and Britain, although not quite so bad as the rest has done some things that could been seen by some in a bad light such as conquering 1/4 of the world.
Although Iran has a bad human rights record it is not even in the same legue as what China and Russia have done, I think Iran doesn’t even have concentration camps, plus it has elections which China doesn’t, and Russia didn’t have till recently.
Would you suggest the the US should attack these countries with histories varying from appauling to bad to strip them of the nuclear weapons they are known to already possess?
Copy Mike’s comment and paste it after just about everything Della has said (and probably will say) on this thread. The above comment is perhaps the most deserving. Part of me wants to respond…but…I really can’t be bothered. I think the parallels Della’s trying to draw are so easily dismissed by anyone with even a tiny modicum of historical perspective that refuting her will sound trite.
Take for example the current rulers of China, that goverment has murdered 50 million adults and children through it’s policies. It’s 1982 one child policy which is enforced using haeonous measures has caused a reduction of the number of expected births by 250 million, which is around 10 million a year. It’s a novel sort of genicide I suppose, but it still is genocide. Since the invasion of Tibet (Iran hasn’t invaded anywhere recently) the Chinese have murdered 1 million Tibetans.
So if you tot it all up that comes up to 300 million people murdered which is 100,000 times worse than September 11th and is the equivilent of killing every single person in America and Canada. They also have nuclear weapons pointed at the US and probably europe too.
What about Iranian genocide you ask? The only site I can find talking about Iranian genocide (post ’79) claims 200 people have died (the Baha’i), it seems unlikley they killed so small a number though, maybe there’s somewhere else with a bigger total.
Also when talking about degrees of Risk what about Russia, they invented the suitcase nuke, the worst terrorist weapon imaginable. They had pre-placed nuclear weapons in the US either buried or disguised as rocks, they set of the largest nuclear weapon ever, they invaded pretty much every country they are neighbors with, and they have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the US and western europe.
How can you compare a country that in the past planted nuclear weapons next to major cities in the US with the intent of destroying them, and currently has thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at the US, and a country which has some anti-US demonstrations, and say the one with the demonstrations is a bigger risk?
I think the questions are more like this:
1. If Iran does have/obtain nuclear weapons, how likely are they to be used?
Not very, I would say. The use of nuclear weapons invites rapid and deadly retaliation, and everyone knows this. If you have the only nuclear weapons in the world, you may feel able to use them with impunity. However, all of the world’s known nuclear powers with the exception of North Korea can launch a strike in retaliation against Iran. However deluded the mullahs may be, it still needs reasonably sane military personnel to make the things work. I would expect the Iranian military command to be rational enough to understand the likelihood of retaliation & hence the lack of wisdom of pre-emptive nuclear action. Defence is another matter, of course.
2. Would they ever use them pre-emptively against Israel?
Extremely unlikely. Israel has a substantial if undeclared nuclear arsenal and is more than capable of devastating retaliation. Furthermore, the Moslem world, especially the Arab part of it, is not exactly shy about using bombastic rhetoric with no supporting action. Just because they may say they would launch a nuclear strike against Israel does not mean they have the slightest intention of doing so.
I know Iranians are largely (but not exclusively) not Arab, but the mindset of their governors largely is. To focus on the Zoroastrian tradition of Iran and its cultural differences from the Arab world as a rationale for Iranian peaceability is deluded, IMO. Having said that, the Iranian governors are probably a touch saner than the neighbouring Arab loonies.
3. Why would they want them?
Iran sees America as a threat to its strategic interests & power in the Gulf region. It is aware that elements within America or its government would like to remove the Iranian government, perhaps by fomenting rebellion, perhaps by invasion. Boasting of a nuclear capability is a good way of deterring invasion, and of making spectators stay in their seats if they have to get a little assertive with their own population or, come to that, if they have to assert their interests in eastern Iraq. Whether Iran actually has nuclear weapons (or is trying to make them) is another matter, but the fact is they have the capability, thus the boasts are credible even if they are not accurate.
Whilst it is the case that America (or Britain, or France) has the ability to invade and respond in kind to a nuclear strike, I doubt very much if any American, French or British administration would care to be remembered as the one which started a middle eastern nuclear war through an aggressive act. This would be political, diplomatic and strategic suicide. Iran also knows this.
EG
The problem with Euan Gray’s cool analysis of the situation can be summed-up in a single word: religion.
To make assumptions about the Iranian government without understanding that its members are as alien to Western attitudes as invaders from outer space is to court disaster.
It cannot be said too often. These are not rational people.
“Would you suggest the the US should attack these countries [China, Russia] with histories varying from appauling to bad to strip them of the nuclear weapons they are known to already possess?”
There is another question: what is possible vs. the imminence of the threat. Dissarming Russia or China seems impossible now, and the threat they pose at the moment isn’t huge, so, no, don’t disarm them.
Not that it would be a bad idea to have them disarmed, but it’s just not possible or too risky.
However, it was a grave mistake that China and Russia were allowed to produce nukes and missiles in 1948-9. The US, sole possesor of nukes, should have used them to stop and prevent the cold war and nuclear proliferation (and, incidentally, prevent the murder of many million people under communism).
Iran can be stopped, and should be stopped, otherwise we incur grave and unpredictable dangers.
It would be nice if the EU, Russia and the US could declare a doctrine that no new nuclear weapons will be permitted anywhere in the world.
Meanwhile Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria are also developing nukes.
Failing to disarm Iran of nukes now will result in some kind of nuclear war in the ME sooner or later, with the oilfields going radioactive, and the world frozen to death.
Della writes:
“Would you suggest the the US should attack these countries with histories varying from appauling to bad to strip them of the nuclear weapons they are known to already possess?”
Like Euan Gray, your analysis is lacking the most important ingredient – the one that changes the entire nature of the game.
No one is pretending that the gang of thugs in Peking is anything other than it is. Similarly, no one is under any illusions about the essential sweetness and goodness of Mr Putin. But do you seriously believe that China is likely to launch a nuclear attack? Or Russia?
Even at it’s most barking, even when on the very brink, the Soviet Union held back
from assured self-destruction. As materialist atheists, it’s not hard to work out why. Likewise the pragmatic Chinese. There is a world of difference between killing even a million Tibetans and having your own homeland reduced to a smoking, radioactive wasteland.
If, on the other hand, you are sufficiently deluded to believe that martyrdom is the greatest thing to which you can aspire. If your belief in an afterlife is so strong that even a mediaeval Catholic would have been awed by it, than you are not deterred by the same sort of fears that condition the behaviour of even a hardened Maoist.
The gravest error made by the Left is to believe their own poison – the cultural relativist nonsense that we are all, more or less, the same. We are not.
People who scream ‘Allah Akbar’ as they detonate their suicide bombs are not rational people. By any reasonable definition, they are insane and, as such, cannot be expected to behave like sane people.
That is why Iran is a threat of an entirely different order.
I admire your flexiability EG. You accept the words of the mullahs that support your POV and belittle those that don’t. Words are the favorite tools of liars, a rational man tends to discount them. Unless of course, somebody says they will do something, and then does it. Repeatedly. Then you have to take their words into account.
In military terms, you look at capabilites, NOT intentions. Knowing your enemies intentions requires mind reading, which is in short supply in the real world.
Lets look at capabilities. Iran MIGHT have a nuke now, and almost certainly will by the end of the year. As far as delivery systems, they don’t have any reliable ones. There is a lot more to an ICBM then bolting a bomb on top of the thing. Iran has been trying for the last decade to manufacture it’s own ATGM’s and SAM’s, IIRC they also tried to do a AAM. NO luck at all, they ended up buying Russian again. ICBM’s are several orders of complexity beyond other guided missiles.
Della’s suitcase nuke is a figment of the Liberal press’s imagination. If anyone is interested the FAS has a good article on the W-54 (I think that is the number. It’s been a long time since I had to know this stuff) SADM (Special Atomic Demolotion Munition). It is the smallest nuke the USA ever built and since US nukes were 15 to 40% smaller then Soviet nukes, might be the smallest ever. The Brits might have been able to build a smaller one, but when they decide to buy American, that went out the window.
Anyway the W-54 goes around 90 kilos, and while small (It is about the size of a commercial thermos like you find at truck stops. Even looks like one). It is that light because it has minimual shielding. Slap that 90 kilo backpack on and you will be dead in 3 or 4 hours. Obviously that will not deter a suicide bomber, but it does limit how transportable the device is.
Then you have the problem of giving your suicide bomber a nuke and hoping he gets to the right city. Might he forget an leave it in the bathroom?
One of the Job requirements for being a homicidal tryant is paranoia. I have trouble with the concept of someone who clawed their way to the top by ruthlessly murdering anybody that got in his way, leaving no stone un-turned and nothing to chance, handing a nuke to anyone. But I could be wrong.
Nuclear weapons have shelf lives. The Plastic Explosives break down and the radiation fries the electronics. The USA rebuilds its nukes very decade or so. I doubt that there are any ‘suitcase’ nukes that are still functional. I’m worried about the 16 nuclear torpedo warheads the Soviets lost back in 89 to 91. They are at the end of their life cycle, but I’ll bet they still can fizzle.
Della, so much of your thinking is devoid of logic and so many of your “facts” are wrong that it would take pages to go through it all. However, here are just a couple of points to consider. 25 years after their revolution, the Iranian leadership still vehemently hates the U.S. Recently, their parliament voted to continue uranium enrichment after which the chamber erupted into the familiar “Death to America” chant. In addition, when they hold military parades, guess what is painted on the side of their missiles…of course it is, “Death to America.” You may have the luxury of dismissing such things, as an American, I don’t.
Euan has a decent point, to be fair. I would point out that a lot of the thugs who run Iran are basically cowards, and hence quite possibly deterrable. They are perfectly okay with sending impressionable young man out to blow themselves up for the greater good of Allah, but not quite so enthused about doing so themselves.
Having said all of which, we may need the coalition powers to carry out the same kind of brilliant pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities that was done to Osirak in Iraq in 1981. In public, the the likes of France, Russia and even Britain will bleat, but in private leaders will be delighted.
The flaw in Della’s arguments, well one of the many, is that China and Russia are not at war with the West or the US and its allies. The thugs in Peking are despicable thugs no doubt, but they are also rational thugs concerned with their own survival and the acceptance of China as a responsible global “citizen”.
Putin recently affirmed his support for the President (one of the only European leaders to publicly express partisan support for a second term Republican administration) and talked about the unity of European Christian civilisation.
Iran on the other hand considers itself in a cold war with the West, with Christendom and with Israel, has paid for and exported terrorism against Israel and the West for twenty years, and has repeatedly threatened to use nukes against Israel at the earliest opportunity.
That Della either cannot see the difference between these countries, or that she can and is just indulging in rhetorical games to defend the indefensible, is reason 10867 as to why I am not a liberal.
If you think that that Iran is only a threat to the United States, you should read this.
But, to assume they are an alien species (in effect) is not going to get anywhere. The mullahs may well have a fundamentalist religious world-view (so for that matter did Ronald Reagan and so to a lesser extent does GW), but this does not mean they are from another planet. They are still human beings, and as such individuals of widely disparate views. To assume that the Iranian government is a monolith of fundamentalist clones is unwise, and even less wise is the assumption that the military command or even the government executive wholly and wholeheartedly shares this zealous outlook.
The senior clerics may be happy to vaporise Israel, but the people who press buttons, give orders and make things happen are perfectly well aware they will have to live with the consequences and it is by no means certain that any such order would necessarily be obeyed. Iran is not as unified as some would like to think, and there is plenty of evidence to show disquiet within the government, never mind the population. Assuming fundamentalist Islam means Iran will act irrationally over the use of nuclear weapons is not, IMO, justifiable.
Repeat 5 times: must remember preview
EG
Shawn writes,
The Iranians goverment aren’t nice people, they go for a lot of bobastic retorict, however apparently they haven’t killed a lot of people and they havn’t invaded anywhere in the years since ’79. Iran is also a democracy, although with a lot of imperfections.
I’m not a liberal, at least not in the American sense. Can’t anyone be against the state and for the non initiation of force or fraud round here? It seems that there is a lot of fraud and initiation of force in the case for an Iran war.
Euan Gray said:
Josef Goebbels said:
Enough said.
Euan Gray writes:
“But, to assume they are an alien species (in effect) is not going to get anywhere.”
Wrong. Where it will get us is to a place of greater security. If you are faced with a barking, salivating dog, the safest choice is to assume it has rabies and accordingly. Your choice – to assume the mullahs are reasonable chaps, just like us, beneath the turbans – is risking disaster.
May I remind you, again, that reasonable men do not hang 16 year old girls from cranes in the marketplace.
Della:
“The Iranians goverment aren’t nice people, they go for a lot of bobastic retorict, however apparently they haven’t killed a lot of people”
Er…yes they have. Thats what terrorism does Della, it kills people. Lots of them. The Iranian Secret Service has networks throghout the ME, and has been co-ordinating major terrorist and military actions for twenty years, including the attack on the US Marine barracks which killed three hundred US citizens. And Hizbollah has been carrying out military attacks against Israeli citizens for years now, including recently. Hizbollah remember, is a proxy for the Iranian government.
So your claim that its just rhetoric is false. Utterly and completely false.
“Can’t anyone be against the state and for the non initiation of force or fraud round here?”
But your not against them.
Your telling us that the Iranian state can initiate force against the West and Israel, and this is just fine to you. Iran has initiated force by carrying out terrorist attacks against Western targets and Israel. Under the non-inititiation of force doctrine, the US and Israel are within their rights to attack Iran and remove its government.
Like most liberals, or anarchists, or paleo-con-paleo-libertarians or whatever you are, your using the non-inititation of force doctrine to claim, falsely, that the US and Israel have no right to self-defense.
Euan:
Equivalency in this case is a poor argument. Comparing Reagan or Bush to the Iranian mullahs because they are all “fundamentalists” strikes me as dishonest. The problem is not that the Iranian leadership is fundamentalist, the problem is that they have been carrying out a terrorist war against Israel and the West.
MAD assumes the players are rational, and I’m not entirely convinced the mullahs are.
That said in the 21st century all sorts of people are going to get their hands on nukes as the technology becomes old hat. You won’t be able to stop proliferation forever.
The selfish me says stopping it for 50 years will do, but I think there needs to be some serious reconstruction done so it’s not even an issue, or at least all the players are rational as at least the Soviets, despite their many other faults, were.
Wow, what a lot of misinformation you can get here.
1) Della,
Neither North nor Jenkins are in absolutely any way at all comparable to Stalin, Mao, Napoleon or even Adolf Hitler (the one you seem to have omitted), personally I find it rather insulting that you make the comparison ..
2) Shehab-3 – the Iranian IRBM (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile) is capable of carrying a 1760kg warhead over 1,300km. It’s not an ICBM – that involves the creation of a re-entry shrouded vehicle and a delivery powerpack capable of achieving low-orbit – which brings us to what Yitzhak Mordechai (head of the Israeli Defence Force then) brought up in 1997 – that Iran was THEN developing Shehab-4, an IRBM with a 2-3,000 km range and Shehab-5, an Intercontinental Range Ballistic Missile (yes, the one that can go into low orbit) with a range of 5,000km and the potential to carry a 2megaton capable warhead.
Shehab-5 apparently, as is so usual in this day and age, has been developed with the active assistance of the Germans and the Dutch but NOT (unusual maybe) with any assistance from the French.
It seems that the Dutch, despite clearly worded warnings having been previously issued by the USA, still have some odd affinity with the now infamous AQ Khan (father of the Pakistan H-bomb, as well as that of North Korea, Iran and others) to whit, that they originally supplied Pakistan with basic centrifugal systems, while the Germans supplied them with the original meranging (improved steel) centrifugal systems – these systems are part of the Uranium 235 (yellowcake) purification process.
If Iran already has the Shehab-5, or even the Shehab-4, in place then I would personally feel a lot more secure if Israel did indeed carry out another Osirak-style raid upon their production facilities. Hopefully the USA could earn pluspoints for providing them with suitable satellite intel and refuelling facilities …
“Iran remains the ideological center of the America-hatred pervading the Islamic Middle East. That theocracy began warring with America when its rulers took 52 Americans hostage in 1979. Highlights of Iran’s terrorism on Americans include the bombing and murder of 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983 and the killing of 19 US servicemen bombed at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996.
More recently, intelligence sources believe Iran harbors Al Qaeda operatives who orchestrated the bombing of a Western residential compound in Saudi Arabia last month that killed nine Americans. Iran sends Islamic agitators and militants into both US-controlled Iraq and Afghanistan, and sponsors such terrorist groups as Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Lebanon, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
In January 2002, Israel intercepted a ship from Iran delivering 50 tons of weapons to the terrorist Palestinian Authority. A month before this, former Iranian “President” Hashemi Rafsanjani stated publicly that when the Islamic world has nuclear weapons “the strategy of the West will hit a dead end, since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel.” Last month, an Iranian opposition group discovered another secret nuclear facility in Natanz, undoubtedly part of Iran’s advanced nuclear weapons program. ”
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2888
Looks like a lot of initiating of force to me. Perhaps Della’s interpretation of the non-initiation of force principle is doing nothing while the enemy kills you.
GCooper,
May I remind you that the kill them before they kill us was one of the reasons suggested for the wholesale liquidation of the Jews by the Nazis after they’d done a bit of killing because they apparently didn’t want Jews to come after them for what they had already done.
Your argument is mearly an excuse for genocide.
Mike –
Cool hard cash. The US has I think set up the Asian non-proliferation initiative or something because it believes NK would be willing to sell its warheads for the right price. I think they’ve set up a ring of countries (including china) that have set up a de facto cordon around North korea to search any suspect ships. A similar worry are the ex-soviet nukes.
Euan –
Game theory is a nice way of looking at the problem, and using it you can give an argument as to why nuclear proliferation is good, but ultimately it falls short. Firstly, you assume rationality, and secondly you assume they want to stay alive. On the first issue, you assume that someone along the chain of command is rational enough to disobey orders. However, if I was in charge of a country (and god forbid that ever happens), I’d put my most fanatical followers in my most important areas. Im sure the Iranian Mullahs are the same.
But ultimately, that’s missing the point. The real problem (as someone here pointed out to me some months ago) is not that they are irrational, but that they are perfectly rational but just have different goals to the rest of us. If you honestly believe the Jews/Americans are Satan’s minions, and that being killed in a nuclear exchange with them is the best thing you can ever ever do, then its perfectly rational to play thermonuclear war. Tic-tac-toe just doesn’t matter any more, because that assumes both sides want to win by getting three in a row. A deathwish changes the rules. The only way they can then lose is if there is no retaliation – and even then at least they’ve killed 5 million infidels.
They’ve repeatedly talked about driving Israel into the sea, and they’ve made at least two serious attempts at it (1948, 1967). When they talk about wiping out Israel, it’s pretty clear they’re serious. And when they talk about wiping out other people, Im inclined to think they believe it.
Exactly. Which is why the scenario I describe above is relevant. They know we go into hysterical fits over civilian casualties on the order of 5 or 6 people. If they can let off a nuke and create enough doubt over the origin, they can rely on the fear of creating 5 million innocent civilian casualties giving them protection from nuclear retaliation by the established powers. I honestly believe the UK and France would sit tight in such a scenario, Russia and China would have little interest in becoming involved, Pakistan wouldnt want to nuke another Muslim country, India wouldnt want to risk nuclear war with Pakistan, and so it all comes down to the USA. This is where uncertainty comes in – even with Bush in charge. And if Iran waits until the USA elects a relatively pacifist president (which it may well expect in 2008 after Iraq is still being fought), it could reasonably expect to get away with it. And if they don’t? Well, at least they’ll go to heaven.
Euan
One of your themes is that the Iranian military may not obey orders to launch a strike. Strictly speaking, the military has no part of it. Iran’s nuclear programme is locked down and under the control of the Revolutionary Guard. You won’t need reminding that they form the Praetorian Guard, the most faithful.
Della
I think one of your holiday photos was mixed in with mine at the developer.
And you assume they are all mad and all prepared to sacrifice themselves for Allah and country. I doubt this is the case. Whilst there are of course many prepared to die for Islam, you have to consider that there are probably in this case rather more who would prefer to live for Iran.
Iran is not a naturally fundamentalist nation, and those ruling it – although powerful – are only a narrow clique within a broadly cosmpolitan and educated society. The government is not monolithic, and it is not particularly secure.
This doesn’t work very well. You put technically capable and competent people in the key positions – ability being more useful than ideological purity – and put your zealots over them, watching. Like the political officers in Nazi and Soviet units, you see? If you are looking for a bomber pilot or submarine captain, you want someone with a passing familiarity with the controls to operate the thing. But you also need to check his loyalty, and this is where the zealot comes in handy.
There is no evidence that Iran has this sort of deathwish in reality rather than in rhetoric. I would expect Iran to continue to fund terrorist organisations, but I would not expect them to carry this on to the extent of supplying nuclear weapons or permitting their use against Israel.
Iran’s government is mature in the sense that it has been in existence for 25 years. Pragmatism tends to overcome ideological fervour fairly quickly, and Iran has more important long term strategic interests in the Gulf region than trying to wipe out Israel or unnecessarily piss off the US. Governments change, interests persist.
Almost all Moslem states spout vitriol against Israel, since opposition to Israel is the only thing they have in common. The point is that the separation of Islamist rhetoric and pragmatic reality must be made. Iran could have made life extremely difficult for the US/UK invasion of Iraq, but didn’t – despite rhetoric from all corners. The Arab world, given capable generals and astute political leadership, could easily neutralise Israel, but doesn’t – plenty of talk, no meaningful action to put themselves in the position to do it. It is interesting to note that the most capable Cold War anti-western Arab state was Syria – also the one with the most Russian advisors and officers. The potential is there, but the leadership lacking.
Oh, come on. If a nuclear device exploded in Israel, just how many countries could plausibly be blamed for it? Pakistan is capable (maybe), but not interested enough in that area. North Korea is preoccupied with local concerns about Japan and South Korea, not to mention the US interest. It’s unlikely to be an accident. An ex-Soviet warhead is unlikely to function after 15 years without maintenance or rebuild. Really it has to be Iran. Just how long do you think it would take the rest of the world to figure this out – and how long for Israel to do what it feels it has to do?
I still think it is extremely unlikely – although remotely possible – that the Iranian government would even permit a pre-emptive nuclear strike. Even if they did, they need to count on the RG assenting to the destruction of their own cause and country. Even if they do this, they have to assume the non-RG elements involved (and there will be many, it is not possible to have such a complex program completely and solely operated by the zealots) doing the same. There is no reason to believe that Iran is about to immolate itself for the cause.
Whilst one can read Iranian rhetoric as being a defined threat to Israel, one can also read other statements as meaning that the nuclear program is more of a deterrent than anything else. Iran has for years clearly seen a danger of American invasion (although after Iraq I’m not sure there’s an appetite for it in the US), and it would be appealing for them to have a definite deterrent. I wonder if America and Britain would have invaded Iraq if they knew it had operational nuclear weapons and was prepared to use them?
EG
The Iranians might never nuke Israel. But they would be invulnerable to military and possibly political pressure if they have nukes. They always work through proxies like Hizbullah, which has hundreds of short-range rockets aimed at Northern Israel. If they become invulnerable, they will up the ante to make Israeli population centers vulnerable to attack. Given their ideology (which is a Shiite version of Wahhabi absolutism like Al Qaida), we can be sure that they will become expansionist if they get a chance.
So you don’t HAVE to nuke your enemy to make nuclear power work. The Soviets made it work for fifty years, without ever taking the risk of nuclear attack. And they were relatively rational (after Stalin, at least). It is simply unknown how rational the radical Mullahs who run the place are. Plus — every new nuclear power expands the probability of further proliferation. Pakistan’s AQ Khan spread it to Lybia and Iran. North Korea is probably spreading it. Add Iran, and immediately the Saudi’s will want nukes, because the Iranian Shiites have designs on the Saudi oil fields (which are populated by Shiites, plus they hate the Sunnis). So you get more and more spread to more and more irresponsible regimes, and at some point it is likely to get into the hands of someone who has nothing to lose.
It’s very dangerous.
I can only assume you have not met many Iranians then. They are quite different cultures, as different as, say, Italians and Germans (i.e. they share many historical facts and influances but are significently different in how they reacted to them).
You need to realise there are people from my former part of the world (I live in Australia now, thank God) who think that a nuclear war would be a great thing. If we are all reduced to the dark ages, it is the ‘Godless West’ who has a long way to fall, not ‘us’. Millions of muslims still see the Taliban as the perfect Muslim society. Who is more vulnerable to nuclear attack: pious rural muslim or ‘evil’ highly urbanised jews? Nuking Tehran and five other Iranian cities would not end Islam in Iran and would probably ‘only’ kill 25% of the population in the country. Nuke five cities in Israel and you probably kill 85% of the entire population. THAT is the calculation at least a few people are making. If you are not afraid of those people, then you are not paying attention.
You really didn’t read what I’d written, did you?
I said their GOVERNORS share a largely Arabist, anti-Israeli mentality, NOT the people. And actually I do know several Iranians.
True. You can’t bomb people back to the Stone Age when they already live in it. However, and less frivolously, it is the “godless west” which has the means to cope with such a catastrophe, not the pious Moslem world.
In any event, no Moslem country has the ability to launch anything other than extremely limited nuclear strikes not far from their home base. Nuclear weapons are not actually as hideously destructive in the long term as many people believe (look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki today if you doubt this), and the overall long term effect of a Islamist nuclear assault on the west, worst case, would not be that great.
On the other hand, America, Britain, Russia and France have a global reach to their nuclear forces and can strike any Moslem nation at pretty much any time with massive force. Incidentally, Britain no longer has a “no first use of nukes” policy. This was announced by Hoon in Parliament before the Iraq war, probably by accident.
The threat of nuclear catastrophe against “the west” in general from Islamism is infinitesimal. A specific nuclear threat against Israel is less so, but still very small. Israel, of course, would not be likely to have any moral hang-ups about returning the compliment.
Well, knowing something of how nuclear weapons work, what damage they do, how difficult they are to design and make, and what the long term effects of their use is, I am inclined to be a little concerned rather than mortally afraid.
Fear leads to demonising the enemy, over-estimating his ability, under-estimating one’s ability to cope, permitting the terrorist to gain his objective (terror), and ultimately to giving up in a blue funk. None of this is necessary. In a nuclear context, Islamism does not pose a serious threat to the west in general, and only a slightly more serious one to Israel.
However, to be entirely frank and selfish about it, the west can survive without Israel but Israel cannot long survive without the west. I’m not convinced the west in general would do or care all that much about the extinction of Israel, to be honest. I suppose America might, but no-one else really seems to care about them any more.
Even looking at the worst plausible case, Islamism could detonate one or two small nuclear devices in the west. The damage, both short and long term, would not be all that severe, but you can be certain it would be the very last nuclear device freely available in Moslem hands – there would be retaliation, make no mistake. In effect, a nuclear assault by Islamism on the west would bring about in short order the effective end of Islamism and would not significantly degrade the west as a whole.
I am quite sure the Iranians realise this. They may spout apocalyptic Islamist rhetoric, and they may fund and supply terrorist organisations, but they do not seem to do much beyond this, although they certainly have the ability. They are not expansionist or particularly aggressive towards other states in the region. One should consider why this is.
EG
Do you really think that there has been no progression since a 12.5 kiloton bomb was dropped on Hiroshima? That the standard munition on a British Trident missile is a 2 MEGATON warhead? Do a search on AQ Khan and on Iran’s delivery systems and then make a comment.
Again, never heard of a “suitcase” bomb, the seemingly generic title for a small nuclear device that could smuggled in and detonated in a Western city? And it would be far easier to airburst a small device in a hijacked passenger jet over Belgium at high altitude – that way you could do some serious EMP damage to most of Europe.
I think I’m going to stop here before I turn apoplectic …
To create a large warhead you need to do a significant amount of testing. It would take them years of devlopment and testing to get from their first warhead which if it was ever to be created would be Hiroshima sized till they created a multi megaton device. I also believe that the warheads in the missiles on UK submarines are variable yield from 10kton to 250kton, however one missile may contain quite a few warheads. Britain does know how to make multi megaton individual weapons and has set them off.
Suitcase nukes seem to have a yeild from 0.1kton to 1kton which is not very big and wouldn’t do a lot of damage (compared to a large nuclear device. They seem to weigh between 30 and 90 kgs (more likley the high end of the scale) which would be over the weight limit for an item of lugage. Even if you managed to check it in the very high density and X-ray opaquness would probably make the bagage handlers not put it on the plane, it would take upto 3 people to lift the 90kg warhead, and it would be significantly heaver than the equivilent volume of lead. You could easily put it a a car’s boot though (US:auto’s trunk).
A suitcase nuke would be significantly more difficult to develop than a hydrogen bomb and needs servicing every 6 months according to the Russians.
ok,
“Suitcase” Nuclear device, aka “Special Atomic Demolition Munitions”, weigh in at around 100 pounds as a low-yield 1 kiloton atomic device and are extremely portable – I send high-spec camera equipment abroad on a regular basis that can be a lot heavier than that.
Source [Link]
One of the advantages of state-backed terrorism, nuclear or otherwise, is that the state owns the passenger jet you want to use as a delivery vehicle
Euan
I’m not convinced the west in general would do or care all that much about the extinction of Israel, to be honest. I suppose America might, but no-one else really seems to care about them any more.
That statement rings true for the anti-semitic left but certainly not for the majority.
Of course there have, but most of them are very much more complex. Thermonuclear, boosted fission and enhanced radiation (ERWs or “neutron bombs”) devices are all quite possible but much more complex. Pure fission devices of relatively crude design are hard enough to design and make, let alone more advanced designs.
It’s possible Pakistan and Israel have boosted weapons, but their programs have been running for a long time. Iran is unlikely to have them, but it isn’t impossible. Again, considerations mentioned earlier apply – it would not be hard to determine who had built the device or at least supplied the materials.
From the residue of the explosion it is not difficult to determine the type of bomb used and, to an extent, the composition of the fissile core. It would, therefore, not take all that long to make a really good guess as to the identity of the supplier, and anyone who makes the things knows this perfectly well. If, for example, Iran supplied a simple bomb to the Islamists and caused it to be detonated in the US or Europe, then within a matter of a couple of days it would be confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that it came from Iran – this could take less time than identifying the terrorist agency responsible for letting the thing off.
So ask yourself this – would the Iranian government invite the near-certainty of invasion, possible nuclear attack, military defeat and the defeat of the Islamist cause, all for the sake of letting off one small nuclear device in the west? Considering also that any such event would almost certainly be followed by extremely stringent and rapid action to control all nuclear devices and technology world-wide, the Islamists could do this once only, and would then be hammered mightily in retaliation.
As for the effects of nuclear strikes. Well, assuming that even if the Islamists did manage to get a bomb and set it off, it’s not likely to be a high-yield state of the art thermonuclear device. It is estimated that the total number of people adversely affected by Hiroshima and Nagasaki is anywhere between half a million and one million. I’d tend to the lower side, since these estimates often get inflated. Even that could be inflated.
In the cold and brutal calculus of war, a million deaths over 50 years in a population of 300-400 million (US or EU) is not excessive. In the same period, one fifth of this number would be killed in road accidents alone. Keep it in proportion. Also, the distribution of fall-out after an explosion is very widespread and much less of an environmental hazard than many think. Again, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – they aren’t exactly ghost towns, are they? Consider also the surprisingly small number ( << 100) who have died as a direct result of Chernobyl. It's easy to scare people with radiation stories, but it is frankly not as dangerous as the more extreme stories suggest. Yes, a small nuke is more than just a big bang, but it is alarmist and incorrect to assume that it renders hundreds of square miles permanently uninhabitable. Suitcase bombs are, I suspect, something of a scare story. Whilst it's entirely possible to make small nuclear devices - the US and Britain had 8" nuclear artillery shells, for example - it's not so easy. Also, the yield is very low, around a kilotonne. Even if you could get one on a plane, the EMP damage would not be all that great. If you detonate at say 35,000' then the blast and radiation damage would be pretty negligible too. Nuclear devices don't last so long. The radiation from the core degrades the metal structure and the electrical equipment surprisingly quickly, and as has been pointed out by others they do need to be rebuilt fairly often - especially the small ones. The probability of a Soviet suitcase or artillery shell device being nicked 15 years ago and still in working order is slim indeed. In summary, the matter is being blown out of proportion. The threat exists, but is very small - so small in fact that it probably is not worth losing a great deal of sleep over. It would be prudent to keep an eye on things & prevent anything untoward developing, but it would be paranoid to assume we are only an air ticket & a corrupt baggage handler away from nuclear oblivion. EG
I was considering the governments, not the people.
EG
Euan
So was I.
Julian Taylor,
That’s the page I linked to, I did read the whole thing.
70lbs is between 30 and 90kg, the high density would be noticable to anyone handling it though, and the X ray opacity. Later on it says “suitcase nukes” need maintenence every 6 months.
A suitcase nuke is as difficult to build as a fussion bomb, so if you’re going to go to the effort of putting a suitcase nuke in a plane with the help of a state, in which case size does not matter, why not just use a fussion bomb, adjust the mirrors to make it a high yield neutron bomb and kill a lot more people? I mean if we are going to just throw reality out of the window why not create a gigantic 27 ton, 100 megaton multiple stage fission fussion device and blow up western europe. A passenger jet could easily hold it…
Ye-es.
So, how exercised is France going to get about it? Other than some emotional bleating and ineffective sanctions (maybe), what exactly would the other EU states do about it? Is anyone really going to go to war to defend an unpopular state which is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being not much less repressive and dogmatic than its neighbours? When its neighbours are the co-religionists of those who own the oil? When one of its neighbours controls a strategic waterway? When they could not realistically do anything militarily about it in any case? Really, what would be in it for Europe?
If anyone would do anything about it, it would be the US. Even then, depending on how things go in the rest of the middle east over the next few years, that cannot be taken for granted. Since the end of the Cold War, the US has gradually reduced the subsidy and support Israel gets, because Israel is no longer strategically important. This has resulted in Israel becoming a little less bellicose and a little more flexible with its neighbours, as can be seen in the various withdrawals from certain occupied territories, which is deeply unpopular but economically and militarily necessary. Israel is withdrawing to a defensible heartland, & is presumably not expecting much if any tangible outside support. If the worst happens, I really do think they’re on their own, at least if the Arab nations can manage to act decisively and quickly enough.
This is unlikely, and would be pretty much unprecedented. However, it’s not impossible. But all in all it makes a nuclear assault on Israel less rather than more likely – there is more to be gained for the Arabs by negotiating Israel into irrelevance than there is by trying to bomb it into oblivion.
EG
Going back to Julian Taylor’s earlier comment:
If you were to listen to what Americans way talk about British “tyranny” at that time you would believe the British administration was similar to Pol Pot’s. I don’t think they were bad guys, but if you look for British Prime-ministers who are the most “evil” by American standards you have to choose those guys. Of course by British standards and absolute standards they were not evil at all.
Euan Gray writes:
“It would be prudent to keep an eye on things & prevent anything untoward developing, but it would be paranoid to assume we are only an air ticket & a corrupt baggage handler away from nuclear oblivion.”
This business about so-called “suitcase bombs” is a bit of a red herring. As is pretty much common knowledge, the greater threats are either the use of conventional explosives (without or without a garnish of radioactive waste) or the use of a merchant ship to deliver a nuclear strike. I am told that this latter is the option that it is really worrying security.
Needless to say, perhaps, I still find your opinions on the threat posed by the Iranian government naive to the point of complacency. Mercifully, it seems the US government is not so blasé about its first duty.
Euan
So, how exercised is France going to get about it?
This is exactly my point. Frankly yet another Arab-Israeli war would see the EU jump into the Arab camp. It has been conducting a proxy war against the US via the Palestinians as it is. Whilst socialists predominate in European nation states and in the EU Europe will not be rid of anti-semitism. They are past and present masters at it.
Is anyone really going to go to war to defend an unpopular state which is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as being not much less repressive and dogmatic than its neighbours?
Seriously, are you sitting on the fence here?
But the bomb still has to come from somewhere. This could be determined quickly enough and appropriate action taken. The sponsoring state would have a difficult few weeks ahead, and Iran et al know this perfectly well.
I do not believe there is a Persian master-plan to irradiate secular western society into oblivion. None but the paranoid do, I suspect. I do not think this is naive.
Yes, Iran is a dangerous regime, no doubt – but not to the extent of planning to nuke us all. As I said earlier, one can read several recent Iranian statements on nuclear matters as confirming the deterrent nature of the program. Taking this in combination with Iran’s noticeable lack of territorial aggrandisement since the revolution; their failure to make hay while the Iraqi invasion sun shone; their knowledge that they are not Uncle Sam’s best buddies, and of course the apprehension that anything sufficiently overt might attract a US invasion, I find it hard to accept the assurances of imminent apocalypse.
As I said earlier – keep an eye on things, but don’t lose sleep over it. And, of course, recognise that the US government has an immediate interest in exaggerating any threats to the US or the west in general.
Once Iran does have an operational and credible nuclear force, it might be argued that they can act with relative impunity since no-one is going to invade. I don’t think this is valid either – the west will still have vastly more (and more capable) nuclear devices, and I suspect we would enter a cold war phase of mutual suspicion but careful avoidance of actual shooting.
EG
I am surprised some here assume(lack of imagination or what?) that a suitcase Nuke had to pass in a airport screener. Assuming target it is in Europe, bring parts via truck, assemble somewhere preferably in some farm, rent a corporate jet, move the plane to a regional airport, put the bomb and voila.! Now just need someone willing to commit suicide.
Concerning Iran, they did bomb Israeli Embassy in Argentine. Of course no words from UN.
http://www.woai.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=17053480-D960-4D97-9BF7-04A7492B7271
Authorities are trying to determine if the four pasengers on board the Cessna 172-P, two men and two women, are linked to a report that several Chinese nationals were attempting to set off a ‘dirty bomb’ in the Boston area.
Online records of the Federal Aviation Administration show the 20-year-old plane is co-owned by Afzal Hameed of Dover, Del. The other co-owner is listed as Alyce S. Taylor, but no address is given for her. The FAA records state that the plane’s last three-year registration was filed in 1999, and that the agency received no response in 2002 after mailing new registration forms to Hameed.
Right in time! jut run in to this piece from Drudge.
Which is why I said the EU isn’t going to give a damn if Israel sinks. They are unlikely to actually cheer on the Arabs, but a period of judicious inactivity followed by an Arab victory and appropriate glad-handing all around would be just perfect for Europe.
Anti-semitism is not the exclusive territory of the left. It has a long history in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, inextricably linked with the rise of Christianity and the heritage of Imperial Rome. It is easy enough to understand American pro-Israeli inclinations given that there are more Jews in the US than any other country including Israel, that Israel was a pro-western front-line state in the Cold War, and also of course that the US has for long been a home for the oppressed and persecuted (and the Jews have some experience of both). Equally, European pro-Arab bias is understandable enough given the history of Anglo-French colonial domination in the area, anti-British terrorism in Palestine, long-term strategic interests and of course anti-Americanism. It should be noted that this last is far from being the most important.
Many people in Britain seem to have distinctly lukewarm feelings towards Israel, in part I suppose for some of the reasons outlined above. As I have said before, politics is about perceptions, and a common perception seems to be (judging by the number of marches, posters, leaflets and street-corner protests, anyway) that Israel is not exactly whiter than white. Perhaps a lot of that is mere opportunism, given that there are many more Moslems than Jews in Britain.
By the way, if you’re imputing anti-semitic or racist motives to me you can stop right now.
EG
Euan wrote:
” keep an eye on things, but don’t lose sleep over it. ”
Which was exactly the approach taken with Al-Qaeda in the late 1990’s. And we all know what the result of that was. Why would any sane person want to repeat a tactic that failed utterly and that resulted not only in 3000 dead, but the first direct attack on American soil since Pearl Harbour? Were some people asleep on Sept.11?
“Yes, Iran is a dangerous regime, no doubt – but not to the extent of planning to nuke us all.”
But you dont really know do you? Your just guessing.
“Nuclear weapons are not actually as hideously destructive in the long term as many people believe”
No, just thousands upon thousands of men women and children incinirated and burned alive, and with generations to come of deformed babys and premature deaths due to radiation.
Nothing to get alarmed about right? After all your not an Israeli, so who really cares right? Nothing to lose sleep over.
“And, of course, recognise that the US government has an immediate interest in exaggerating any threats to the US or the west in general.”
Ah yes, when all your other points of debate have been dismissed, its time to resort to good old fashioned conspiracy mongering against the Great Satan.
Euans arguments boil down to this:
He knows that Iran has been threatining Israel and the US for twenty years, but his GUESS, is that they MIGHT not be totally serious. After all, Al-Qaeda threatened the US for years and nothing happenned.
He knows they are developing nukes, but his GUESS is that they MIGHT not use them.
He knows that the Iranian regime has been carrying terrorist actions against US and Isreal for twenty years, but this doesnt bother him, and it tells him nothing about the character and intentions of the Iranian regime. After all he is GUESSING that twenty years of terrorism MIGHT not mean anything.
And as for the victims of Iranian terrorism, well they dont even figure on his radar screen. They apparently desreve no justice, and Irans initiation of force against Israel deserves no response.
I obviously did NOT impute anti-semitic or racist motives in you, although they are motives for many of the marches, posters, leaflets and street-corner protests that take place in the UK. In any case I won’t go on. The fact that Israel is a democracy which respects human rights and is fighting for its very survival against an enemy which doesn’t want peace and will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel is plain. You seem to prefer constant analysis to proper condemnation.
Euan
I think they would actually do rather a lot about it if there was an nuclear attack on Israel. Whilst some of them may have no love for Israel I am sure they are pragmatic enough to see that if some nutty state is throwing around nukes they could well be next.
Whilst much is said to ridicule the military capabilities of the European countries (inc. Britain) they are as a group highly militarily capable and could take out any enemy. Even Britain on its own could take out any ememy (apart from maybe America and Russia). It has one of the best conventional militaries around, a large nuclear arsenel and the capability to vastly increase that arsenel if neccesary.
No, it actually boils down to this:
Were Iran to launch a nuclear attack on the west (including Israel), even via terrorist proxies, it would be very obvious very quickly who was behind it;
Iran would suffer the most extreme punishment for this, and knows it;
That Iran sponsors terrorists in the middle east does not necessarily imply that Iran would provide them with nuclear weapons;
Whilst some Iranian statements suggest a desire to destroy Israel by nuclear means, other suggest just as strongly that a working nuclear system is seen as principally deterrent;
History and the current political-strategic situation in the Gulf supports the idea of a deterrent rather than an aggressive nuclear policy as being the credible option and whatever other policies Iran may have (including non-nuclear terrorism);
Therefore, and although Iran patently is a dangerous state, there appears no credible reason to suppose it has any SERIOUS (i.e. non-rhetorical) intention to do the above.
On the effects of nuclear weapons, I repeat the bald if unpleasantly blunt fact that the maximum damage the Islamists could inflict on the west in this way is not particularly significant. I am not looking here at individuals, but at the generality of the western idea of secular pluralistic society – it will not be destroyed by one or two small nuclear explosions, however horrible the prospect may be. However, this would result in the effective neutering of any significant Islamist society.
EG
I went over and saw my old friend at the Pentagon. I put my name on a list. He has about 8,000 names like mine of men who have come in through various filters to see him. He will pick maybe 1,500 out of that..the best he can find. And then we get filtered again and they will take maybe 43 to 48%. My chances of making that cut are anyone’s guess.
He will call me if I make the number. I have skills and I am experienced. I can compete with the best for the work we will be doing. I have a good record. I stand a chance. I may be assigned to training younger men but I am alright with that. I will be told where I stand by next June.
We are going to “DO” Iran kiddies. It is not even up for debate. There will be a CONFRONTATION with the Mullahs in this second Bush term. It is a GIVEN. Anything else is a cigarette in the EUrinal.
I will be active until then. I will do everything I can to maximize my chances.
There are Special Units being assembled for assignments which have high risk but need experienced people. I was with one such unit assigned to the Fourth Mech and we did two raids into Baghdad near the end of March, one to take prisoners and another to take an Intelligence Library before it could be removed or destroyed. We did both without losing a single man and we did lose one vehicle, a Bradley we had to torch ourselves and leave, but the product did prove worth it.
They pressured me very hard to sign up for two more years but my Contract specified a shorter term and I kept to that even when they got angry about it. I did the right thing. I don’t think that will injure my chances on this contract.
The weather here in DC is very COLD. But the subway is very efficient and I have a large leather coat with a wide hood. Getting around in DC is quick and easy and I am going to go down on Georgia Ave near Dupont and see some of the smaller art galleries today. I will also tuck into the M street Intelligence Library and get some books ordered.
I had Shrimp Bisque for dinner last night and watched a video of El Cid. I slept very well. I had forgotten how nice a city can be. Back at my cabin on Blood Mountain the pipes may have frozen. I didn’t think to make the taps drip before I left. When you travel there is always something you forget. My shower back at the cabin is an agony in the winter. No real heat and it’s dark and cold. All my plumbing is primitive since I did it myself and it is all in one corner and it is not very good work.
Up here there are fine thick towels, a shower head that pulses. A hair blower, big huge well lit mirrors, I have two bathrooms and a pair of Televsions with over 50 channels. A modern refigerator (people laugh at me when I say ICEbox for refrigerator, I don’t have a refrigerator back in my cabin) and I don’t have to make my own bed. I am on the 14th floor overlooking the river across from Georgetown. The food is very good. I can go anywhere I like without a car or having to worry about parking. Lots of little neighborhoods in DC. Lots of things to see and do.
I got a haircut BTW. It cost me 20$. Bought myself a nice watch to wear too.
And my daughter’s place here in Washington is very comfortable and pleasant. I got to go to the Gun Range with my daughter’s husband who uses the Secret Service indoor range. I brought my Makarov (souvenir of Iraq) to show him. He is a US Marshall.
I will be talking to some retired people in Intelligence whilst I’m here. A man who used to be my boss in Saigon runs a big Auto Repair place now in Falls Church. Have you ever heard of a man named Victor Marchetti? I am a walking piece of history myself.
You have heard of James Jesus Angleton haven’t you? I was once a “keeper” to him after he was forced into retirement. He and I used to spend all day in his greenhouse where he raised Orchids and he would do art work, sketches and talk. His wife an elegant older woman would bring us tea and sandwiches. I was not in his mental league but he was always kind. He was a very elightening man and exteremely mad. The very mad know they are mad.
I brought my armor with me and my shinai. I went over to the NIH Kendo Club and it had moved but it was better than ever once I did find it. I got a match with a very good middle aged Japanese Doctor who trained in the Korean style of Kendo. He JUMPS. I mean this agile guy is off the ground and in the air half the time. Very interesting match.
Sword fighting, I wouldn’t call it fencing. There is an entirely different mindset in fencing. Kendo is more like Saber is to the Germans. Something like that. Epee is a mind thing. The weapon determines the mind’s motion and the focus of the senses. I like four foot razors.
I have been meaning to get a fiberglass shinai for some time now. They last a lot longer than the bamboo kind.
My daughter has been packing me sandwiches and canned soft drink to put in my pocket while I out all day. My grandson is back to school today. I will see him this evening.
My little grandson had his picture taken at some parties given by Senator Kerry who posed with him the way politicians do. I don’t think my daughter and my son in law voted Kerry however. They knew him personally and they are not going to miss much. My daughter particularly is a lot like a mind reader. She is the one who I found in the railway boogey shot to pieces by 20 mm aircannon at the Chaugatchka Crossing between the BanglaDesh border and Jessore. She was 5 months old in a basket under a seat with 116 dead people blown to hell. The place was so full of flies I had to make a mask over my face of my undershirt. It seems like only yesterday but it was over thirty years ago.
That baby saved me more than I saved the baby. I would have died eventually if that baby hadn’t changed my life. I began to plan my life around the baby and she changed me. I got a house and I started to work with the Daughters of the Cross in Calcutta and began to raise the baby. And I changed.
Back when I was a very young man I wanted to be a priest. I actually went to a Seminary for two years. I was never a priest, just someone in a school that trained men to go into that. But even though I was a good student I was not the right kind of character. I was kicked out of the school. I went into a religious Order, an enclosed Order and I spent a novitiate and had advanced to the first year of Postulancy… just before taking Minor vows. And I got in trouble again and it was considered wisest that I leave the community… and the Abbot said, “have you ever considered the Marine Corps?” Sweet old bastard, clueless and sending me in the right direction anyway. The Marines paid for my Master’s degree and would have gotten me a Doctorate as well. That never happened.
I always begin well and end badly. I went to the Sino-Soviet Institute which is a mid point for Master’s students who will be either State or Intelligence. I am a graduate of their program at George Washington University in DC. All my professors were CIA analysts. I once stole something very valuable and traded it for a grade… a numbered copy of the De-Stalinization speech given by Khrushchev in the Politburo… a priceless document. I stole a lot of things like that. A senior CIA analysts would give me an “A” if I gave him a document. And why not… it was what I was being trained for wasn’t it? A thief of rare things. I made my fortune stealing rare things. This land I own was made selling a man.. I got millions of dollars for him. His name was Colonel Firman Ali.. and I sold him. He murdered 500 very rich Hindus and I caught him and sold him.
My specialization was Asian politics and languages. My Masters Thesis was on Mao Tse-tung in 1923. My art collection is primarily on Bodhisattvas and artifacts associated with them.
I am in Georgetown right now.
I am here on business. Another war is coming and I want to be in it.
I am a realist. And I am very heavy duty when it comes to what kind of tactics I use. I am like Stone Wall Jackson (whose birthday was last week, but then I would know things like that) in one of his quotes about the going to war.
“When you draw the saber, throw the scabbard away.”
And another when a lieutenant told him the Union line was closing on their position and asking what should the men do, Stonewall replied, “Fix bayonets and give it to them, use your bayonets!”
I found a pair of bodies once, a young Marine and an NVA soldier locked in each other’s arms after we came on the hill in the morning. They were a forward OP which had been over-run during the night. Everyone was dead. The young Marine had the NVA in his arms and had sunk a K-bar knife in the NVA’s ribs and was still biting him in the face even in death. I fight like that. I will not be a nice guy in a fight. I am an animal and I do not stop until I kill. And I will do ANYTHING to win.
Most of you have never had to fight for your lives . What won’t you do to stay alive?, what WON’T you do to stay alive. I wouldn’t stop at cannibalism. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to stay alive. I know this because I have been there. I know how absolutely and ruthlessly dedicated I am when it comes to winning… and to me winning is staying alive.
I have done some patriotic things and I have done some criminal things to stay alive. I murdered two civilian Viets who were selling drugs to my men. It was against the law to kill civilians. It was most specifically against the laws to premeditatively set them up and murder them. It was not a combat situation, it was in an alley and it was murder. I don’t play by the rules.
It was found out and it absolutely shocked officers over me that they knew I did it. But they couldn’t prove it. What were they supposed to do with me after they realized one of their men was murdering Viet civilians and they couldn’t bring me up on charges because they had no real evidence. But all they had to do was look me in the eyes and they knew I had done it. I didn’t need to say a thing.
But THEY had allowed the Viets to sell drugs and they had been ineffective in stopping the drug sales to the men when the solution was very obvious. KILL the drug dealers. On top of that the men who bought drugs knew I was right there in the platoon and that I had murdered their supplier and that I knew who they were in the platoon. I never threatened my own men, but they knew I murdered people and they knew I knew them. I was not going to tolerate my men using drugs out in the field in a combat situation and risking their own lives and everyone elses lives to boot. Something had to be done.
But to Win a war, you have to have more than Jack Armstrong the All-American boy. Dudley Doright is an asshole. Dimpled chin assholes get killed and then the bad boys rape your wife and slit your children’s throats. Well, nobody laughs when they meet me in a dark alley.
I will cut your tire just a little so it goes flat on the drive home at ten PM and when you stop the car to check your tire I will pull up while you are bending down to see what is the matter with your tire. I will shoot you in the back of the head with a silencer and get back in my car and no one will find you until a State Trooper stops to examine the car about four in the morning.
Did George Bush LIE to the American public about WMD? I don’t think so. He actually had good cause to believe they were there. As it turned out even France thought they were there. But what is the truth is that Bush USED the issue of WMD to motivate the US public and he did it without a qualm.
George and the boys in the Whitehouse doesn’t think like you would think, he can’t afford to be that simple. He has to think in broader and more cautious ways. He has to cover everything. He used the WMD issue to get what he wanted. But his OWN motivation was much broader and much bigger and it INCLUDED motivating you. George was motivated by Power, National Security, Oil, and dominace of the Middle East prepatory to dominance of Central Asia, more Oil again, and then an End Game with China.
This war with the Islamic booga boogas will be over in time. But the United States still will have to go on in the next Century. We will have to face China. We have to be positioned to do that. It will never end, people. We are going to be the next Empire and the entire Earth will eventually be our Sphere. I’m not lying to you. The economic REGIME will cover every continent. Dollars will be the medium of exchange everywhere on Earth. All currencies will be measured against the dollar. There will still be Nation States… but there will still be only ONE locus of power. That locus will be the United States. A Century from now the United States will head a world Federation of Nations and it , unlike the UN, will have a centrally designated MILITARY and a single International POLICE. It will have one LAW. And Islam isn’t going to be a problem.
Now, you can bemoan that this is going to happen to your good old Apple Pie. But it won’t change what is going to happen. THIS either happens or we stay like we are… and what are the chances of remaining the same? We go back to some “good old days” where we called everybody neighbor and we left our doors unlocked? Cokes were a nickel and Beaver asks for a cookie? Suzie Creamcheese and Bud the Stud sitting together holding hands at the football game?
The world is FULL of people, all sorts of people. Are they nice people? They are just people. Are they smart people? They are just people. JUST people. But if you look closely I am sometimes in the crowd. You won’t see me but just for a moment. And the yoghurt eating hippies won’t save you but I might. You better hope someone does. Because you can’t do it alone.
The American people are nice people. The American system is the most efficient system the world has ever produced. The American way of life is prosperous, industrious and creative and strong. We are surrounded by people who envy and hate us for what we are and for what we have. They want to see it dead. They hate our American guts because we have soap and scented toilet paper and they don’t. You can read and they can’t. You live in a nice house Ohio and they live in a mud-brick hut in Goombah Islamabad.
They would literally orgasm to see America hurt and bleeding. Take a good look at yourself and take a good look at me. Who do you want on your side?
But, don’t have any illusions about what it takes to win. I will send you upstairs to read a magazine and you will close the door and you will not come back down here in the basment until I come upstairs and wash up. And I will put what is left of the likes of Zarquawi into a double thick industrial trashbag and pour a package of Home-Depot Lime on the remains and I will put it in the trunk of the car. And I will go out tonight while you are asleep and I will dispose of the evidence and I won’t lie to you. I just won’t tell you.
And the children will never know. And you may know…. but don’t ask me.
And if you seriously think Iran is going to go on playing in the park, I have some stuff down at the sandbox to kick in your face.
And Iran is one big target. We don’t have to OCCUPY it. All we have to do is take the Oil province and bomb the living hell out of the Iranians who want to come through the mountains to take it back. We can put a JDAM in your kitchen window on the second floor and have it follow you down the hall.
Does anyone here know how WEAK the Iranian military actually IS? They are just sitting there with bullseyes on their foreheads.
Eve of Distruction? Talk to me Allahboy. Tell me we will swim in our own blood like we did in Afghanistan. Tell me we are just sheep to be slaughtered by big bad Baghdad Bob. Get Saddam to advise you on how to do it the right way. Get the Republican Guard to hold your hat.
You sound like an Arab. That means someone open the windows and wave at the Marines.
Iran is Next. Iran is ready to cave in and we don’t have to do anything but give it a push.
And the Iranian military is half what Saddam’s was and we kicked theirs in in about three weeks flat.
We can do the same to Iran. Besides we don’t have to occupy Iran. all we have to do is take their wallet. One Province with the majority of their Oil and that is cut off from the rest of Iran by mountains. Let the Iranians storm over those mountains against our air superiority and take their Oil back. We don’t even have to KEEP their Oil. All we have to do is take it and trash it. Then we leave them to stew and we in effect throw their wallet away and laugh at them. We take over their Oil supplies and thus CONTROL their economy. We grab their wallet.
Iran can launch anything they like and we will find it before it gets altitude. Who is better at launch than we are? Iran will launch? Sure they will.
Iran can try their tech against ours and be damned. We have satellites over their country. Do they have satellites that will tell them to duck? You are talking about a third rate country with a third rate military they bought from old Russian surplus and its running on a third rate tech infrastructure by people with camel shit between their toes.
Get serious that Iran would present a challenge. They have missiles ready to launch? Carrying WHAT? Last weeks laundry? They don’t have Atomic weapons, remember? Besides, who will they hit… Israel? They hit Israel with anything atomic and Iran gets wiped off the map. They can’t reach anything American. Maybe they will target Iraq or downtown Paris? Who cares? It isn’t our blood. It’s Frenchy.
And their vaunted North Korean style missiles… just how much better than a Scud are they? Do you suppose their targetting systems can hit what they shoot at… remember we are talking about goon tech here. It isn’t like we have to worry that they hit anything even if they do LAUNCH.
Besides we do pretty well with Patriot and the Israelis have a system called Arrow which is pretty damn good too. Lets REALLY see how good the Iranian garbage really is. Want to?
What do you bet they give us a carnival and provide their own fireworks? We can piss on them and put their fire out. Iranians are no different for being Persians rather than Arabs. They still wipe their asses on rocks.
To put it in a more polite fashion: Iran is half as strong as Iraq and the young people there don’t love the Mullahs anymore than the Iraqis loved Saddam. Their tech is third rate Russian Surplus and stinks. And Iranians have no more chance against an American military than Saddam had.
PLUS we don’ thave to occupy Iran, we just trash the Oil facilities and stop their rebuilding anything soon and cripple their economies and cause civil unrest on the streets of Tehran. We bomb them at will and there is nothing they can do about it except act like terorists and they are doing that already. It gives us a gold plated excuse to rip the seams out of them and make their country into one big smoking pothole if we have to. They won’t have money for cigerettes and a blowjob and they can beg us to give their Oil back. That is if the Iranian people don’t hang them from a lampost first. There are LOTs of Iranians who would like to hang mullahs.
Yes, Iran is ready to fight… and die. Like all the Shahadda who were going to lay down their lives for Saddam. Remember those guys.? All the fat ladies in black bags pumping their AK’s in the videos and stomping around the mud huts singing?
Where is big Momma tonite? Iran won’t be that big a problem with a bullet in the head. Bush will do it the nice way though. He will do it more efficiently and with a better style. But the effect will be….. Iran’s desire for the Islama bomb is extinguished.
We will be READY for Iran when the time comes. It is being laid out and we will be swift and thorough.
We will rip its skin off and take it.
And the whole world will excrete and they still won’t do anything to stop us. The UN will write a ‘strong’ letter of disapproval and then go back collecting their pay checks.
France will posture and the Arab world will seeth with anger and they won’t be able to reach us.
And we will take Iran’s wallet and leave them coughing up their guts.
I understand the shortage of antivirals for the forthcoming avian ‘flu epidemic, but will someone tell me when the supply of chlorpromazine hydrochloride dried-up?
GCooper,
Why assume he’s making it up? This is really how some people think, and is similar to other life stories I have read. People like that have a lot of influence in the American administration these days, and are awfly common in America. I don’t like it, you may not like it, but that’s the truth. It’s fascism baby, you can fight it, or learn to live with it.
To whom you sold your soul?
You dont know much about Fascism dont you Della?
Well it was an honorable socialist that said “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. ”
Now back to the issue; Iran with Nukes: Iraq will strengh it’s ties to USA or will get Nukes also. So expect US bases in Iraq for long. Saudis will get Nukes too. And if Saudis get the Egypt will try to get unless they really need the 2B$ that US sends to them. Looking at behaviour of Arab nacionalism every country will try to get any toy that the other already have, Or put most Arab countries nearer US.
An attack to Israel can be a blow, depends much in the prevalecent winds at time , Palestinian, Jordanian areas can be much more affected by radioactivity. Or if the Arrow interceptor works the ogive can even fell outside Israel. By i expect they will launch many dummies to saturate the sys.
A side note the apparent really stupid behaviour of Russians.Would the story repeat again? Massacre at Mallot school when 20 children were murdered by Palestinians by gun shot in 1974 , the same genie that Russans helped to bread would appear later in Beslan 2004 in their garden. It will happen the same?
“Faust”,
What a brilliant spoof!
ROTFLMAO, as they say…..;-)
A bit over the top, but all great satire is…
John Ellis,
If it’s a spoof he must be pretty dedicated because he’s been doing it for 31 years that I can trace. He wrote “The Monk And The Marines” “a novel of a medic in vietnam” published in 1974 which I guess confirms the Vietnam era bit and the Monk bit (he said he robbed and murdered someone else in that message). He said he was going to Iraq in a message in 2002 which I guess confirms the Iraq bit. He’s been formenting against Islam since about 2002 that I can find and arguing for a war with Iran for about 11 months.
luckylucky writes,
I do know about how totaletarian systems rise up, and that seems to be what’s happening now. I think that whatever this is will get a new name in the fullness of time and it won’t be an exact copy of things that happened in the past, because it never is. I’m not even particularly sure if this time it will, or needs to go non-democratic. If they can massage the populous sufficiently then that step is unnessesary, although these things do tend to follow their relentless internal logic.
A quote by Goerge Orwell, how very Orwellian of you.
I don’t expect to change the mind of a true believer, that never seems to be possible.
In WW2, I bet Della would have been denouncing the FDR government as fascist too.
Calling names is pathetically easy. Backing it up with evidence, with a clear set of definitions for what exactly constitutes ‘fascism’ is probably beyond him.
Totalitarian systems spring up in many ways, and democratic processes actually provide very few examples compared to other routes by which fascism is achieved. The path the US is on is pretty far from those examples.
TWG
Oh, check this link for the definition of fascism.
(Link)
Key features are
“exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual”
“uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition”
“engages in severe economic and social regimentation”
So, Della, the challenge for you is to point out exactly how these features are becoming ascendent in the US, any more than ANY other western state that you deem to be NOT turning fascist.
TWG
PS. I note that the feature of corporatism is endemic in almost all developed nations, which effectively removes it as an unique critera for determining fascism.
If it’s a spoof he must be pretty dedicated because he’s been doing it for 31 years that I can trace.
Thirty one years? A bit long in the tooth for an assassin. Assuming, of course, he didn’t publish telepathically from the womb.
A possibility I wouldn’t entirely eliminate in this case.
I find it hard to believe that real assassins make a habit of posting meandering diatribe proclaiming their profession all over the web under mutiple email addresses. I haven’t read the book cited, but if it is written in the same blend of adolescent control fantasy and Tom Clancy trash novel I don’t think I’m inclined to search for it.
Sounds more like delusional fantasy to me.
EG
The Japanese internement in WW2 war?
This for USA
And what about Canada where Italians(mainly those suspect of sympaties towards Fascism) and others nationalities were interned?
Of possible interest on this subject, I have recorded an interview given by a San Francisco professor to radio station The Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The professor tells the “voice of justice” audience that Washington is lying about the nuclear threat as an excuse to go to war with Iran.
The gun I designed has a chamber filled with vaseline which absorbs the heat of the round being fired. This chamber is connected to the baffles which break the sound of the gun report The baffles transmit the heat through convection down into the vaseline chamber which absorbs the heat while the baffles break the sound signature. Sound is converted into heat, and heat is conveyed from the baffles into the density of the vaseline. People used to use a heavier chamber filed with water. But Vaseline is more dense and absorbs heat very quickly and weighs less than an equal amount of water to do the same heat distribution. You can see how the physics work.
The report of the weapon being fired creates a sound signature. Very loud. Sound travels at approx. 1100 fps. So what you do is break the sound up with a baffles chamber venting the gasses of the round being fired as it clears the muzzle. The round loses none of its speed. The gasses just never reach the outer air to make a noise. The baffles absorb the sound and convert it into HEAT. The heat is transferred by convection into a chamber of vaseline and the heat is disappated there quite quickly… a few seconds. The vaseline chamber can be unscrewed quite easily and a new cartridge inserted… like an Oil change after so many rounds of use. It’s so easy, you can do it in seconds.
The weight of the baffles and the Vaseline cartridge are compensated on the weapon by making the entire rifle construction slightly smaller. Weight is a very important matter. But as long as we are making the rifle smaller, lets change the configuration also and make it look slightly more innocent and not so much like a rifle. Just enough.
All that really matters is the trigger assembly, the chamber for the round and the barrel. The vents and the baffles can be adapted from the muzzle backward and its construction can flow like a folded umbrella back along the barrel where the stock once was. You still have a stock but it now becomes a chamber for the baffles to transmit the heat to the cooling cartridge.
Bottom line no sound of a report, no sound of a bullet being fired.
Now you go a step farther. You alter the powder charge just a fraction downward a few grains from 72 grains to 68 grains. Compression in the barrel is slightly altered downward, but venting at the muzzle remains the same. The bullet clears the baffles with no gasses to make a report. But the bullet does make a sound like someone ripping a sheet anyway.
This sound is far more quiet and subtle than a report however. And it may be noted but it is not a very good directional indicator like a report would be. And in most cases the sound can only be heard at a certain point. Once the bullet breaks the sound barrier there will be no sound thereafter until impact.
Now to change and alter this sheet tearing sound you make the bullet architecture a little differently. Most bullets are a brass projectile containing a lead core. The bullet has a certain MASS. You want to change that mass or alter the architecture of the round. One of the two.
So how would you change one or both of these? You have a Shape to the round and the Mass of the round. The round doesn’t HAVE to be brass and Lead does it?
If you can keep the Mass and use another material or combination of materials, couldn’t you?
Why not use a composition round, more complex to manufacture of course, but I don’t fire many rounds and they can be hand made. I only need one shot one kill in theory. I don’t do business with lots of shooting. Just very exact work done once.
So how about a thin metal acrylic jacket mix. The metal will hold the round together on firing and the acrylic will make the round have a particular Shape.
The pointed end of the round has a flow wave and a sound that arises from that. The rear end of the round has a flow wave and a sound signature from that. What if we vary the flow waves by changing the shape? And what if we use LEAD powder or dust in the core of the round. The Mass stays close to normal, the shape changes to disguise the sound and diminish it, and the acrylic architecture means the round EXPLODES rather then impacts and pierces the body. The round does not pass through the body it strikes but detonates and converts the composition into heat and gasses INSIDE the body as it vaporises totally and never leaves the body at all.
It is so compact you can take the weapon apart and put the entire thing in a briefcase and walk down the street.
The gun has a body heat sensitive Laser sight with a built in hi-tech electronic rangefinder which is about the size of a CD Walkman in your shirt pocket.
I am old now but I am not feeble. I run nearly every day. I can cover ground, and I live in the mountains. I know you would like to think of me as something else. But the fact is I focus very well.
Use it or lose it, that’s what I say. I cut my own wood and swim and fish and I can cut across country and leave you city folk behind. I sometimes give classes to the Rangers at Fort Merrill which is only a drive away from Blood Mountain. And I know some of the top snipers in the world. The men who made records in Afghanistan kulling the Talibs are friends of mine. I am old enough to teach and they are smart enough to learn.
My own creativity is patented. All it takes is a little patent. Just the essential one.
Every heard of “wet” sound suppresors? Some sound suppressors are made out of metal alone…they have a series of baffles or brakes to impede the gases from a bullet’s report as it leaves the barrel of the weapon being fired.
The gasses are moving very fast and they are captured and contained in the “silencer” and they are then converted into heat. Sound becomes heat. That is what essentially a sound suppressor does. This “silences” the noise of the bullet being fired.
If there is a water/liquid chamber in the sound suppressor it converts the heat quicker and brings down the noise generated by the gun as the bullet is fired. This problem also makes the sound suppressor heavier and more complex.
Building sound suppressors is quite complex. How does one build a sniper rifle sound suppressor system? Why bother? The bullet will still be traveling at supersonic speeds. It still makes a sound as it moves long after it leaves the barrel.
Experimenting with the problem is facinating to me. There are a great may variables and the problem is complex. Mechanically it is challenging. But if a person could build a sound suppressor system that was close to “perfect” it would be marketable.
How does one build a marketable long range rifle sound suppressor system. How does one improve it step by step. Every kill is a problem in mechanics.
You solve the problems of individual kills individually and after a time you keep seeing patterns in your solutions. This points to a sound suppressor system that will solvve most of the problems.
I have also experimented with making rounds that were unconventional to solve the problem of sound and the mechanics of sound. The bullet has a Mass and an impact pattern. It has a transit pattern and shock waves from the speed it has and the turbulence in the air as it moves.
All these factors have to be understood. It is a great deal of enjoyment to design a round for shape and Mass that makes the least amount of sound as it moves and will explode on impact inside the tissues and do the most damage… especially not exit the body. A bullet which strikes and explodes on impact and doesn’t exit the body. A sniper round that is “perfect”. What material would you use? What shape would the round have. How would the round be designed?
A bullet in transit has a shock wave at the front and a shock wave at the back. These cause various turbulences in the passage through the air. These turbulences make noise. How can we SHAPE a round and what Mass should it have? On impact what will the round do to a piece of meat…? What is the impact and the penetration? How can we make a certain mass that translates complete energy after impact into an extreme disentigration of itself in heat and gases? And do that INSIDE the wound.
It keeps me busy. But people like those in the US Military pay big money for it. Gun manufacturers pay big money for stuff like this… marketable stuff they don’t have to spend their money exploring. You show them a shape and a composition and demonstrate what it will do…and they know you have a patent. They are willing to work out a deal.
Imagine a kill that has to be made at 700 yards or more. You want to hit your enemy and not have the bullet exit the body. The round has to disentigrate entirely on impact. And no one can hear the round being fired. Solve the problem.
It takes all kinds.
Faust is a published writer and an accomplished gun maker. You can read my books. The Monk and the Marines. Bantam Press 1974. There are a wealth of my things out there. I design weapons and make money from the patents which the government adopts. The most lucrative is a self contained oil cartidge silencer, sound suppressor for sniper rifles. You can pop it in and pop it out because it is a cartridge and it doesn’t need cleaning. And it is easy and simple and the sound suppression is almost perfect with appropriate ammunition. I also design munition rounds for sniper cartridges that will impact at twice the speed of sound, explode on impact and not leave the body. The round on impact makes a sound but being fired it doesn’t make any more noise than striking a match.
‘Assassin’… you are barking up the wrong tree. Faust is an old Marine who stole a lot of money off a Pak torturer and mass murderer during the BanglaDesh War and retired on it, but I am happy to do specialist military contract work for Uncle if the pay is right.
I can cut a five millimeter wide wire in a chain link fence at 200 yards. And I don’t like Jihadis.
My team mates when I was in Iraq some time ago were a Bible thumpin’ black man named Samuel who spoke fluent Arabic and has killed confirmed 100 times, mostly Talibanis. The other team mate has killed 200 times, mostly Afghans again. All confirmed kills. He has four front teeth missing and he is crazy as a shithouse rat. He doesn’t like Jihadis either.
We were on the initial “cattle drive” up to Baghdad (remember all those armored vehicles racing across the desert?). The Saddamites and Jihadis are just goats to us.
This war will be carried forward. There will be a “confrontation” with Iran. Iran is coming up. No? You just watch us do it. We get so much as a ‘sniff’ that they are making IslamAtomics and we will eat raw meat to get a them. We will pounce on them like cats on a canary. You will hear the bones snap.
Y’all have a good day now, ya hear.
Keep taking the pills, Faust.
EG
Well, let’s not be too hasty in rendering judgement yet. I’m very interested to see if Faust was on the money. Let’s just wait and observe what happens in the next three years.
Personally, I do wish he was telling the truth, and that there is a plan in the works for Iran.
Well, yes, Wobbly…I’d like to see something happen with regard to Iran, too. That’s a question entirely divorced from the veracity of our friend the alchemist here.
Cross-checking the last name of the author of The Monk And The Marines against US patent records, we fine ten patents, ranging in menace from a dusting mop to cleaning implements having structures for retaining a sheet to an individually packaged sanitary napkin having cleaning wipe packaged therewith.
That last one would probably scare the hell out of a mullah, I have to admit.
I grew up in Asia and the Pacific as a child, we were military and it was in those years right at the end of the war and the few years right after. I came back to the United States when I was an adolescent and it was in a small southern town with a military base and local children mixed with the military kids.
When I was in high school we left for Europe. It was the Krushchev years. My father was a senior officer by then..his specialty during the period after the war was Electronics and long range communications. During the war he was a commander of a squadron due to his flying skills against the Japanese during the early years of the war flying out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal against the Japs on Rabaul. I was born in Pearl Harbor the day the Japanese attacked. My father was driving back from my birth at the hospital when he looked up and saw the Japanese attack squadrons peeling off across the Kaneohe approach. When he got down to the airfield everything there was ablaze and his fighter was burning. He never got into the air.
He fought against the Japanese all during the early air campaigns out of Guadalcanal, and eventually arose to command the squadron.
My mother took a troopship with me as a new born in her arms to travel into the warzone to be with my father the last year of the war.
I was raised in Oahu and started school there the last year of the war. My schoolroom was a bombed out aircraft hangar. The playground was a sandy plot full of shards of window glass. Our school yard “game” was removing glass from the sand which we shoveled up and passed through a screen nailed to a wooden frame. Then we could play. We had bomb shelters overgrown with woodroses and flowers around our military housing. I grew up on military bases mostly.
My father was promoted because his associates on a day to day basis were a succession of Flag rank officers who depended upon him for his technical skills and he moved into Codes and Intelligence work early in his career because of long range communications. Most of his close friends were legends and some of them were heroes. I grew up sitting on their laps and playing with their children.
I was a haole, a white child, completely outnumbered when I was small among my playmates. But at that age I was accepted by the local island children. By the time I was just starting school I was in Japan and I had to make alliances to stay on my feet. My father was an administrator during the Japanese Occupation.
It was politic to send me to a Japanese local school and I adapted. But I had to be able to fight and I became quite talented in Judo and Kendo by the time I was in third grade. Kendo was outlawed but the prohibitions were largely ignored since they were rarely enforced. A Sendai Division Kendo Instructor name Ittosai was my teacher. I was very close to him. I had talent. And I was big. I am big by American standards. By Japanese standards I was a giant even at the age of eight.
I had the third eye and I was young enough that I learned things that adults fail to learn. I believed in the “magic” of Kendo and I made it real. I was open to the sword. I became what I did. I took the dreams and illusions and as a child I made them happen because I believed they were possible. The sword was a living thing.
The backbone of the blade is concentraction. The cutting edge is awareness. The point as it slashes flesh is enlightenment. Bushido.
We used to play a game. Ittosai would stand with a willow switch in a big courtyard of thick raked gravel and all the boys in his class (I was the only western Gaijin among them) about six to eight of us would approach him from all sides in an attempt to touch him. He would close his eyes and listen to us on the gravel as we closed in around him.
I would take off my sandals and so would all the others. We would all try to keep low and out of reach of that switch, because if we were within reach of him as he stood in silence he would slice us viciously with that flexible branch like a whip.
We were absolutely silent and so was he. The only sound was the gravel and we had to cross it to reach him. If he cut you with the switch you had to retire and watch. I was big and the gravel was wide. What I would do is watch the other boys as they moved and as they moved I would shift my own weight very slowly forward as if I were on very thin ice.
I would keep my own mind free of all conceptual thoughts. I would practice my breathing and be empty. And I would approach low and remain still. I didn’t make so much as a mental ripple and I listened to the silence. When someone would move I would shift ever so softly and conceal my own sound and movement in the sound and movement of another. I took Ittosai’s willow switch one day and he caught my wrist when I did it.
He gave me a sword when I was twelve.
The sword was a SHOWA blade dating from the very early Meiji, smith forged and signed on the tang. I still have it. It has one minor flaw a damaged point, very slight. I have never had the blade reground or polished.
My father was responsible for my obtaining a college education. He and I attended college together and completed our first two years side by side. I helped him in his classes and he helped me in mine. He had a heart attack while driving. He lived five days. My mother committed suicide two years later.
I had entered a Cistercian monastery after a scandal with a young nun. Use your imagination. I transferred to a seminary in my Junior year determined to become a priest. The young nun was a librarian and the convent was in walking distance of the seminary. She and I were caught late at night having sex in a closed Library common room. I took responsibility and she was allowed to remain in the convent. I went to a monastery of an enclosed Order, a Contemplative community which was in the rural South. I was recommended for Holy Orders rather than being a Lay Monk although I served my novitiate working in the fields and building a dam by hand.
After two years I would be up for minor vows. Then after two more years I would be allowed to take Major Vows. An enclosed Order practices a form of prayer which is little recognized outside the walls. It is a way of shaping mental states, awareness studies you might call it.
I was recommended to be sent to train at the Gregorian in Rome and to live in the main monastery of our Order in Rome, a private retreat of the Pope and where he went to confession. Our order provided the confessor to the Pope.
In rapid succession in my second year as a Postulant…. a monk committed suicide and left a note mentioning my name . He said I was a bully and that he wanted to die because I beat him up and humilitaed him. It was all true. I had beaten him repeatedly and been carefull not to leave marks that he could show. I was scientific about it. No marks, just pain.
I also was flagrant in breaking the Holy Rule, the standard customs of monastery life. I built a still for making liquor and corrupted the other monks, there were orchards of peaches and apples and I made moonshine. I had an accomplice in the mailman and the local sheriff. I imported cigarettes and magazines and some of it was regarded as pornography by the abbot. But it was all pretty tame by my estimation.
I did not keep the hours and I did not respect the privacy of territory that monasteries have….monks do not “own” anything but they are very territorial.I used to steal food and I used to use other people’s “space”.
I didn’t respect “authority” and monks tend to be passive aggressive types, I wasn’t I was overtly aggressive. I didn’t make any pretense or cover myself with platitudes. I scared people and I enforced my way with fear. I blackmailed and extorted and I was physically abusive.
I was out in the field cutting timber and I was hot. It was summer and we were logging. Brother John also nicknamed “Snoopy” because he was Father Paul the Novice Master’s stooge and informant, told me I couldn’t have any water. I drank anyway and spit a mouthful in his face. He ran off to tattle and brought back an ex-German Tank officer, the monastery was full of international types who had difficult pasts, the community had taken me because I was a discipline problem.
It was full of rough men who had tattered pasts. Not unlike a prison of a kind.
The German was Brother Otto, a former Wermacht officer now turned saint.
He grabbed me and I am sure he knew what he was doing it was nothing new to Otto.
I broke his collar bone, the clavicle. I snapped it and his arm was incapacitated. Then I held onto the broken arm and got him down off his feet where I proceeded to kick him in the face repeatedly while thirty other monks stood there and watched me do it. No one came to help poor Otto.
Three days later I was given fifty dollars and a change of civilian clothes and a bus ticket to Memphis. It was suggeste that I join the Marine Corps. I never went to Rome and I was conseled that I could always come back rto the monastery after I reformed my morals… whenever that was.
I was seven years in VietNam and I came back for a Masters and a Doctorate at the Sino Soviet Institute in Washington DC. I was sent to The Farm on the James and made an intern for CIA.
I had served three years as military liason to CIA with Eye Corps. My father’s name got me all the necessary clearances. I was assigned as a body guard to the family of the CIA head of Station.
I got some assignments because I caught the eye of several high ranking military and CIA diplomats. They liked my answers and my face. I tended to do things quietly and keep it quiet. I did things people were afraid to admit they had anything to do with.
I was a what they call a “knuckledragger” and I was rewarded with a scholarship to the Institute in Washington and made a career track for either DI or DO. As a knuckledragger I was destined for a return to the Far East… where I met an assortment of people who shot people in the back of the head when they bent over. I drove and kept my eyes on the road.
Laos went to hell and I made it out alive. Xieng Khouang and Phou Pha Thi went down and the Plain of Jars was finally taken and I went to Burma and then to BanglaDesh. I wound up in India for several years and later was in Pakistan and the arms trade out of Dara. After that it was Oman in Arabia. I made a lot of money on the side. Mostly in mortar ammo and East German small arms. And grave robbing too. Oh, and taking millions of dollars in high grade diamonds taken off a Pak ISI interrogator and Colonel named Firman Ali who we hunted down in BanglaDesh. He and his men tortured, raped and killed over 500 very rich Hindu civilians out by the brickworks and took their possessions. The Indian Rupee isn’t worth shit outside India you see, and Indians don’t put their savings in Rupees. They invest their savings in Gold and Gemstones. Real valubles. The Pak Colonel knew this and extorted their valubles out of them. When the Indian Army turned up he and his men packed all their loot on a chopper and fled but ran out of fuel so they had to run for it. We hunted them down and took their booty off them and we divided it amongst ourselves. We took the ISI Colonel to a BanglaDesh village full of people who’s family members he had killed. They hated him and we just sat in the jeep and watched as they chased him like a rat and beat him to death. His carcass was thrown head fearst down the village cesspit. A fitting end. He had a lot more than the millions I took, but I had to share a lot of the rest of it with the men under my command and with certain government officials who found it profitable to look the other way when I left the country. But then that is my world and you are welcome to yours.
I once spent three days trying to think of the worst thing I ever did and after a couple of days I realized I had forgotten most of it and I decided to stop digging any deeper because it was already too dark to see.
A Colonel who did polygraphs once told me that I didn’t appear to have any Conscience whatsoever. He said it was a very marketable item.
“Hello, Clarisse”.
You know why the movie character Hannibal is a Cannibal don’t you? He had to survive among the SS men who ate his little sister. It does focus your attention when you see human bones in the shitter.
I am leaving all the good parts out. But the bottom line for the smart amateurs is not to piss me off.
“Spoof”…. you wish.
We are not all bank clerks and stationary errand boys with health insurance and pension schemes and a nice house in the burbs.
No one seems to be connecting the dots. Uncle will NOT tolerate Iran turning into the Middle East version of North Korea. Cats on a canary.
Hey, you know you can ask for ANYthing you want from room service? I asked for a couple of videos to watch in my suite and they said sure. I asked for Gods and Generals and The Big Red One with Lee Marvin and they sent them right up. Blew me away. I am staying across the Potomac from Georgetown.
Be going back to Blood Mountain maybe Sunday late or Monday early. Half my luggage is books.
Indeed. Some of us are sane and rational.
So tell me, why the multiple email addresses all over the place? Why the same old spiel over and over again in any number of fora? Why the move on to another forum to do the same thing when folks obviously get a bit tired of it?
EG
I do like to write about myself Euan and people seem interested in what I write, even if they don’t agree with what is said. And sometimes I have to repeat myself because there are those who find such a life implausable. What part of my writing do you find fantasy and not reality Euan, the part about my life as a monk, my education and internship in Washington and the Farm, or my time as a Marine in Vietnam or my stealing of lot of money in India back in the seventies, or the book I wrote which was an autobiography of my time in the enclosed monastry and then in combat. What part is not based on your concept of “reality” Euan?
As for the Email addresses. I have had several Email addresses over a period of time. Two or three over the past couple of years. And people often have more than one email address at a time. Nothing strange about that.
And yes I do post on another Arab forum where I am neither liked nor loved. I do like to ‘mingle’ with the locals and enjoy conversing with the Arab posters who sometimes claim I am Jibril, the Devil incarnate. I don’t think they like me too much. I once got thrown off a Middle East forum for speaking my mind but it was all fun. I had a dissagreement with one of the Arab forum administrators who thought it was just fine for people to post segments of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” on their site as ABSOLUTE TRUTH, (Jew hating is all the rage in the Arab Street you see) but it wasn’t fine for me to openly criticize some of the religious and political tenants of Islam. Apparently they don’t like open debate and freedom of speach very much. If you don’t tow the line, you get the boot.
After reading some of my recent posts here you should know quite a lot about me by now Euan. How about you telling me something about yourself. What do you do for a living Euan? I take it you have an education, so what did you get your degree in? Are you a British Euan or Welsh maybe? Euan is a Welsh name isn’t it. Where do you live Euan, is it London perhaps? As a kid I lived at 44 Chester Row off Sloane Square down from Knightsbridge… Buckingham Palace was in walking distance. I went to school at Regents Park and my brother went to Princess Gate. I did Phys Ed. with the Welsh Guards at their barracks in Camden. I remember the Welsh soldiers regarded the English to be nothing more than an bunch of bucktooth gorillas. No love lost between the English and the Welsh. I learned to play Soccer and Rugby. Lovely muddy sport. I learned a good trick playing Rugby, you get real close to someone and the referee can’t see you spit right in the guy’s face. I used to like to do that and then have the guy go for me.
The referee could see that. It was a good game. I loved it. You could cut guys in a scrummage and no one would know how it happened or who did it.
The trick was do it so no one saw it done and to do it to the right guy. Timing was everything.
A persona as a fifteen year old boy? That would be an interesting one. It would try my talents. If you are going to create a lie, Euan, the wisest procedure is stay CLOSE to the truth and stick with what you know. Actually I no nothing about Monastic life or the Marine Corps or weapons technology and ballistics for in reality I am fifteen year old girl and I have a pet bunny.
I’ve always said, what the world needs more of is sanitary napkin designers with training in hand-to-hand combat. Yessir.
What do I find implausible?
There is no doubt that a Philip Kingry wrote “The Monk and the Marines.” That appears to be a mass market work of fiction – pulp fiction is the common term, I understand. Whether you are the same person is another matter.
It’s hard – and perhaps unfair – to try to tell via blog comments, but your use of English is awful, not what one might expect from a published author. Not so much the spelling, since few people check punctiliously online, but more the lack of structure in your narrative and indeed the lack of any real point to the posts.
You mention patents, but tampons with integral cleaning wipes don’t appear to have many useful ballistic properties. Patents are public documents, so let’s see some numbers and details on the rifle silencers.
Your “team mates” in Iraq have oddly round numbers of confirmed kills. 100 and 200, not (say) 86 and 173. Just one big number and then the next one is precisely double that. Not to say it’s impossible, but it’s suspiciously neat.
For someone who has supposedly spent a great deal of time amongst Arab and other Moslem peoples, you seem somewhat naive about their culture. You write as if there might be something in the least bit odd about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion being accepted on a Moslem site but any criticism, however mild, of Islamic teaching not being accepted. I have some experience of living & working with Moslems (although not, I concede, of killing them) & this wouldn’t surprise me at all.
I don’t dispute that people do the sort of things you claim to have done. What I do find odd is that someone could do these things, essentially boast about them in public fora, and still be hired to do them again. I find that very hard to accept.
I don’t dispute stories of monks joining the Marines – June Ramos is an example – so your tale is not unprecedented. I suggest it may just be copied.
The things you write about monasteries, the USMC, ballistics, weapons design, the Far East, and so on could be discovered by anyone with access to the internet or a good library.
I could go on.
EG
*sits back with a bag of chips*
Go on. I like to be entertained. ^_^
TWG
C’mon Faust, where’s the patent numbers for your famous rifle silencers? Where’s the explanation of why you’re passing off a work of low-grade fiction as autobiography? Where the justification for the suspiciously round kill numbers, or the total naivete about a culture you’re supposedly expert on?
Not only am I still waiting, but Wobbly’s waiting for the show as well.
EG
So Fausty weighs in:
You assume that just because an work of literature comes in paperback form that it is in your interpritation a work of “fiction”. Many biographies, personal journels, memoirs and autobiographies are published in paperback. You can read diary of Anne Frank in paperback but I would’t exactly call it a work of fiction. Would you?
And how do YOU know it is “low grade fiction”?… You DON’T. Again, you merely ASSUME. And you assume WRONG.
“I don’t dispute stories of monks joining the Marines – June Ramos is an example – so your tale is not unprecedented. I suggest it may just be copied.” – Euan
And The story of June Ramos is RECENT. The published life story of the Monk and the Marines happened over THIRTY years ago Euan. Who’s copying who? You got that Ass Backwords Euan.
“Your “team mates” in Iraq have oddly round numbers of confirmed kills. 100 and 200, not (say) 86 and 173. Just one big number and then the next one is precisely double that. Not to say it’s impossible, but it’s suspiciously neat.” – Euan
It was in Afhanistan Euan, not Iraq. I wasn’t with them in Afghanistan. Different conflict. There are not many Press reporters and TV news crews out there in the remote Afghan mountains Euan. It’s too wild and dangerous for most of them. They like nice clean hotels and bathrooms ensuite with cold beer and a freshly stocked bar downstairs.You can fight and happily pick ’em off like rag hatted mountain goats and it woudn’t get on this evening’s CNN. My apologies for not being so precise Euan. I simply ommitted the word OVER in the sentance. As in the fact that Samuel got OVER 100 confirmed kills. Sorry to burst your bubble. There’s no great mystery here.
“I don’t dispute that people do the sort of things you claim to have done. What I do find odd is that someone could do these things, essentially boast about them in public fora, and still be hired to do them again. I find that very hard to accept.” – Euan
What exactly am I boasting about Euan? Killing in VietNam (nothing new about that) or taking a dead man’s loot, stolen from hundreds of innocent civilian Hindus he had murdered in a war at the time when you were probably in daipers and your Mamma was still wiping your ass for you? That was in the BanglaDesh War, half way across the world over THIRTY YEARS AGO. That’s a Loooong time ago. What are they going to do Euan, arrest me? Who’s going to arrest me and on what charges? On what evidence? On who’s say so? I don’t see anyone knocking on my door Euan. And I am a rich old bastard who owns a lot of land and I rarely pay taxes. I have been in a couple of dirty little wars Euan, and killing people is what you do to stay alive. Killing is part of the job in war Euan. Killing in war is not a crime, Euan. It is a natural function. It is praiseworthy and very necessary. The men who do it are rewarded with promotion and parades. I didn’t know what I was until I found out. It didn’t feel good. But I realized what it was almost immediately. I comprehended what I was. I understood it had always been there. I knew it was my basic nature and I didn’t lie to myself about it. The rest of the men in the platoon in VietNam recognised me for what I was and they were content if not glad to play to what I was. They didn’t like having to kill. They usually worked as a team to give me the closing line. They would set the kill up and I would do the execute. Team effort. They would do the finding and the fixing in place and then give me the shot to make.
In VietNam I was recruited to go with a sniper team (The Grim Reapers, they even had the Reaper logo complete with syth) and these men looked me over as someone to join their number. I was shown a target NVA human being and they said, “here you do it.” When I did it then I was part of the team. I trained with them and lived with them. I grew in the craft. I followed my talents.As the years passed I changed. I came to be seen as unique and my talents were noticed by people who needed someone for special work. Not just combat work. Combat of another kind. I had some experiences with regular military who never felt comfortable with Snipers. They accused me of making kills that were not sanctioned. They regarded such kills as questionable. I did not hold their view and others outside the military took me in and gave me work which was not miltary. Necessary work.
I shot a 16 year old girl names Timmy Duong in the face one night. I didn’t know it was her. We shot four people in an ambush outside a village. Two of them had carbines and one had a pistol. I rolled her over and she had documents sewed into panels in her jacket, pay records and accounts for VC cadre. One of the dead men with her had a payroll in Viet money. He was a paymaster, Timmy was his secretary. She also was my interpreter and playing a double game. I was very sorry to see it.
The bullet had gone in under her right eye and gone straight through her head through the nasal cavity blowing most of the roof of her mouth down her throat and exiting out the back of her head below her left ear. She was still alive and trying to breath. I just left her to bleed and choke to death after I stripped her jacket off her for the sewed in documents. I was a young man in those days. I am very old now. And damned. I’m not “bragging” here as you say Euan. This ISN’T bragging. This is ME being honest with you. It happened and I am simply conveying the fact, a moment in my life. That’s not bragging Euan. That is simpley being honest.
I’m not a hitman Euan. That IS what you are thinking isn’t it Euan? And as for the modern day hiring of experienced professional ex-military types, with the right skills in combat and security work… happens all the time. It’s happening right now Euan. You too can earn up to a thousand dollars a day in Iraq, doing specialist security work if you have the right skills, technical know-how and the big iron balls to do it. It’s dangerous work, but it pays VERY well. And it’s all tax free. The US government often contracts work out to ex-military types, and come to think of it, so does the CIA. It helps if you have the right connections too. You can earn a lot more money assigned as a contracted individual with the right skills they are looking for. You can earn far more than a serving soldier who is working right alongside you doing the same kind of job. Fact. To my knowledge, there are over 40,000 ex-military types working in Iraq doing security work right now, either working for private companies or sub-contracted out by the US government. They hired such experienced and skilled men to assist the US military before the push into Iraq. Trained sharp shooters and snipers are a rare commodity and highly prized in combat situations and the US are willing to re-enlist and contract out ex-military types who are prepared to say “Yes Sir” and follow orders. You don’t have to be a hitman Euan to do that. This isn’t the Mafia you know.
And you are going to wait a very long time for me to feel sorry about my work or express any guilt for being exactly what I am. Left to myself I live a quiet solitary life close to Nature. I putter about in my work shop and my library and my kitchen. I work in my garden and I cook. I go on the web and I talk with my friends all over the world. I talk with some friends in Iraq nearly every day. I am a peaceful soul. And my eyesight is very good.
“For someone who has supposedly spent a great deal of time amongst Arab and other Moslem peoples, you seem somewhat naive about their culture.” – Euan
And you ofcourse know a lot about Islamic and Mid East culture than I. Enough to contradict my own.. yes? After all, you worked with some Muslims once as you say. Good for you. Ever read the Koran Euan? How’s your Arabic? Mine’s a little rusty these days. I’m much better at Hindu and Chinese Mandarin. I once lived in Oman Euan, a long time ago. I married in Arabia… Muscat to be specific. I married in Oman and my family on my wife’s side is quite extensive there and well connected. All her family is huge…many of them are richer than Midas. I get along very well with my kin on her side. Eight entire families came over to the United States to live and they are like ants at a picknick. They are business people and they own Laudramats and Dairy Queens and Convenience stores and some have married American wives and everybody celebrates Thanksgiving. My wife though old now, is still very beautiful and she thinks she is Dolly Parton. She decorates the house with antique Early American furniture and Decor. She likes wearing Jeans and cowboy shirts and horse riding. She has a Silver Dollar belt buckle and mother of pearl buttons in siver bezels. She left Oman YEARS ago and is now as American as Apple Pie.
She likes gardening and making smoothies and she wears Arab jewelry in bed and no pyjamas. When she got her American citizenship, she called all her friends on her cellphone while she ate lunch before taking the Oath of Allegiance to the United States that cancelled all other national allegiances. She celebrates the Fourth of July with flags all over the place and she gives a party.
Her children are my children and they are all Americans and have never known an Arab day in their lives or an Arab value. They are as tall as I am and their mother comes up to their armpit.
As I said, I met my wife in Oman whilst working out there doing security work for the old Sultan. The Iranians in the Djebel were Popular Front for the Liberation of the Arab Gulf, (FLAG/PFLOAG or something like that) a Marxist terrorist movement, Arab idealists with bombs, mostly educated in France and wanting revolution in Oman, late sixties, early seventies. And Sultan Quabus Said bin Taimur had a team of specialists who used Omani Scouts to hunt the rebels…who are all gone now aren’t they. We caught one of their leaders, a man who’s name means ‘Shorty’ in Arabic who we put down in a deep hole in the searing heat with no water for two days and we used to piss on him. Eventually he told us all the FLAG intelligence we needed. He gave us seventy names. That was back before Computers though… we used a map, a phone book and Rolodex back then.
You need to read your history a little closer. And if you look closer you will find that about seventy of them were picked off over a short period of time. There were six of us on the team and we did a bounty hunter Tom Horn on them… their Iranian allies stood out out there. Take a close look at the times Euan. I was a young man back then.
And I think I know a little bit more about the Mid East mindset than you do Euan. Been there, done that. I am NOT naive about Islamic culture Euan. So don’t kid yourself.
The Mid East Moslems are going the same way as the Sioux and the Cheyenne. They have a 7th Century “kill the Infidel” oppressive religion with a 14th century technology and a 1920’s political level. They simply are doomed.
They don’t have what it takes to live with modern Civilization, they can’t compete on any level. And unless they change and adapt to a more Western and American cultural and political model, they simply will never make it.
The only ones who will survive are the ones who adopt, adapt and assimilate. A lot will immigrate and clean toilets or open Jiffy Marts until they get the language down and move into Real Estate and learn to vote. The Palestinians are a totally lost cause. And Saudi is as about as viable as the Aztecs. The only reason they are still around is they have the Oil. It will run out someday as technology either leaves it behind or something else kicks their last crutch out from under them. And when that happens they will be selling Pork Chops in Mecca.
Allah is going where Jupiter and Mount Olympus went. If Allah does survive he will be doing time as a cartoon character on the Simpsons and get the same slot on Ramadan as Oprah gets. It will be Islam with a real twist. The modern world is a blender. We all get bloody milkshakes.
And Jihad meets the US Marines is going to be Sunday School for Achmed.
And just for the record is everyone here convinced Iran is safe? No plans to take Iran down like we took Iraq down right? Iran is a big pile of Islamic SHIT! We don’t like the Mullahs in Iran. Iran is going to have to be a little more agreeable or we make it more agreeable. There will be no discussions over tea and buscuits at the UN on this matter.
Iran will NEVER get an Atomic. It is GUARANTEED a war if it tries. Do I make myself clear? WE will KILL Iran if it argues. We will not negotiate the matter. Iran goes for the IslamaBomb and we kill the country, break its flag and leave it to smoke.
I am not exaggerating. I am not joking. Iran is just about ready to get its brains blown out.
Just so you know.
I made arrangements in the summer BEFORE the invasion of Iraq happened to be there in Iraq in Kuwait to take part in it. I saw it coming and I believed in it enough to make the necessary arrangement six months ahead of time so that I left for Kuwait in November before it happened.
I was with the Ist Marines the night we fought our way through burning Iraqi garbage and took the city in the dark. When the sun came up we HAD the place. I was on three long range patrols into the Jubair and Rumailah Oil field BEFORE the war even began. I have parked on the south side of the Hawt and waved at Iraqis across the swamp near the Causeway. I have watched the lights of the Basrah Airport at night and the Iraqi soldiers were too chickenshit to even come out and make us go away.
I made four kills.
They were ALL officers I might add. Two were Mukharabat. The other two were Iraqi army officers who were staring at us through binocs from their position in a trench way off in the distance. They didn’t even know what had hit them until it was too late. One two buckle my shoe. Put them in your sites and then… Pop!
Unjust war, is it? If you LOSE they are all unjust. Now Suck me and call a lawyer.
We didn’t lose a SINGLE man all the time I was in Iraq. We killed 16 Iraqis in one night. I killed FOUR. And we were there for four months before we got rotated out to retrain. And we will be going back for Iran.
I am telling you that Iran is next and I have made arrangements with a company in Florida who provide Security people for high profile “principles” on a contract basis. If things go the way I think they will go, I will be in on Iran too. It’s more than possible, especially now that Bush has a second term in the White House. There will be a CONFRONTATION of sorts.
The pay is a thousand dollars a day. I have a SAT phone and a SAT connection and can use a laptop. I am getting new stuff I will be needing. I learned a lot last time. I am guessing maybe Autumn of 2005. I knew that Bush would be re-elected and I know there will be MORE war. Watch it happen. We are not finished with the Jihadis yet, some of them are still alive.
I am crazy right? Let me suggest something to you about the situation in the Middle East. The CRAZIER stuff is the most likely. And when I say 40 million dead Arabs in the next 20 years I am not joking.
It is going to become a can of worms from Hell.
And you can follow it like a dog with your nose on the road or you can look up and look at the road. And if you look close you can see the horizon. It is going to get VERY bad.
The final outcome is not going to be a long drawn out process. It will get extremely final at the end. And if you don’t like storms then I suggest you get out before the wind hits.
I repeat… the Middle East is going to be a very bad place to live over the next twenty years. The Wars will not stop. They will spread and they will get bigger.
It is going to get so damn bad you won’t believe it.
Iran is NEXT. We won’t stop until we have it all. Osama wrote us a blank check on his shiny butt.
Euan thinks old Faust got all his stuff of the Net. Euan thinks Faust is a civilian and knows NOTHING about Monastic life and War or being in the US Marines.
Euan, you never heard of the BIG RED ONE because you are a civilian.
Have you ever heard of the FIRST MAR DIV Euan? Do you know enough about military life to tell me how many men make a fire team?
How is an infantry fireteam usually armed? Who is the senior man in a fireteam?
If you have two squads how many platoons do you have present?
How many companies in a battalion?
Describe precisely the duties of a Weapons Platoon… and how is it different from the other three Combat platoons in a company?
What is the standard millimeter size for a company mortar?
What is the killing radius of a 81mm mortar round…?
Euan, I am the real mcCoy and you are just a civilian twit. Men like me are the reason Sadr is not in Najaf. We are the reason Samarra is rather quiet this morning. We are the reason why Fallujah is smoking rubble. I have a superior understanding of WHY we are going to win and how winning is DONE.
And in the bottomline I make a lot of money at it too. I will be in on Iran when it rolls around and you can read about it in the newspapers twit.
Tell me why a standard M-16 is not a good Sniper rifle? Explain to me why the M-16 round is not designed for sniping.
Why is a Remington 700 a better rifle for sniping than an M-16. You don’t need to get technical, just describe the ballistics simply and it is self explanatory.
If you want to fire an M-79 what sort of mm round are you talking about? What is the effective range of an M-79? Why is an M-79 and an 81mm not considered artillery?
If you standard load a mag how many rounds does it take? Why do you not chamber a round when you are not in a combat necessity situation? Where is the safety mechanism on an M-16?
If you had to pick a backup weapon what would you pick and where would you carry it?
I really am what I say, Euan. So DON’T tell me I know nothing about the Military. I’m not some wet-behind-the-ears civilian Euan.
And we are going to have more war. We aren’t anywhere near finished with the Jihadis.
I am sitting here finishing a big cup of coffee in my hotel (they have internet connection in every room) and looking out the window over the Potomac near the Three Sisters Bridge and I am wondering what to do tomorrow. I think I will have the kitchen make me a roast beef sandwich on pumpernickel with a whole crisp dill pickle separate and some chips and put that in my coat. I have a long leather coat with a hood and big pockets. I will use the Metro all day and go over and look around Georgetown for a while and then ride down to the Smithsonian and go see the museums. I can eat my lunch in front of the Natural History Museum. There is absolutely no end to all the stuff to see down there in a day. I can go up to Dupont Circle in the afternoon and get some coffee and see if there is a Concert that I can attend tonite. Just relax and be entertained. DC can be a charming place even at this time of year.
The Kennedy Center has shows every day and the lines are not long for tickets.
I have never seen anything there that I didn’t like. Tomorrow is my last day and then back home to Blood Mountain, Georgia. I haven’t gone to see any of the monuments. I like cold bleak days and walking alone. It is pleasant for a man like me. Solitude and no crowds like in the Summer.
I would be the only person in the Jefferson Memorial on a chill afternoon looking across at the Pentagon. Just the silence and the wind. My kind of thing.
Do you know how SOCOM works, Euan. I do.
I hope I have answered some of your questions for you Euan.
Now answer one of mine. You still haven’t told me what you do for a living Euan. My guess is you are the educated sort that wears a suit and tie to work and answers the phone and shuffles paper all day long.
To me Euan, you are nothing more than a ‘Normal’, a civilian dipshit.
Have a nice day kid.
Wow…
“Kan4 Lai2 Ni3 Bu2 Shi4 Zai4 Kai1 Wan2 Xiao4”
Heh.
All that technical stuff about the M-16 and the M-79(later M203) is making me feel very ashamed, because I realised I’ve forgotten all the specs(range, effective range, etc) after 5 years of civilian life! Granted, it was only two years in the Singapore Armed Forces, but still…
At least I still remember the mode selector switch(auto, semi, safe) for the M-16 is on the left side of the rifle, and is handled by the thumb.
Loading a full mag of 30 rounds is often a bad idea if the magazine spring mechanism is lousy(and they often are), leading to jams and stuck rounds. My CSM often told us to load 20-25 instead in real combat. Not that we ever got to load so many live rounds, not even during range practice. If we get to load up on that many rounds, they’re only blanks in drills. Blearrrgh.
We don’t chamber a round when not in a direct combat situation because even when the mode selector is on safe and preventing the trigger from pulling, there’s still a chance that excessive jarring can cause a misfire(happened once in my unit, scared the fuck out of everybody). We clear the chamber by releasing the magazine and pulling the charging lever, catching the unused round as it spins out. For the same reason, we keep our fingers outside the trigger guard, even when a round is not chambered.
The M-16 is not designed to snipe with the 5.56mm round, more to maim and injure, which is the opposite of the sniper who has to get one-shot-one-kill. The range(although I can’t remember it now) of the M16 sucks.
TWG
If you search for “The Monk and the Marines” by Philip Kingry it is listed in several places. In all cases it is listed as fiction. In at least one case it is listed as “mass-market fiction.”
So I assume it is fiction because that is how it is listed, that is how it was published and that is how it was sold. No great stretch of the imagination needed. Whether it is paperback or hardback is irrelevant.
I assume it is low-grade fiction because that is what the term “mass-market” is used to describe – more your airport bookstall thriller than “Anna Karenina”, if you follow. Again, no stretch.
So I repeat the question you have avoided – a work of fiction, clearly written and sold as such, is being passed off by you as your autobiography.
WHY?
Your questions about military technical trivia prove nothing. As a matter of fact, I do have some military knowledge, but from a British rather than American perspective. I know how British infantry units are put together and what weapons they use – or at least what weapons they used 20 odd years ago – and I know about artillery. In any case, how hard would it be for me to search for the specs on the US weapons you cite? And what would it prove if I posted the answers for you? That I can use Google? Big deal.
You avoided the direct question asked – where are the patent numbers for your rifle silencers?
You have also evaded the question as to why, being such an experienced Arabist, you seemed surprised that Moslem fora don’t accept criticism but do accept anti-semitic propaganda as fact. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with much of Islamic culture would not be in the least bit surprised at this, but you seemed to be. Odd, given your alleged experience.
But you said you WERE with them in Iraq, which is why I described them as your team-mates in Iraq. I was only writing what you’d said.
I didn’t. I just said anyone could find out the same information from Google or a library. The fact that you post it here doesn’t prove you’re military, ex-military, or a Boy Scout. I can post all sorts of stuff here about quantum mechanics, but it doesn’t make me a physicist. Equally, it doesn’t prove I’m not.
I expressed no opinion of your military experience or otherwise. I did not say you got all your facts from Google, although you could have done. You could be ex-military. You could be a paranoid and delusional veteran. You could be a teenage fantasist. I don’t know & didn’t say I did. Basically, this is why I am asking the questions – what you say is disjointed, rambling, in some cases fantastic, is some cases naive. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, and frankly it doesn’t have the ring of truth about it.
In fact, you have not answered any of them, with the exception of some weasel excuses for big, round kill numbers. You have instead embarked on another meandering, unstructured and pointless ramble.
What are the patent numbers for your rifle silencers?
Why are you passing off fiction as autobiography?
I tend not to resort to personal insult. However, if you continue to evade or refuse to answer the simple questions you have been asked, I think I will be entitled to assume you are, as they say, full of it.
EG
Well, Faust?
Any answers yet, or have you accepted that not everyone will swallow your line in rambling garbage?
EG
Construction workers in Arabia (the Gulf States, Emirates, and Saudi) are Pakistanis and Omanis. So are the enlisted men in the mercenary armed forces. Most of the military forces in many of the Emirates are paid professionals from outside. The military in Oman was about 98% professional who fought for the pay.. the officers were primarily Brits and some Egyptians with the Iranians (in the Shah’s time) making a showing here and there.
The enlisted people were almost always Paks with a sprinkling of Omanis in the NCO ranks..very good men almost always. The pay was excellent for all ranks and the benefits were very fine also. The service was mostly dull though. There was a lot of parade and drill and too little to do. There had been a war up to 1970 but it was over and not much was happening. I just came in on the last of it and the show was over, so the military was in a bad time. Men were taking their pay and looking to move on… the ones who were old and close to retirement were the only ones who were sitting around.
Young men who knew their stuff and were good at their work were hiring out to places where you could still make a kill… The war in Angola was all the talk at that time… course that is all old hat nowadays.
Sultan Taimur, Quabus’ father, back in the fighting days of the late 50’s and 60’s had a small piece of the Pakistani coast which his ancestor pirates had held in fief (and still held). It’s a shark guts stink-hole of a town called Gwadur at the extreme end of the Pak south coast near the Iranian borderline. The people are the sort who stare at you even while flies crawl across their blank faces. Children play games like poke the stick up the dead shark’s anus to let the body gases fart out and gurgle. Scruffy dogs with total mange fight over the rotting remains of the sharks whose oil is the main economic product of the town.
The other product of the region around the town is men.. enlistee recruits for the Sultan’s war with the mountain Imams up on the far side of the Adam (AW DAMN) plateau. All these Gwadur men carry old British Martinis or short Lee Enfields and most are good shots with any sort of rifle. These men have great calloused splay-toed feet like hooves bare to the blazing rock with no obvious discomfort. The whole population has a bovine quality. The women are like buffaloes. I always wondered how difficult it would be to kill one of these Paks. I seriously doubted that my 9mm. would knock one down. Certainly aiming for their heads was a waste of time.
The people are Baluchi, and I have never liked Baluchis… Ever.
I know them far too well. The only thing that ever made them even approach human consciousness was their tendency to enjoy killing someone who was helpless and raping children (male or female it didn’t much matter to a Baluchi). The Sultan recruited them to do his fighting and brought them over by the boatload.
I had heard them described as absolutely without imagination. It is true. They laugh when one of their own gets hit with a bullet and squeals like a pig in pain… it is an example of their callous yuck yuck humor. No empathy whatsoever. Another idea of their humor is to shit on the barracks floor and the stairs.
They are stolid soldiers under fire, but hard to inspire to any heroic exertion. Perfect garrison troops. As Moslems go these are as good as it gets.
The Omani by contrast makes an ideal NCO. He is all energy and bark. Small bodies, big heads, and faces that even in the young seem to be made from knotted wood. The Omani has only one disadvantage… he’s addicted to chewing Quat, a narcotic hallucinogenic leaf.. on Fridays particularly. The other disadvantage to these soldiers, (besides shitting anywhere but in the latrine) is that they have to be almost forced to advance under fire. This is a natural tendency in any soldier, but in the Arab it is an obsession.
Now that may sound sensible on their part, but you can not win a war without carrying it to the enemy.The Baluch and the Omani, when fired on (usually by some aboriginal bedu who isn’t even seriously aiming) will get behind a rock like a damn limpet and bang away back (at extreme range) and can’t be pried loose. They look at you like you’re a fool because YOU aren’t behind a rock also. The firing is taking place at ranges of 1,000 yards or MORE and in some cases you can SEE the smoke of a round BEFORE you HEAR the sound report, so the range in that case is BEYOND the speed of sound which is 1100 ft/sec. Effective range on the rifles these Arab clowns are using is about 350 yards in the hands of a skilled marksman. You figure it out. The Arab is definitely no hero.
They might as well be firing in the air with their eyes closed. Professional soldiers? They would sit there all day if you let them or until they ran out of ammo.
One sniper could hold up a whole platoon. It took real effort (one method was to poke your officer’s stick in their anus and call them “fariqi” which is Arabic for the homosexual passive (fa’iri) is the homo active – it’s also where you get the English homosexual word ‘Fairy’ from) and then take a rifle and go up alone after the sniper and hope they would follow. The Arab is a coward, but he is a macho coward.
To take out a sniper was usually not difficult. They rarely worked in teams and they were almost always firing from extreme range. If you could close the range and enfilade his fire preferably from a higher position then you could get them to move. If you had set up a team to flank the sniper then when he moved you had a chance of potting him.
The Sultan was at Salalah when I came into the country at Muscat. I wanted to pay my respects since it had been a personal matter concerning my marriage to an Omani girl who was attached to the family in the Sultan’s household who handled his accounting for Import and Export… in the Sultan’s case this was largely a matter of gold smuggling on the last leg of the Beirut to India circuit. This girl’s family was in the gold trade.
There are only two ways to reach Salalah and that is one very good reason why the Sultan spends a lot of time there. One way is to come in by sea through a very narrow passage in a rocky cliff being hit by big rollers moving full force from the Indian Ocean. You have got to be a local to cut that passage. If you come by land you have to cross the eastern edge of the Rab a’kali and you have to come by truck convoy with a heavy military escort. The mountains up to the plateau and down the range to the far side are crawling with the most savage fanatic bootstealing throatcutting murdering rapists I ever saw… savages is too good a word for the Green Mountain (what a laugh!) Ibadis who live up there.
They infibulate their excess women (slice off the clitoris and sew the vagina up) to keep their neighbors (and one another) from killing them to get the women. They are living on the rim of Hell and two out of every three women is mutilated. The men go around molesting one another in the heat. Perversion is natural in every orifice but the right one. Even animals are preferable. No kidding. The Ibadi have a saying: “A WOMAN FOR SONS, A BOY FOR PLEASURE, AND A GOAT FOR SHEER ECSTASY”. Whether the goat is dead or alive is all moot to an Ibadi.
The Ibadi makes his living tending the Frankincense bushes that dot the plains of the plateau. The Frankincense trade goes back beyond recorded history. Long before the time of Christ. Sheba and Dhofar are Frankincense country.
I carried a long barreled .44 pistol in a hip holster like a cowboy on my first and only trip up across the plateau. It was the only handgun I found in the bazaar which looked reliable. Indeed it was an admirable pistol… American made and dating from the 30’s. The tribesmen who came up to trade with our convoy had heard about cowboys and when they found out I was an American they expected me to act the part. John Wayne they expected… and John Wayne they got. I put the remains of an eaten melon on a rock ledge and amazed them (well they seemed amazed) when I did a fast draw and blew the melon to bits. The range was about thirty-five yards which is all the pistol is good for usually although that is not a great range to hit something. But with a pistol most of your shooting is not going to be done at a greater range. They loved my fast draw. Draw fire and put it back, time a second and a half maybe. I timed a man once doing a fast draw, he was good and showed me some tricks, by the stopwatch he could do a draw and fire in seven and a half TENTHS of a second. I only did it once for these goons and mine was a second and a half, but it seemed fast to them. Why push my luck?
One of the tribesmen showed me his rifle and pointed out that it had some 60 nails in the stock..he said they stood for all the men he had killed. I know that these men are not liars. Fuck your mother in the ass maybe, but they won’t lie about it. However, I found it hard to believe that anyone would actually have killed that many men and then boasted about it. He took out a bag which was hanging around his neck and showed me what he claimed were a double pair of dried human testicles..trophys he had cut off the corpses of men he had killed. I expressed my admiration and awe. The hairy stupid jerk. Remind me, Abdullah, to shoot you without any warning if I come on you in the dark.
The men offered me some Quat to chew.. several had big green leafy twigs of the stuff. They took half a dozen leaves and folded them together and tucked them into the back of the jaw like chewing tobacco. After a while they all got quiet and glassy-eyed and some smiled and giggled and scratched themselves. I tried some also since it seemed polite. At first I just concentrated on chewing the stuff and swallowing the juice. The taste was not unpleasant.. the tongue and lips became a bit numb. I just sat and watched the others. My awareness did not seem to blur. I became quite detached and calm.. and felt quite lucid and serene. Able to handle whatever came along.
What came along was a mangy dog. I stood up and drew the pistol quickly and cranked off a single round which caught the dog in the side of the head and spun him around twice. The dog never made a yip. The tribesmen didn’t move but everyone got quiet and all eyes were on me. I didn’t give a flying fuck.
That Quat had me stoned and I felt calm and cold. There was another dog about 50 yards away going beside a wall. I hit it in the side and shot it again while it was still in the air. Then I took a walk around the village and shot at every dog I saw… reloading twice. The captain told me I killed some eleven dogs in the village and terrorized the whole place. He laughed and said he had never seen the tribesmen that way in his life. They thought I was insane… bugger all and scared shitless.
Since they knew I carried a special rifle in a special case, they knew what I was and why the Sultan had me. The Captain said the men asked him if I was as good with the rifle as I was with the pistol. We both were laughing. Eleven dogs with 12 bullets had made me a legend.
I asked a question about the custom of infibulating the women when we stopped in one village. The captain told me he would show me what it looked like. He called one of the villagers over and said something and they brought a girl out of one of the huts. She squatted on the porch and pulled up her skirt. She spread her legs apart and be damned if it wasn’t true.. the vagina was gone.. there was just a small opening in a smooth scar that looked like a wrinkle on a plastic doll. Christ it was a shock. It just boggled my mind. Castration for women. The Arab is an artist. In conservative Islamic countries, women have no jobs, no education, no clitoris and no lipstick. But don’t despair folks, they do get to wear a bag on their heads.
When I got to Salalah I was introduced to the Sultan during his daily Majlis… a court he holds in the morning. Anyone in the kingdom may approach him in the Majlis and ask for justice or bring greetings or gifts. The Sultan will hear anyone, but do not waste his time.
There are some thirty armed men sitting on the rug in front of the Sultan and about another thirty sitting in the back of the room. He has a sword which is carried by a man who is his executioner. This sword goes wherever the Sultan holds Majlis. It is a big doublehanded thing with Koranic prayers written on both sides of it. I sat close enough to read the writing on the blade. Male tense on one side of the blade and female tense on the other.. an interesting concept. The prayers were male and female.
I got to talk to the old Sultan and I think we got to like one another. He invited me to a court dinner and later arranged for me to have a tour of the Jalali fort and I wound up doing some intelligence for him concerning a little bastard named “Shorty” who was laying mines in the road and blowing up trucks.
The Sultan had me working for an old Scotsman named Crofter on that project. Crofter was a ex-British military type who had deep connections with British Intelligence and worked for the Sultan now. The Sultan said I ought to become a Moslem. He said I was a fine man and he needed fine men in his service… the implication being that if I converted to Islam I had a permanent position in his service.
It was interesting and so forth… but looking at Crofter convinced me of what it really meant. Crofter was my boss, head of the Royal Palace security. Crofter was a Moslem convert, that might be said, but the only thing Crofter REALLY believed in was who held the knife.
Crofter and I liked each other.. that is if you can ever form a lasting relationship with a highly intelligent reptile… a big dangerous lizard at that.
Crofter was EXTREMELY dangerous. It was a wise thing to be on Crofter’s good side. If he wanted you dead he had the power to see that it happened and he was absolutely loyal to the Sultan. I had to remember that I was in a feudalistic 14th century Islamic world and could never think in 20th century Western terms if I wanted to survive. People that fucked up or were not attentive to the matters of security… corruption on duty being a big one.. were taken out to the dump in the back of a closed truck and had their throats sliced in the truck then they were dumped in the middle of the night. No shit, somewhere in that mile out to the dump. Crofter meant business.
I earned my pay and earned respect… carefully. I performed a function that no one else could do. I could kill a man at a thousand yards with a single shot… (a skill honed in VietNam) he would never hear the round that hit him. And I could find a man hidden in a thousand square miles of sand… by reading a map and using my intuition from meticulous notes on a rolodex. I didn’t explain how I did what I did… that made it look like I was magic. I was being paid for my magic. I just gave orders and kept my silence. And finally one night we got “Shorty” and my job was over. It was simply a matter of putting all the data into a map… when..where… and then narrowing it down and asking again when… where… until I had an area… then a place in the area… then a time in the place. Then waiting. Then… turning on the headlights and there he was… two mines on the donkey and two mines being dug up from his stash. We found the stash first and then we found him.
Then about two hours interrogation and then… honest to god chains and a hole. 14th cent Medeival style. Torture was simple… water for names. No names, no water.
El-quasayer (Shorty) was his name and he never got out of the hole. We left him down in that hole to die of thirst. He also gave us the name of the man who provided the mines. We took that man’s wife and son and used them to make him a model citizen. And got more names.
The Sultan liked me a lot. Him and Brig. General Raina had that in common. Raina was Research and Analysis back in Bengal..I worked for him too. The trouble with Raina had been that he kept my passport and seemed to think I might never want it back. That was not something which friendships are built on.
Still and all, in certain lines of work you tend to meet men like that. The Sultan was just so certain that no one would ever tell him no. Few people did, so he got to thinking no one could. Raina and the Sultan had that in common, as I say. Nice men , but then I was as sweet as could be myself.
When the civil war broke out the Pak Eastern Command had 35 Infantry battalions and one armored regiment which had two squadrons (about 25 tanks ). These were US made Walker Bulldogs or American Chaffees. That may not mean much to most of you.. but what it should mean is junk. Obsolete junk, old junk, and second rate junk from the word go. A Chaffee is an el-cheapo tank chassis that can be fitted with a variety of el-cheapo main guns, whatever happens to be laying around and usually should have been left there anyway. Nothing needs to match and the ammunition is almost always just right for falling short or being a dud or blowing up in the barrel ,if it just doesn’t seem to be the best of days. Needless to say the Pak East Command was one step above vomiting in a bucket.
They had six artillery regiments and about a half dozen mortar and field batterys. By our standards these units were mediocre at best. The only good unit in the whole Army was a battalion of Commandos. But that was too little except to cover a general retreat. Oh, and the United States had provided some 20 Sabre jets..vintage Korean War to go up against Mig 23’s and Harriers when the time came. Not much of a contest in the air actually. But then realistically none of this hardware was ever meant for an external enemy anyway. It would all be used against local peasants with cane knives and a few police pistols.
The Paks had 4,000 frontier guards in seven wings and another 4,000 Pak police. These fellows were all recruited in West Pakistan to be used in East Pakistan. It doesn’t take much figuring out. In addition there were 35,000 armed Razakars who were Bihari moslems organized into Majahid battalions. These guys were a lot like Quantril was in Kansas during the American Civil War. They were bandits with a religious mission.
We were going to take the railhead at Jessore and the Paks knew that. The rail network in Bangladesh is shaped like a letter “H” with its western nexus at Jessore. The Paks put a division there consisting of a Brigade actually around the city and a reserve Brigade at Jhenida. They had one squadron of 13 Chaffee tanks between them. The rest of the Pak order of battle was distributed with its 16th Division at Natore as the NW HQ and a Brigade in reserve. A Brigade at Hilli and the rest of the armored regiment..the Walker Bulldogs. (Now there was a shittank for you.. one hit and the whole thing opened up like a can of beans.) The rest of the defense was a Brigade at Mymensinge in the East with a regiment in reserve at Jamalpur. The city of Dacca itself was commanded in the beginning by a Maj. Gen. Jamshed with his 36th Divisional HQ. It had about 5,000 men, but this command was extremely varied and the only good units were paramilitary since they were adapted to a civil war anyway…
The Coronation Bridge on the Meghna was held by the 14th Div at Ashuganj with a Brigade in reserve at Sylhet and another at Mauli Bazar. These troops had their hands full trying to stem a flood of river smuggling that provided arms to the guerrillas south and west of there. There was a brigade at Brahmanbaria, but it was spread out in garrisons on the railline along the Tripura border south of Comilla and Chandpur. These clowns had their hands full trying to keep the railline cleared of mines and trying to keep from winding up chewed to bits in daily sniping and ambushes.
The 39th Div was at Chandpur with brigades all strung out in the jungles and hills from Comilla and Feni, to the port of Chittagong. The harbor down there was full of rusting hulks that had tried to bring war supplys in..the city of Chittagong itself was a deadly place after dark. The Bengali dock workers were a mean lot and had guns they took from the Moslem police.
Facing the Paks the Indian Army had two Armored Divisions at full strength and good training ready to cross the border . This was the 2nd Corps and had the 20th, the 23rd, the 8th, and the 57th Divisions of infantry for support. These infantry were lightly equipped which means they were stripped of everything they would not need..they were going to have to move fast and across water obstacles.. they had to be quick and light. They did take some portable boats on trucks and pontoon equipment for the trucks themselves. They had well-trained Harrier jet air-support trained in Britain and they were co-ordinated with 8 infantry regiments of guerrillas.. who had about five divisions of unarmed irregulars to harass and impede the Paks. Many of these guerrillas did an excellent job gathering intelligence and transporting supplies.
The 9th and the 4th Armored Divisions had Russian T-55’s and PT 76’s which were quick heavy firepower, easily maintained. These were to be used in the Northeast and the 33rd Corp was a reserve at the headquarter in Siliguri. They had the 20th Division, 2nd Brigade and one light armored regiment of APC’s(armored transport) and armored cars. IVth Corps was in the East with the 8th, the 57th, and the 23rd, to spearhead the attack from three directions when the word was given to go in at the Paks. Of these the 8th Division was the best, in my estimation.
The total situation for the Paks was worse than I have been able to describe it. Of their Eastern Command only 9 of its 15 battalions was actually completely loyal. Six of the 9 battalions were considered unreliable since they included a large number of Bengali rankers. The Bengali troops did mutiny and some 3,000 men in the East Bengal regiments went over to the guerrillas as did some 14,000 men in the East Pakistan Rifles.
Rahman had promises from some 176,000 Bengalis loyal to his Awami League Party and many of these Bengalis were armed or were gathering arms. The 15,000 rifles stockpiled in the Police HQ in Dacca were taken by the populace before the army could stop them. Chittagong was the only deep water supply port and it was almost closed to the army due to the March 31st general strike. This was supported by an armed barracks of dock workers.
On the Indian side of the border the Paks were already facing incursions and patrols of the Punjab Regiment, the Rajput Regiment( whose officers carried swords like modern samurai) and The Mahratta Light Infantry.. (these fellows cut your nose off for a joke). These bad boys had set up anti-tank recoilless guns only 50 yards from the border. the Bahini guerrillas around Jessore were being given supplies as early as 17th of March through smugglers at Satkhira.. mostly arms, ammo, and explosives.
The Paks, meanwhile, were endearing themselves to the locals by burning down 700 homes in Myemsingh and machine gunning 880 people to death at St Gregory’s, a settlement of Catholics. The dogs ate the corpse of Father Gomez. Bengali middle class workers were being rounded up in Dacca and taken to the Pakistani Oil complex where they were placed in the warehouses converted into a prison. In lots of fifty they were wired together with their hands behind them and forced to wade into the river. Then about ten would be shot by a burst of Moslem machinegun fire to drag the rest under.
A fellow named Faridi was superintendant of Police under the martial law administrator Brigadier Bashir. These and four Pak divisional commanders are wanted for war crimes…their names are Raza, Aslan, Sharif, and Saffi. Today these men work for the dictator Zia al-Haq. Zia is a good friend of Kissinger and Nixon.
From the 26th of March until May guerrilla resistance was spontaneous and unco-ordinated. But by June and July the guerrillas were becoming more organized and their tactics were being directed systematically at the Pak regular troops.
By September and October the Paks were being forced to abandon the countryside and fall back on the safety of the towns. From October to the 3rd of December the Bahini guerrillas began to win and by the first week of December the Indian Army came in to back them up. For 150 miles between Faridpur and Agartala the border was alive with heavy fighting between the guerrillas and the Pak forces at all levels.
The Bahini were softening up Jessore for the Indian Army. There was fighting in the Harinagar and the Ghariakhali districts of the city south along the river. The Pak naval craft and gunboats supplying the city were heavily damaged as were their bases. By the 8th of November the west bank of the river was controlled by the guerrillas along the Mathabhangha. The Bahini hit the gunboat docks at Baumundhi and Gagni. They swept inland from there to take garrisons at Bhairab in the towns of Natuda and Maniknagar.
The Pak regiment put up a stiff defense around Jessore on the river line for three days and the Bahini took heavy losses. But in a war of attrition they outnumbered the Paks 20 to 1. By the end of the week Sylhet and Jessore were almost completely in Bahini hands. On the next Monday the Bahini had taken Comilla and were encircling Dacca.
The Indian Army had waited for the end of the monsoon in September. On October the 30th ,Indian commandos crossed the border at Kamalpur and raided the Pak artillery positions. The guns were silenced permanently. These raids were repeated at Mymensingh on the 4th of November and again at Skikarpur on the 11th. On the 23rd the dictator of West Pakistan, Yahya Khan, declares a national emergency. The Pak sabre jets over Jessore that day were blown out of the air by Indian Air Force Mig 23’s.
On the 3rd of December Pakistan hit 8 Indian airfields. India retaliated all along the line in Kashmir and recognised Bangladesh as the legitimate government of East Pakistan. The next day Pakistan declared war. By that time I was eight miles into the border with tanks moving up on Jessore.
Atilingam and I were in a jeep with the spearhead of the 9th and the 4th Armor. We were following the PT-55’s as they cleared a path on the flanks T-76’s . The only thing that slowed us up was the water obstacles. The rest of the time we deployed then brought up the armor and then deployed again in jumps. We met little resistance. What little resistance we did meet..we would send out a squad of Pt’s wide on both sides and then move up a single tank or two to draw fire. Once we had pinpointed the enemy position we got on the radio and took them out at long range with massed fire from the T-76’s acting as battery. The paks ran and kept running until they got to Dacca. And then we bagged them. We took 93,00 prisoners in less than ten days. Brigadier General Raina used me and Ati to recon for places the rivers and creeks could be forded. We also got to go into the towns first to see if there were any hard resistance. We would snoop and poop and then get on the radio.
After the fighting was over Raina detailed me and a squad of Commandos from II Corps to hunt down Col. Firman Ali. We spent two week down in the Sunderbans looking for his sorry ass. Kumar and Ati and I found him… but we never told General Raina. Raina wanted him alive. We didn’t. When we got the buttfuck we had him snuffed.
We also had another reason to make sure the maggot never saw daylight. He extorted money from some five hundred of the wealthiest people in trade in Dacca. He robbed the safe deposit boxes of five banks. That made millions of dollars in real value commodity. Naturally I gave something to Ati but not so much that it would be apparent that he knew anything…which he didn’t. The deal was between Kumar and myself. We both got a big share of the loot… most of mine in diamonds.
We put the colonel off in a village of refugees and told everyone he was a Pak colonel. They dragged him down in a latrine ditch and beat him to death with farm tools. Kumar and I got in the jeep and drove off. We told Raina that the colonel’s helicopter went down in the Sunderbans and that we never found him. Then Kumar and I both got out of the country as fast as we could. Raina was not happy, but he still sends me cards now and then.
I sponsored one of his daughters for American citizenship. We are still on good terms. I alsways send him a Christmas card.
But none of this true ofcourse because Euan says it’s all made up. Never happened.. right Euan? Faust was never their. Never been in a monastry, never been in the US Marines, never been to VietNam, never lived in India, never worked Oman, never been to Iraq. Isn’t that right Euan?
Euan says I got it all off the Net and it’s all made up and the book is a cheap work of “fiction”. Euan has never read it and knows nothing about the book or the life story but Euan has a big brain and Euan knows best.
http://www.americasvoices.org/avarc2002/archives2002/BowenM/BowenM_043002.htm
My title is actually taken from a fine book of the same name which I read years ago. I’ve not been able to find it and can’t remember the author’s name, but it was a true story about a young man who left a monastery and became a Navy Hospital Corpsman with the Marines in Vietnam combat. But I’m using the title today because it fits so well with a different topic: the Roman Catholic priesthood. – Michael R. Bowen, MD
(Link)
Get a clue kid…. This man has READ the book (unlike YOU) and said it was a TRUE story. You heard the man. True Euan. Get it kid? A TRUE story.
Faust wrote the book Euan. Philip Kingry is “Faust”. And what Faust wrote above is also TRUE. It happened kid. I was there.
The Wobbly Guy. Thank you for your reply on the M16. Cheers. You obvioulsy know your “stuff”. Unlike this other clueless civilian twit.
Eat me Euan. Use your tongue.
My guess is.. Iran next.
So Faust,
More meandering rubbish, AND YOU STILL HAVE NOT ANSWERED THE QUESTIONS.
WHAT are the patent numbers for your rifle silencers? Honestly, if you could justify that I’d be half way to believing you. But no, you can’t do it – perhaps because there are no such patents?
WHY is the book published, listed and cited as fiction, mass market fiction at that? So one conservative guy thinks it’s true – but he can’t even remember the author’s name. So much for him, but don’t you think the publishers would probably have a good idea if it was fiction or not? And they say it’s fiction. It’s not my opinion of it, it is what the bloody publishers say and I really think they ought to know, don’t you?
I’m not saying you didn’t write the book – you may have done, I don’t know. But it isn’t autobiography when it’s sold as fiction, now is it? I’m not saying the tales you have posted here are not true, either. What I AM saying is that you are passing off as autobiography a long out of print work of fiction. Why? You have been asked several times now and have not come up with anything close to an answer.
Unless you can answer two very simple questions WITHOUT posting pages of irrelevant crap, then frankly I can’t see that you are anything other than a deluded liar.
PROVE WHAT YOU SAY IS TRUE. It wouldn’t be hard – why can you not post the patent numbers? Why can you not explain why your “autobiography” was published as fiction?
EG
Faust,
All you need to do is answer two very simple questions:
1. What are the patent numbers for your rifle silencers?
2. Why is your “autobiography” published, sold and listed as a work of fiction?
That’s all.
EG
Well, Faust, since you seem unable to answer the two simple questions which could demonstrate your truthfulness, I am forced to conclude that you are no more than a peddler of rambling and mendacious bullshit.
I submit that you lie about having patents on weapons equipment. You could easily show this is not a lie by the simple expedient of posting the patent numbers so we can check. It would be very easy. But, despite being explicitly asked to do this more than once, you have simply ignored the question, perhaps hoping it will go away. It won’t.
I submit that you lie about “The Monk and the Marines” being your autobiography. It was openly sold and published as a work of fiction, and you have given no explanation for this discrepancy. If it really was autobiography, you presumably had a good reason for disguising the fact and could explain this. But you haven’t. If it really was, you could list people who could be contacted to verify your tale. But you haven’t.
I suggest that you are not even Philip Kingry, the author of the book. I suggest you are a delusional loner with an inadequate life who seeks escape in dramatic fantasy, so much so that he comes to believe it as fact.
Despite my repeated claims of scepticism, and my statement of simple things you could do to PROVE me wrong, you have done nothing whatever to show you are telling the truth. You write long and rambling accounts of events which don’t remotely address the questions asked, and are themselves implausible.
I submit that you, sir, are a liar, a fraud and quite possibly in need of psychiatric help. Prove me wrong.
EG
More rantings from the Faust chronicles……..
Even more insane rantings from Faust. This never happened folks. I was never there. Faust is a crazy old man who made it all up after he read it in a Marvel comic book. Faust has never a monk or a Marine and lived in India at one time, and Faust never partook in the BanglaDesh war and that old Pak, Firman Ali isn’t dead at all, he’s alive and well and living a nice beach house somewhere in Malibu. Nuns, monks and monastries, US Marines, VietNam, Indian, Oman. Never happened. Faust is CRAZY.
You can tell from reading this story that old Faust is totally mad and is obviously making it all up. It all came off the top of Faust’s head and has no connection to reality. Any resemblance of real names, places and dates are purely coincidental.
Calcutta, India, was a bitch in the Spring of 1970, but then Calcutta always was a bitch. What can you expect from a city named after a buck-naked black goddess with pointed teeth, blood matted hair, and a big red tongue at least fourteen inches long?
Calcutta…seventy-nine thousand people per square mile at two hundred and forty square miles. All of it bathed in tears and dipped in shit.
Everything you may have heard about Calcutta is true.. the city of eternal night, the anus of the universe. This dark Venus arises in a pall of smoking stench comprised of industrial jute mills, Hoogly river mud which is ninety-eight percent human feces, rats, garbage in drifts, and swamp mists edging in from all over eastern Bengal.
At first light Calcutta’s subjects can be seen strewn on the pavements still wrapped in their sleeping shrouds. In the tens of thousands they are still hungry from the night before. Beside them the open sewer ditches twist down the narrow dim alleys beside overflowing brick outhouses puddling trickles of mud and urine. Here and there stand sacred cows.. and everywhere else spitting, staring, starving Asia.
Calcutta..served up at 100 degrees F. sweating and spicey as a used condom, freshly dipped in the festering cooze of the Tropic of Cancer.
Calcutta erected a statue of Lenin that year in the Park. They elected a Communist clown named Basu as combined police chief and mayor too. Not surprisingly there were some 473 political murders that year. Being an American was frowned on also.
I was living in a one-candle back room at # 6 Little Russel street, an alley between Ho Chi Minh and Nehru Roads. It was no plumbing, tin cans nailed to the bottom of the door to keep out the rats, and sleeping on a pile of feed sacks.
I was twenty-seven, less than fresh from the Marines in Quang Ngai, Viet Nam, and three more private years in Laos. All for nothing.
I had been in southern Asia about four years. When it came time for my military discharge I had not wanted to be dumped on the streets of Nixon’s America. At that time I only had some nine days to do and Uncle wanted to ship me back to the States, give me my civilian status back, and show me the front gate. An unemployment line in some service town after thirteen months in the jungle was not my idea of a thrill. I opted to stay in Saigon and try for a job with the CIA- run Air America. Hell is relative.
At first the Gunny Sargeant said it was impossible to get discharged in Viet Nam. He said I had to go back to the States whether I wanted to or not. I just looked him in the eye and reminded him that when he got a venereal disease I took care of it for him and then lost the records. I was a medical corpsman and most of my job at battalion was that of pecker checker. Don’t you know I got to meet all the better sort of people that way.
I had a friend who recruited me for work with Air America. He was another corpsman. He had, himself, been recruited while at Pendleton USMC. He said the job paid two thousand a month plus hazardous duty bonuses. He was not really specific about what sort of work I would be doing..but between the lines it was apparent I would be doing a lot of what I was already good at..gonnorhea and bullet holes.
After a couple of weeks hanging around Saigon and spending my evenings down on Tu Do and Plantation Roads or sitting in my hotel bar until it closed or I did…Air Am cut my papers and flew me into Pnom Penh in Cambodia to get some “training”. This consisted of some psychological testing and a few reruns on my medical knowlege. I stayed in a hotel full of an odd assortment of individuals who were obviously a bunch of military spooks. They seemed to like their work which consisted of taking unholy risks in pursuit of the meaningless. There was a lot of talk about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and parachute drops. Real Looney tunes.
Pnom Penh was a seedy place where the whores spoke French, but only accepted American green. I remember the rain and the pretty parasols.. it is all a ghost town now. Literally.
I didn’t stay in Pnom Penh very long. My contract was to serve for a year in Laos. Before long I was on a flight that took me to Vientiane. Vientiane is the capital of Laos. It is sort of a big small town. It is a pleasant place in many ways..or was. There was a sizable black market and a lot of currency speculation. The whole place seemed poised on the brink of some soon to arrive disaster. I always had the feeling that the city wouldn’t be there when I got back. I was right eventually.
I spent three years in Laos instead of one. Each year I got more and more involved with the craziness of my work…a merry go round to nowhere. I worked for weeks at a time in these tiny hill forts full of tatooed little tribesmen who wore tigerclaw necklaces and carried crossbows and Thompson submachineguns. They didn’t know the world was round and figured me for some form of devil. They measured their fortunes in women, pigs, and silver. Not necessarily in that order.
Every month or so I got two weeks relief and rotation back to Vientiane where I would play the black money market. After a year I had about $8,000 in profits. Since I saved most of my pay to use in speculation I finally came away with about twenty-eight grand. I converted it into small bars of gold bullion and heavy silver wire. I smuggled it out with me when I left in November 1969.
I got out just in time. Things went to hell fast that last year. Vang Pao got driven out of Xieng Khouang while Kong Li, the only patriotic general in the country, crossed the CIA once too often and wound up dogmeat. The Pathet Lao hit our people at Phoupha Thi and the whole Plain of Jars went in the toilet. Then it was fold and run south to north until there was nothing left. I made it out alive but poor old Air Am was up for scrap.
Now I needed a job. So that was why I was in Calcutte. It was either that or go home to Mother.
I had a friend in Calcutta named Waldo. He was the Director of Catholic Relief Services. He and I came from similar backgrounds and had once shared a youthful vocation to become priests. He went to serve the poor in southern Asia and I joined the First Battalion Seventh Marines. From that you can judge us both crazy, although in different ways. As old JC once said,”By their fruits ye shall know them”.
Waldo had been writing me about this wonderful old prune named Mother Teresa who ran a convent of nuns in Calcutta. She was a good friend of his. I mean no disrespect to the good lady. She is so hard that when she talks even God listens. She wound up being my boss too eventually.
When I presented myself to Waldo he asked me what I would like to do for him? I looked around at the crowd in his yard and said,” How about if I start by kicking all these beggars off your porch?” He laughed and told me I had not changed. Then he hugged me.
He put me to work soon enough. A lot of Waldo’s relief food came in on the Hoogly Docks. Much of it was being stolen by the fat babu grafters who ran the warehouses. I listened to them give Waldo a lot of their Indian Bird of Paradise fly up your nose bullshit. I told Waldo that if he would leave the problem to me I could help him. He asked me what I had in mind. I told him his job was to mind his own business and not to ask me how I did mine. He just nodded. He understood.
I got a truck and drove around looking at the unemployment situation. I wanted to stare into some eyes. If a man didn’t drop his eyes when I looked at him hard then I asked him if he had a lathi( a bamboo bat with a metal knob on it ) or could get one. If that didn’t make him flinch then I offered him a job. I got six of his friends too. They were all Jats and mean as junkyard dogs. All you need to know about Jats is they wear big turbans, carry knives, and almost always need a shave.
About closing time me and the Jats went down to see the fat babu on the Dock. We pushed him back inside and set his watchman to doing deep kneebends. The babu never took his eyes off me as I took him into his office and closed the door. ” How’s your mother,Nigger?” He knew what I was there for..
I asked him politely the same questions about the losses in the food relief manifests that Waldo had asked him. Very nervously he gave me the same answers he had given Waldo. I nodded to the Jats. They knew what to do. I told them they could hit any part of the babu’s obese body except his head. I said I did not want him dead. I wanted him to think he was going to be beaten to death, that is beaten so badly he wouldn’t care if he lived. Pain is all.
When they had beaten him until his woman’s screams were dulled to a cough and a whimper I sat him down in his chair and asked him again about the food manifests. This time I showed him a knife. He became the gibbering soul of cooperation. I asked him to give me a tour of his warehouse and to use his keys with generosity. When the truck was loaded I told him where his children went to school. Nobody will ever give me the Nobel Peace Prize.
Our manifests improved manifestly. Remember how the third grade teacher told you that violence never solves anything? She was an idiot.
I got to see a lot of Mother Teresa’s operation. People say she was a living saint. I wouldn’t know about that. It is all the far side of the moon as far as I can tell. But one thing I do know..I am no saint. What I saw of Mother Teresa’s work left me feeling unprofited. I do not like poor people. I do not like weak pitiful people. I do not like the sick or the whining or the old. I do not like children who stink and cry. I do not like getting that stuff all over my clothes. But whatever the nuns asked of me… then I did it. I do not know why. Personally I think Judas got a bad press, he seemed like a swell guy to me.
One afternoon when I was unloading some food for the convent kitchen the young nun asked me if they could “borrow my truck” to pick up some people north of the railine. I must not have been thinking. I said sure. Waldo wouldn’t bitch at the gas and I had the rest of the day free.
Three little nuns all jumped up in the cab and gave me the where to turn stuff and off we went. We drove to the end of nowhere..dirt road and potholes, dust and weeds. There was this sort of settlement of beggars in what looked like some rural dump. The nuns jump down and go chirping off gathering up about a dozen old derelict geeks and bringing them back to my truck. You should have seen these specimens! They must have all been waiting for Digger O’Dell, because for age and abuse they were way overdue. The nuns brought them hobbling to the back of my truck and there it all stopped. It was a good six feet or better up over the tailgate.
With a disgusted sigh I got down from the cab and put my cigar on the runningboard. I walked back around to the back and looked at the little nuns. They weren’t very big. And all they got for chow was bread and water and a strong stroke of Gospel. I had to pick each one of those old geeks up in my arms and lift them into the back of the truck. Then I had to jump up in there to get them all straight so they wouldn’t fall out when I passed third gear. When I finally got back around to the cab and was ready to go..somebody had copped my cigar.
We got back a little after dark. The convent was quiet except for a light left on for us at the back entrance. I had to do a damn repeat performance. I lifted each of the old farts down and passed them to the waiting nuns. The back of my truck was full of piss. I asked one of the nuns to go get me a bucket of water.
When I turned around in the dark, one old nun was standing there with a single glass of water already..on a tray no less. She was offering it to me. It had been a bitch of a hot afternoon. I drained the glass in about two swallows. When I passed the glass back to the old nun she caught me by both hands and pulled my face down into the light. I found myself staring into the face of Mother Teresa herself. She was trying to look through my eyes into my mind. I looked right back into her eyes. I do not know what she was looking for, but I didn’t give it to her.
“Did you know they were lepers?” she asked me in accented English. Lepers. No I hadn’t known. I drew myself up and took my hands back from hers. Well, it was too late now wasn’t it? I laughed. Lepers. I left her standing there in the darkness and went and cleaned out the truck.
She thought I was like everyone else, scared of death and disease. The water I was using for my bath that night was from the Ganges River..the same river where the poor buried their dead . I just didn’t give a damn. Virtue and Sin.. Clean and Unclean…most of it is all in your head. Leprosy is one of the least contagious diseases..who knows whether I would have cared one way or another. The day was hot and I probably wouldn’t have given a damn if I had known. That old woman was looking for virtue in me. That was why I had laughed.
I worked with Waldo for about a year. I got to see a lot of the nuns and Mother Teresa. They lived among the poor in the poorest part of the city. They wore a simple cotton sari and lived in a sweltering dank old building that reminded me of a rundown zoo. They had a variety of charities. They fed the hungry..before dawn they were up with buckets and swabs sloshing everything down while some of them made bread and others made mush or soup. The poor came to them and they went to the poor. The old , the sick, the dying, the widows and the retarded and the abused and the mad…they did it all. The feeling I had was almost always the same..I was looking at something I could not understand, something so incomprehensible it hurt me to look at it. Yet day after day it was my job to be there before anyone else..smoking my cigar in the dark dawn light and unloading the truck in the convent courtyard.
I wanted to ask them why they did it. But I never did. They had a big place like a warehouse called Nirmal Hriday. It was a place where they brought people who were going to die..people who had no place of their own to die. A horrible place where death screwed itself and stared at you while it wheezed. There were volunteers there who helped the nuns.. people from every country in the world.. just people for the most part. They were like Waldo.. do-gooders. They thought in terms of souls and God and lets do it for Jesus. Where is my bucket of vomit,Jesus? Incomprehensible.
Wierd memories. The weeks of summer and spring passing rapidly as I learned a routine. I would go down to the docks which never closed. I would make sure I got what I came for and that it was all there. If I had to play a little rough then too bad for the nigger who argued with me or thought his boys were bigger than mine. Then back to the convent before dawn to see that the first loads went to Mother Teresa. Keeping an eye on my own boys to see that they didn’t steal more than their share. Then stealing my own share..oh yes..somebody has to pay for all my work and thought. The wages from Waldo and the Catholic Relief were not enough to pay for all my gas and overhead. The nuns and Waldo got far more than they expected because they paid more than they realized. Food..bulk food was extremely valuable. I traded it for whatever I needed.
Don’t get the idea I was skimming for a wardrobe of silk suits though. I just took enough to buy myself an extra shirt and some soap..and the rest went to get all the stuff Waldo couldn’t find but always needed. He did not know human nature very well. There were so many things that could be given to the poor besides food. I got medicines and soaps and sewing kits and I got stuff the poor could sell or trade for other things..cosmetics and prophylactics for the whores, for instance. Baby oil and simple cures for aches and pains. Scissors and thread and needles. Boxes of nails and work tools. Some of it I got fair and some of it I just got. I made my own rules.
I looked at the poor and I picked out one here and one there. I was looking for the ones who had a steady eye and who took a little time to wipe a kids nose or share with the one next in line. I made them my partners. They were given little jobs to do and I paid them in stuff that would feed them if they worked at it and got others to come to me. I got some old women to sew shopping bags. And I got other people to sell them. I got a load of cheap smokes and had a gang of youngsters selling them at a decent profit. I taught the lads to work in teams and we took over a section of the streets. I armed them with sticks on which were nailed a section of bicycle chain. Soon I had three gangs of young men and had to organize leaders.
I got a lot of information about the community from my boys. Granted they were not nice..they mugged and stole..but they also got me a view of a whole area which I could not obtain any other way. And because I supplied the leaders with a guaranteed income in smokes and fenced what they stole..I knew who was who and what was what. I could get a verbal dossier on anybody on a street. If I wanted to know how many times a merchant took a piss or how much the local cop got..I could find out for a pack of cigarettes.
Waldo never could have done that. Before I came they were just taking his charity and coming back for more..or stealing from him and selling it. They did not respect him and would forget him when he left. When I left though they were going to miss me..I used what I gave as charity to create work and start links that bound one group to another to form networks..profit and identity. And I made them call me sir and made them compete to have my ear. To old women I was a son. To children I was a father. To young men I was a sargeant. I got a team of kids to do delivery work and courier service. I saw that everyone was paid. Some in coin and some in kind.
I made sure that I was obeyed..fear is a legitimate son of justice. It isn’t enough to love others..you have to understand them first. People are ripe as @!#$ and they don’t care how they breathe as long as the air is there. They will follow pleasure and avoid pain. They respect what they fear and nothing that makes a man independent or free needs any moral justification otherwise. Everyone wants the same things.. enough to eat and a safe place to sleep. When they are young they want somebody warm. And when they are old they want somebody sure. The big will take from the small. Somebody has to be boss. And anybody who doesn’t like my rules is welcome to say so, but authority is not in words. Authority is in being who you are and knowing your limitations.
So that was the way it was in the summer of 1970. Gradually as the summer progressed I began to have more and more work to do with passing food up to the refugee camps being established north of Calcutta. Waldo was getting a lot of requests and a lot of paperwork. He started changing my routine a little at a time. Finally I was taking a big piece of each day and then a big piece of the week driving up to Krishnagar.. a good hour and a half either way. I got to know the Indian Army and the camp administrations. As summer turned to Fall I spent almost all of my time looking on the disasters that were unfolding in eastern Bengal..Bangladesh.
Bangladesh hangs like a muddy tear from the underside of the East-Indian subcontinent . It is a silt run-off of the Himalayan Mountains, a sprawling delta that forms a thousand mouths in the Bay of Bengal. Despite the fact that three crops a year can be planted in its rich tropical soil, it is a land of famine. One famine in recent times killed fully a third of the entire population.
In the summer of 1970 some 15,000 square miles of rice-producing land was flooded by the monsoon. These heavy rains left some one million people homeless. When the flooded land failed to drain no crops were planted. The people began to starve.
In the Fall of 1970 East Pakistan was due to have its first elections in 23 years. But in November a typhoon arose in the East-Indian Gulf similar to the one in the biblical time of Noah. It created a gigantic storm at sea which pushed incredible winds and tidal waves before it onto the low-lying Ganges delta. A quarter of a million people died in a day and a night. Another quarter of a million were left homeless. What food that had been planted was destroyed. The only other major food source, fishing, was also destroyed when 9,000 fishing boats were smashed to driftwood.
A horrible famine began and disease spread. Foreign relief rotted on the docks or was sold at impossible prices by graft corrupted politicians. West Pakistani soldiers commandeered the relief supplies for their own profit.
Yahya Khan was dictator in West Pakistan. Little or no relief was sent to the desperate people of East Pakistan. Graft was everywhere. The government went in fear of the desperate people and expressed this fear in a widespread abuse and guilty hostility toward the stricken population.
The countryside was placed under martial law. In the cities the students and labor unions had collisions with the Army. On 7th December new elections, the first in almost a generation were called. There were fully 28 political parties competing against the party of the rightist dictatorship. The dictatorship reasoned that political activity would defuse the unrest and bring into being a coalition cooperative with the central authority. They hoped that this would reverse the growing slide into uncontrollable anarchy.
A man named Sheikh Mujibar Rahman formed a coalition called the Awami League and won the election. He took 160 of the 162 seats. In East Pakistan his grassroots support was almost a total mandate. In the West Pakistan elections a man named Ali Bhutto won 82 of the 138 seats and became First Minister for the dictatorship. The National Assembly’s 467 seats were divided with 2/3 going to East Pakistan and the remainder to the dictatorship.
Bhutto wanted Islamic Socialism (which shows you what sort of mind he had). He wanted power centralized in West Pakistan and a strong army. He was the dictator’s puppet. The Army had remained nuetral during the election, but such a situation would hardly last. Bhutto wanted an offensive war with India over the Kashmir region.
Rahman advocated Bengali domination of the National Assembly. He had the votes so why not?He also wanted control of at least 60% of all Pakistani revenues resources most of which were in West Pakistan private control. What this meant was that all the bosses were in West Pakistan and all the bossed were in East Pakistan. Rahman wanted dominant control of all revenue resources in East Pakistan. That meant absolute power in his hands in East Pakistan. He wanted a “controlled” Army and emphasizes provincial over central authority.
Rahman called for a new Constitution and wanted the seat of the National Assembly moved from West Pakistan to the capitol of East Pakistan,Dacca..He ignored the Kashmir issue between West Pakistan and India and proposed instead that increased trade with India would heal their national frictions.
He denied West Pakistan any rights in the ministries of taxation, trade and foreign aid. He allowed them only partial control of foreign affairs, defense, and currency.
General Tikka Khan was commander in chief of the Army. He backed Bhutto. Only 10% of the Army was Bengali, that is East Pakistani. And all of the senior officer corps was West Pakistani.
The Bengali majority in East Pakistan spearheaded by the students and the labor unions backed Rahman. Bhutto called out the Army and disbanded the Assembly. The East Pakistani Judiciary refused to swear in the West Pakistani army officer delegated by the dictatorship to establish martial law.
On the 3rd of March General Akbar Khan brought a regiment of Baluchi troops into the East Pakistani port of Chittagong aboard the armed vessel, Swat. It was loaded with ammunition. The union stevedores barricaded the docks and set up a barracks. They resisted and refused to unload the vessel. A General Strike spread throughout the whole of East Pakistan.
Quietly Colonel Firman Ali Rao flew into Dacca from the capitol city of Karachi in West Pakistan.The Colonel was from Central Army Intelligence and quickly he assumed command of all domestic and military intelligence in East Pakistan. The Colonel is a dapper little fellow who fancys himself a wit. He is a physical coward and a sexual pervert.
He sexually abuses young males and is a sadist, particularly toward older women.
Roadblocks begin to appear. Roads are dug up to hinder the Army’s movements. Bridges are destroyed, and troops begin to find that all manner of supplies are witheld. The troops begin to fire on the populace.
At exactly 11:25 on the night of the 25th of March four American-built M24 tanks, followed by two platoons of Punjabi Infantry surround the sleeping dormitorys of Dacca University. The tanks open up at 50 yards with 90mm. shells. This fire is kept up for five minutes in an uninterupted barrage.The sleeping students have been given no warning whatever. Their dormitorys are turned into flaming bloody charnel houses. The troops are then sent in with the bayonet to kill the staggering, bleeding survivors. The unarmed faculty, janitors, servants, and sweepers along with all the wives and children are herded into the searchlights mounted on the tanks. Then they are all machinegunned to death.
Raiding parties spread out into the surrounding neighborhoods armed with deathlists. Those on it are shot immediately. All over the city intellectuals…and anyone who owned a telephone was considered an intellectual..were rounded up and shot. Newspapers and other communication media are shelled and burned. The entire city seems to be in flames.Machinegun fire from armored personnel carriers is heard everywhere in the darkened streets.Ten thousand people are dead by morning. By noon of the following day crows are gorging themselves and are unable to fly. The dead lie everywhere unburied. Throughout the week pigs and dogs feast on the corpses.
First the scavengers feed on the hands and the faces then they eat the genitals as the corpse bloats. The birds finish what the pigs and dogs begin .
With the Army’s attack on the populace full civil war had broken out. The West Pakistanis were determined to imprison or kill all who were not circumcised and therefore Moslems. A common sight was to see laughing Moslem soldiers dragging a weeping Hindu civilian with a bloody nose into the street, pulling down his pants, and shooting him in the groin. This is Islam at its best.
Tanks and troops surrounded Rahman’s home and began firing into it killing his children. It was 1:30 a.m. Rocket fire hit the telephone exchange. The vultures were the happiest creatures in town.
Dacca around the center is spacious with parks and government buildings for about six blocks in all directions. Beyond that except for a few cementblock and stucco suburbs having paved streets and electricity, the remainder of the metropolis is a swamp 25 square miles in size consisting of shantys, piles of feces, and trash.
Rahman was taken alive and disappeared into Akbar Rao’s prison at the race course. After interrogation Bengalis with education were taken to the brick factory and shot. Some 500 fly-covered corpses were thrown into a sewer ditch beside the factory. The sons of the Prophet are brave men and bold.
Refugees began fleeing the city in the tens of thousands at first light. Word spread all over East Pakistan in that single day.Armed vehicles moved out of the city firing into the crowds. Thirty thousand more civilians were dead within the week. Whole villages were exterminated. The Hindu men were separated from the women by truckloads of armed Moslem soldiers. The men were forced to dig a large pit and then were shot and thrown into it. Then the troops began the systematic rape of the women. By the 25th of March a campaign of genocide using American supplied ammunition and tanks was well under way against the Bengali rural population.
The people began to fight back. The Mukhti Bahini or Free Men began to come into existence. At first it formed around local police units who went over to the people and around the Bengali Coast Guard on the Ganges coast.In urban areas the people began to acquire guns by storming police stations or by picking off isolated soldiers. The people did not at first know how to use these guns, but they began to learn. Some Army units with Bengali rankers mutinied and went over to the people. At night mobs attacked Pak motor transport in the countryside. Desperate hordes with nothing to lose destroyed bridges, telegraph wires, dug up railroad beds and sabotaged rolling stock.
The massacres continued throughout the Summer and into the Fall. Thirty million people took to the roads headed south, away from the citys and into the countryside. Any Hindu woman old enough to be raped by a Moslem soldier was fair game. All Bengali males were to be shot. Murdered.
In the countryside young men took authority. Pak sentries were castrated or had their throats cut. The Mukhti Bahini sent cadres from village to village to organize and mobilize the resistance. Arms, except for cane knives and bamboo spears, were almost non-existant. A firearm was priceless. Any man who carried one had to kill to get it and keep killing to keep it.
Pak units were increasingly vulnerable to night mass attack. The Army had to guard itself constantly from snipers and ambush. Any soldier taken alive could expect to be hacked to pieces like pigs. Fighting was brave and vicious to the point of insanity.
Soon the Pak soldiers were overextended in a population that ounumbered them 23 to 1. In three months, by August the population had gone on the offensive. A new Bangladesh flag was being flown openly in about a quarter of the villages. Guerrilla espionage and sabotage were excellent. The entire population was murderous. The Mukhti Bahini were better led and better armed. One Pak Army commander was beheaded with 30 of his Moslem bodyguard in a daring daylight attack. The Bahini had their own captured tanks and their own radio stations.
The Pak Army still held Dacca and its airfield, but the situation was deteriorating every day.I estimated there were 100,000 young men actively fighting in Bahini units. But only 3 brigades had guns.
.
Ten percent of all the educated Bengalis were dead by summer. Between the 14th of April and the end of July fighting increased every day. The Paks fielded an Army consisting of five divisions. By July the Bahini fielded a hardcore of 15,000 men armed and trained. A battalion of them passed through my hands in the refugee recruit camps.
The Bahini set up a provisional government on the 10th of April in the name of Rahman who was now known to be alive in a West Pak prison.
Nine million refugees were pouring across the frontier into India. Waldo and I moved out of our place in Calcutta and headed up to the Indian Army staging area in Khrishnagar just north of the Boyra salient. The Army was setting up refugee settlements near the Ganges. The camps were the homes for the pitiful survivors of the war. When we got them they were sick and starving, often carrying their dead with them. Others had been left behind to die in the ditches. You could follow a trail of tragedy for sixty miles, the dead beneath the trees that had been picked clean of leaves and bark for as high as a man could reach.
India set up a thousand refugee camps. Housing consisted of industrial sized concrete drainpipe sections, pre-fab stables, and piles of trash. The monsoon came in May and flooded the feces littered fields. Cholera infected ground water spread an epidemic of death. But the birthrate replaced the dead every 83 days. One hundred inches of rain fell in the monsoon, mold grew on everything. There were roaches the size of rats, and rats the size of buffalo. Malaria mosquitoes rose so thick in the swamps that they blotted out the moon. On April 4th Waldo and I were ahead of the Indian Army and across the river into Bahini controlled countryside. We were giving directions to the refugees staging out of the fighting. The monsoon season had not yet begun , but it would in about another week. I carried a 9mm. submachinegun. Waldo said we did not need it. I told him to tell it to Jesus.
India around Calcutta in the summer of 71 was a nightmare. We had 9.8 million people in the camps . They were diseased, wounded, starving.. they had cholera and dysentery in epidemic proportions. You could listen to the noise around the clock. The camps stretched to the horizon in every direction.Back in the States nobody even heard about it or knew it was happening. Nixon was supplying the Pak dictatorship with all the ammunition it needed. He sent $3.8 million worth that summer. Thank God the Paks were so corrupt they never used it with any brains.
I had my hands full doing several things at once, legal and illegal. Who cares. Right or wrong. Who cares.
It was where I spent my youth, and where I became who I am. And I am who I say I am.
“You sir are a liar, a thief and a scoundrel. And I challenge you to a dual. Pistols at dawn”.
This is fun isn’t it.
I have a hotdog for you Euan, honey, and some curly crinkly saurkraut on the bun. Have some more beans, sugah.
Here, let me get you a bigger spoon.
And you can say BS all you like. Repeal the Law of Gravity, Euan. Call it BS.
You have already been given a good link to a writer who has published an article based upon the title of the book and the writer clearly states that it was a true life story of a young man who left a monastry to become a Marine and fight in VietNam. It’s all there in black and white. And he should know. He has actually read it. The book doesn’t belong in the fiction section. To do so is a mistake. It is autobiographical.
You can still get copies of my books on Ebay. There are copies still around for sale. Want me to direct you?
Start with The Monk and the Marines by Bantam. It comes in paperback but I wouldn’t exactly call it a work of fiction. After you read that I will give you the title of the next one.
The same Faust whos writings are posted here, also wrote the Monk and the Marines Euan. They are one and the same. You saw and read what I wrote…. I can not invent such things unless they come out of me of their own character. No imagination can imitate such stories and concepts without the direct experience of the things I speak about. They can not be a mask. No one can imagine such a mask. It is my face here. I am real. The truth has a distictive taste, Euan. It has a ring of quality. The human mind has a natural affinity for the truth and it is natural to the mind as wholesome food is to the mouth and the system that consumes it.
I am real. I am too wierd not to be. Life itself is far stranger than fiction. And far more complex. None of us are simple.
Faust really was once a young monk in an enclosed Contemplative Order. That is the truth. The Order was the Cistercians of the Strict Observance… although they only put that on their jelly jars most of the time. OCSO is what they usually write on their documents. I went to St. Mary’s Seminary in the United States near Baltimore, but was expelled, as you know. But I was able to transfer my two years class credits to the Sino Soviet Institute at George Washington Univ. in Washington DC. My grades were quite high. I had a 3.4 average. I am a graduate of George Washington University and took my Masters and Doctorate in the State Department/CIA Sino-Soviet Institute just down from the White House.
I got a degree in Asian Politics and Languages. I volunteered for VietNam after taking the intern class at Langley. I was assigned to the US Marines in Quang Ngai for a year. I returned for my Master’s and was sent again as a volunteer to serve in Quang Tin in VietNam as a liason to General Kelly for the CIA.
We might all benefit one another by sharing who and what we are and our personal experiences and the things we have done in our lives. But many of the posters may not proud of themselves as people and they possibly even resent being quite “normal” and coming from ordinary backrounds and living relatively ordinary lives.
What do YOU do for a living?
And now the first one to jump up and be huffy will be?
Tell us about your childhood and the relationship with your Mother perhaps. Open up. My initiative with you should extend to an offer of friendship. Meet me on those grounds.
Fuast is REAL Euan.
I am not a particularly likeable man. But I am not stupid. I have a degree of wealth and I do not pay a lot of taxes on it.
I hiked in last night after my trip to Washington DC. I am back home this morning. I just emptied my cup of morning coffee. Back on the mountain. The house is warming up. It is icy outside still. The birds know I am back but I have nothing to give them. I will make some bread in a little bit. I bought a lot of stuff in DC. I also applied my name to a list SOCOM has for a new Special Unit Rumsfeld is going to begin forming and training this coming June. I have no idea what my chances are. They will choose 1,500 out of 8,000 applicants and graduate maybe 43% of that. So it will be a small regiment or a big battalion for anti-guerrilla work. Lot of language speakers, weapons experts, lot of techs in electronics, Special Forces men, Rangers and Marines. Mature and experienced men with good records and high physical fitness. NCO’s and some officers. I am going to act as if it is a big maybe and get my garden in anyway in March.
The learning curve of the Iraqi insurgency has been very slow and the same learning curve for the American units has been quite high. Let me explain.
Anti-guerrilla units are going to be developed by the Pentagon for use in Arab countries. Iraq will provide the US with thousands of Arabic speakers and we will be using Iraqis in our new American units. Men who perform well with us will get American citizenship.
Faust hangs out at the Alabwa Arab forum, Euan, with all the disgruntled America-hating Lefties who suck up to the “Ya Allah!” Arabs. Most are a just a bunch of intellectual cripples with no imaginations and with little grip on the real world. If you want answers to your questions Euan, and you do want to know about those patents don’t you Euan. To use a phrase, it is an itch you want to scratch. It would validate Faust’s existance.. yes? Ask old Faust on the Al Bawaba. The Al Bawaba is where this old vampire hangs out like a bat in a belfry. There will be no more postings on this thread Euan. This is the last one. And yes, I am probably crazy, but I get paid for my work. Psychotic might cover it. And it pays very well. I only do the work I like.
Questions, questions Euan. Al Bawaba is my hang-out on the Net. Present yourself and ask nicely and you may get your answers. The old monk Faust really is an accommodatiing old soul, once you get to know him.
Faust,
If you’re so accommodating, why don’t you just answer the two very simple questions?
In case you’ve forgotten:
What are the patent numbers for your rifle silencers?
Why was your “autobiography” published as “a fictional novel of the Vietnam War,” to quote one out-of-print book site?
Why is it so hard to answer them? Hmm?
You give me links to one man who thinks your book – if indeed you were the author – is true, but he can’t recall your name. One man’s opinion doesn’t make it fact. I can give you several links to sites which list it as fiction – including, for your delectation, eBay.
Please answer the questions if you wish to be taken seriously. Do not try to deflect them by asking about me – I will talk about me when you satisfy me that YOU are who you say you are. So far you haven’t.
EG
Faust,
I re-read your note about no more comments in this thread.
I take this as a tacit admission that you cannot, in fact, back up anything you say. I did look at Al Bawaba, and it appears you are as much of a blogroach there as you have tried to be here. There, too, people have commented that you post pointless rambles and cannot back up what you say.
Post some checkable evidence and people might believe you. Do it here and I might believe you. Otherwise, no – you just show yourself up to be a fake.
EG
You read my posts? It’s good history, Euan.
Killing Timmy is NOT a made up story Euan? I really did do that, you know. I have killed so many people I have no way of counting it even from memory any more.
The first man I killed was a farm boy, a teenager, I am not sure of his age. It is hard to tell with Asians. He was 16 or 18, who knows. He had a Carbine rifle. I shot him four times at point blank range with a 12 Guage Savage shotgun, what we called a Trenchgun, a real “blow your head” hate weapon. I was supposed to carry only a .45 pistol according to the Geneva Convention but I got a Trenchgun because it was a close work weapon and most of our ambushes were short range close work. Most of our kills were inside 35 yards or closer.
You don’t know how to judge men like me Euan, because you have never lived like I have or been in a dirty war and involved in killing on a daily basis, being immersed in it, forced to do it every day to keep going, to stay alive.
I can remember we killed sixty man in two weeks and left them all over the place where we were so that after about three weeks the whole place stank so bad the buzzards and birds who were eating them even began to faint. I can remember one place there were nearly 4,000 dead VietNamese and we bulldozed a big open pit and tried to get the stink down by throwing all the bodies in the pit. But even with a layer of dirt over it it was right out there between us and the river. We were guarding the ONLY bridge still intact. And the rats got in the bodies and the whole place just HEAVED with rats at night.
I used to have godawful dreams and they went on for six years before I got better and was able to deal with it. And I look at your being “taken” by the incident with poor little Timmy and I have to try and understand you, because you can’t even begin to comprehend me.
The girls used to call me “BOOM” and “GODDAMN”, that was my name to them. I used to swear and say “Goddamn” with every sentence. No one would spend the entire night in bed with me. They all got out after I went to sleep.
I always woke up and they had headed for the street. I am not asking for sympathy from a cockroach like you. I don’t think your approval or disapproval would make any difference to what I am.
I used to dream until I dreamed it all away eventually. And the dreams went away when I became empty and no dreams could ever form in me again. You can’t kill a dead man. I can go on forever, kid. I have become forever. You can’t possibly begin to imagine what I am like.
I KNEW Timmy. She was a good young girl. Shy modest and thoroughly Asian.
She spoke a decent English and she was my interpreter. She worked for the VC. I knew that but I never brought her to account for it. I should have but I was kind and I cared about her as a person. I didn’t know it was her until I rolled her over in the dark. She had documents in her jacket. The two men with her were Cadre, one of them was a paymaster and he had a big roll of money on him in piastres.
They were pay records and good intelligence. We got names from them, nothing was coded. We were able to get a lot of names and we got a lot of people from the names. We learned a lot and we had to move fast to get them all in a single sweep. But we got dozens. You are a person who thinks in empathy I assume as long as it is harmful to the United States. You won’t have any empathy for me. I don’t expect it of you. You are too shallow and stupid.
In a real world competition between me and my kind and you and yours… I would catch you like I caught Timmy. And you would cease to exist. That real world still exists out there Euan. The United States is waging that war right now. And Euan, good guys and bad guys don’t really exist. Only guys who win and who stay alive matter. The men who die are just smears and things to put in a grave. They disappear and are forgotten. I have survived over and over. Statistically I am impossible. By the law of averages I should have been dead long ago. But it is never me. I keep going and like my namesake… not mad, Euan. Damned.
I started out with eight other men and they all died in a single year… except me. And then I went for seven more years and all the time men were dying all around me and I never died. So your appraisal of me will seem less than edifying. With my luck I will probably outlive you.
I really do exist, Euan. I am out there walking in the world. And perhaps next June I will be back in uniform and back in the war. Probably teaching and training other men in the skills I possess. It is what I am.
The stories I have written here are genuine and real Euan. There is too much information and detail in them to otherwise.
I was there. I KNOW VietNam, Sout East and Central Asia and the Middle East so well Euan because I lived there once and fought in a couple of dirty little wars that are footnotes in the history books now. The details are not published and you will find that this is true The STYLE is mine. AND the time frame is the period in which the events actually occured and that was way before the Internet.
I write my own stuff. The stuff I use is my own views.
You don’t like my things? Bad writing or just that it comes from me. It’s ME you resent, Euan. This white haired trembling old man on his last legs sitting by the fire. Of course, I could be a 16 year old girl with a cat, or a deranged fool needing medical help as you say, but what is your really best guess.
It is EXTREMELY difficult to make this stuff up Euan.
I have all the time in the world. Yes? And how do I enjoy being in the Leisure class, Euan? Money? Not needing to put on a suit and tie and go to nine to five? Maybe I do own a big piece of land on Blood Mountain and can sit on the porch perhaps?
Not today, thank you very much. It is bright and very COLD today. I need to make lunch and put some more wood on the fire. I am wearing a blue flannel shirt and have flannel sheets at night. I have made the bed and I have a pile of books and DVD’s to put away. I bought about $3,000 worth of books and stuff in DC and brought them back with me. The M Street Intelligence Library has all the course load texts for the CIA University courses for the Interns and all the reading lists posted for various Analyst Professors in DO. I like to keep up. I also talk to the interns at CIA who are working on their Theses on various subjects. All you need is one or two Intern e-mail addresses and then you introduce yourself and they share their friends and sources if you are nimble. I am old at the business.
You don’t like me because you DO sense I am exactly what I say I am and that scares you. I am right in there and I don’t have to play games with a mask. My mask is permanent and I never slip. The movie character, Hannibal could always talk to Clarisse and the FBI could even identify the cologne… but they couldn’t catch him because he always drank from a glass using a silk hankerchief on his hand. And he could stab you in the groin in fractions of a second. That is a Persona that got my attention.
I am a more direct person in real life. No Italian cuisine and Univerity chair in Florentine Antiquities. I stick to what I know.
And Euan, it isn’t a failing to see the obvious. It is obvious that a PERSONA for me is a complete waste of time. My real face is too close to my real face, Faust is a name. Aa good nome-de-plume. You know I have another. My REAL name. But both the name and the face are an old man who is typing this to you at this very moment. I am not a junior in highschool. I am not shuffling down the hall in Cleveland to check the mail in my knitted sweater and slippers.
I am about 200 pounds and just at over six feet and I can slip a mag on an automatic pistol one handed. I read and I cook and I run almost every day. I am a normal human being in many respects. But I am not a normal human being.
And what you see of me is pretty accurate. I am waiting for Spring. I like George Bush. An Extraordinary Ordinary Man. I like the elections in Iraq. I piss on Liberal Progressives and on pie-in-the-sky socialist economics. I have a lot of money, a lot of land, and I don’t do any work I don’t like and I come high for my specialty.
You and I could be friends but you lack the objectivity to overcome your bias. I am a first class bastard, but I am very smart one.
I am an old man and YOU KNOW IT. You can sense that I am old and experienced. I am too long in the tooth for youthful naivety. How could I fake the face I present? I am too well informed and I cover too many details to be anything any imagination could conjure.
You can call it BS but that is just because it appalls you and you are afraid of it.
Christ said in the Gospel that if you don’t want to listen to his Words, then look at his DEEDS. Look at me, Euan.
HOW would I be consistently detailed and know all that I know, express it as I do, and not have it as a reality? Do you know how much EFFORT it takes to maintain a false Persona, Euan. I would spend TWENTY TIMES as much time researching a false face as I devote to what I put up here. I don’t have that amount of time just for you punks. It would be much EASIER to be myself. Am I incredible? Yes, you weak little weasel. I am.
I have lived a long life and I did what I pleased. If you live long enough you finally become who you really are too. I really am the son of a US Navy fighter pilot and a Southern farm girl. My Daddy did fly out of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal against the Japanese on Rabaul during WWII. He was right there.
I did grow up all across the Pacific as a child. And I did live in London as a young boy when my Father was attached to European NATO for a period of time. My Daddy was in Japan during the Occupation and I went to school with Japanese kids and learned the language. I also developed a life long love of Kendo and pursue it today as my favorite sport.
My brother was 16 years in Communist China and I did serve in the US Marines in Quang Ngai Province after being kicked out of a Contemplative Monastery after being kicked out of a Seminary for training priests. I FAILED abjectly at being a saint. But it did lead to the US Marines and I did rather well there.
The Marines paid for my University degree and I re-upped after I got my Masters at the Sino-Soviet Institute in George Washington Univ. in DC in Communist Political Thought and Languages. I did an internship with CIA and went back over to VietNam and was assigned as a serviceman as a cover to be a bodyguard to the family of the CIA head of Station in DaNang.
I got into a lot of trouble and I got a reputation which brought me to the attention of COVOPS and my career such as it was took a turn away from the high road and I was labeled as a Knuckledragger and became a driver for a man who later became notorious. His name was Victor Marchetti. It is all esoteric to young kids like you. You simply don’t remember those times. BUT I DO!
I lived them.
I met and liked James Jesus Angleton and I was assigned to be with him when he “retired”. He had headed CIA COVOPS and you can’t really be retired from that. You know too much. They gave him a rich stipend and allowed him to spend his declining years eating lunches in Georgetown and talking to some people and raising Orchids in a private Greenhouse on his Virginia estate. He approved me as a “companion” and we sometimes wrote my reports together on his day to day activities together. As a trained Navy Corpsman/Marine medic, I was his watcher. Both sides of the Political spectrum were satisfied.
Marchetti left the Agency and retired alive and opened a Body Repair Shop in Virginia and kept a low profile. He lives on a nice gated property with dogs to keep the unwelcome people out.
I went back to Asia and got into the last days of the war in VietNam as it spread into Laos. I barely got out alive. It was the late 60’s and becoming the early 70’s. I wound up in a sidelined area just in time for it to go hot. Then I was back in the game for BanglaDesh. In the Agency there were a lot of “suits” and the whole place was being plowed by the American Congress. It was all very political and house cleaning was the order of the day.
I spent a couple of seasons on my own in India and acquired two children by adoption. I was looking to become a different soul and was trying to find out what it all had meant. Mid Life, you might call it. I drove a truck for an East German fellow hauling 81mm ammo up to Dara from Lahore just in time for the Afghan War. The CIA I knew in those days was corrupt and living in a brothel full of underage girls.
It was just across the street fom a bar called Dean’s.
Did you get all that, Euan? Now go dig it up. Google it Euan. And gentlemen, I STEAL. I do it for a living and I SELL what I steal and it gets me a good bit of money. I have stolen a LOT of very valuable stuff in my life. I am rich because I have stolen from rich people and then killed them. I stole a monster of a lot of money from a PAK Colonel Firman Ali who was the head of Inteeligence for the PAKS in Dacca. How would I know who was head of ISI in Dacca, Euan, you little priss? See if you can verify my claim. See if you can find something on Crofter in Oman. He was there for fifty years and three Sultans.
I got a job in the Arab Gulf and went to work for Oman and a man named Crofter who was Palace Security for Sultan Quabus Said bin Taimur. I became a “Moslem” and was assigned to work on the Djebel against a bunch of Marxist rebels allied with antiroyalists from various places. I had money I had made in BanglaDesh and had kept secret because it was dirty money. I got involved in politics and the CIA was a pain in the ass on that. I also got a wife who was absolutely loyal to me first and who didn’t betray me to either her family or to the Sultan’s security.
I applied for a “Vacation” and took my wife and my money and my children back to the United States in 1974. They let me go and I didn’t come back. I went into business in the US and made money. My wife got preganant and we had two more children. I was happy.
The only problem with that is you can’t get away from yourself. I have problems with being what I am. It is not a good idea to be someone who kills people and live a normal life. I tried to compensate for my “leanings”. I did contract work at first just a little and then more and more often. I was gone a lot. My wife raised the children very well. I gave her everything she wanted. She wanted a big house and a big yard full of trees and a big garden and a place to sit in the shade and watch the children in the pool.
I found I became reclusive and that I didn’t like to be home very much. I liked my work. I liked what I did. I finally just had to admit what I was.
I moved up in the mountains after praying about it at the monastery for months. I made full confession as well as I was able and I decided to become who I was. I live alone up here in the mountains for a reason.
Now if you think some highschool kid is making all this up… think of what you just read. Junior doesn’t think like this. I really have lived all this and I am living it now.
When this so-called “War on Terrorism” war broke out with Sept.11th, I was eating my breakfast and I stood up and knew I would have work for years. I began getting people to back me and I put together a Contract that got me into Kuwait. From there I parleyed my skills into an Army Unit doing Long Range Patrols into Iraq for Intelligence and maps. I went as deep as 150 miles into Iraq three times. I have sat outside the Basrah Airport at the end of the Causeway and looked at the planes land and recorded the train traffic going back and forth across the marshes. I have been so close to Karbala I could hear the dogs bark at night. I have slept in the shadow of the Oil refinerys in Jubair and Rumaila on the Great Hawt lake. I have been there.
I was in Baghdad when it fell. I was pressured to sign up for a two year commission and turned it down. It may go against me on this new contract for the new unit I have signed up for for anti-Guerrilla work and will know if I am accepted next June. We will begin training then… if I get in. There are 8,000 names on the list. 1,500 will be chosen and only 43% will be graduated.
I will have to meet high fitness standards and I will have to accept military discipline and do what they assign me to do. I don’t think I will be in one of the combat units, I am too old, but I am hoping to be assigned to their training unit. I feel I can do good work there and I think that Rumsfeld’s initiative in forming this unit will pay off big.
Imagine a unit that speaks the language of the country it invades. Imagine a cadre of the most hardened highly trained men with combat experience.
They take you alive when they need intel. And they show you a box of razor blades and a pair of pliers and they strip you naked and you better believe you are going to tell them what they need to know.
And if you don’t like it tell your mommy, like I said.
They are not subject to the CIA oversight committees and they answer directly to the Pentagon and they do projects specifically for the President of the United States.
Rumsfeld is putting together a new kind of Commando Unit, part Special Forces, part Army Ranger, thick with specialist who are cross trained in all sorts of combat and communications skills, lots of language people and lots of mature older men who have leadership skills as well as unique combat records.
The real kicker is that it will be used privately by the President through Rumsfeld outside the CIA oversight jurisdictions. Congress is completely cut out of the loop.
These men are being trained from a list that reads like a legend. They are the best of a couple of generations and all the wars America can pick from…the leanest and the wisest and the quickest men from a long line of the best available. They are going to be Anti-Guerrilla and they will all be manhunters.
Just a bad dream. How do you fight a war? Put some panties on your head and go boo? The shopping at the Mall is down until tax time rolls around. Have a nice day, shoppers. The dildoes and dope are on Aisle six.
I have already turned down three jobs with Blackwater’s down in Florida. I didn’t see myself in their Jackson’s organization. Being in an Army unit is not a confortable choice for me particularly, but the opportunity is better. I can expect decent money and I can probably make money on the side too. The men they are going to choose will be my kind.
Sound like I am seventeen? Euan. If I am seventeen year old kid or just making all this up off the top of my head, then I have the best imagination you ever saw. I have four grown up children Euan and five grandchildren. I can still run fifteen miles and kick you to death and eat your face.
I know what I believe and I know WHY I believe it. I don’t have any illusions about what the United States is up to…I want it to happen. I am doing something to MAKE it happen. The rest of you can read about life in the newspapers. If I were that kind of man I wouldn’t have lived like I have. And I am still ALIVE because I don’t dwell in BS. I can deliver.
I am sitting here and it is cold as a witches tits outside. I will just have to wait until maybe June and wish for the best. I am very pleased with George Bush and I approve of what he has accomplished. I am certain he is going to be right up there with Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. And when you look at Mount Rushmore… think of George.
U.S. commandos are hunting for secret nuclear and chemical weapons sites and other targets in Iran, and have a plan to turn the hard-line Islamic country into the next front in the war on terrorism.
Iran next kiddies. You can sense it coming, can’t you?
The War is going to get bigger.
And if you don’t like it, TOO BAD!
I think we can now safely say that this thread is dead now, so if you want to talk to Faust, you do it Al Bawaba. Do feel free to call Faust a liar there. Faust is a regular there. You can deny it all you want kid, and say my life never happened, I really couldn’t care less.
“Blah, blah, blah, not real, blah, blah, making it all up, blah, blah, liar”.
Whatever…
However you and I have lived is utterly irrelevant to the point at issue, which is that you made two major claims BUT refused on request to provide any information which might explain the inconsistency with observed fact in the first claim (about “your” book), and which might verify absolutely the second claim (the patents).
Because you refuse to do these two very simple things, the reasonable person would be forced to the conclusion that you are lying. You can easily refute this by posting the patent numbers, but you won’t. You could provide an explanation of why “your autobiography” was in fact published as a work of fiction, but you won’t. In themselves, these actions (or lack thereof) are extremely suspicious.
Actually, it isn’t. It is not hard to take factual events, dates, places and people and weave a fictional story around them. Many novels are in fact written in exactly that way.
There is no credible reason why you could not post the patent numbers for your rifle silencers if you really did hold them. Patents are not secret, they are public documents. If you posted the numbers, I could check with the USPTO and verify your tale for myself. That alone would go a long way to making your stories more plausible. The mere fact that you won’t do this is the strongest possible evidence that you are a liar and making the whole thing up. What are you afraid of? If you hold patents, prove it. If not, then stop making up fantasy tales and get a life.
I said to you before – prove me wrong.
You haven’t done so, you show no indication of doing so, and I most strongly suspect this is because you can’t do it. You made the whole thing up.
EG
If Iran’s goal is to preserve Islam, it would develop nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible, disperse them around their country so that no single successful attack could get rid of them all, and begin using them as a lever against Zionism in the Middle East. When the Israelis rear up with nuclear threats, that is the signal for the Iranians to attack with a first strike. If the Israelis strike first, then the Iranians may still have enough nuclear firepower to destroy Israel.
Folks, Israel is not the land of the good guys. Israel has been _the problem_ for the last half-century, not Iran. Not Iraq, either. America has been on the wrong side of every war since 1916. Although I do fear what nuclear armed Arabs might someday do to the White countries of America and Europe, that same threat already exists, and it comes from Israel. Israel has already threatened to nuclear bomb Europe’s cities if Europe annoys the Zionists too much. The possible threat that you fear from Arabs is here already in the form of a Jewish nuclear fist.
So if we are not ourselves resolute enough to destroy Israel and end its long record of espionage, assassination, violation of human rights laws, illegal possession of nuclear weapons, grotesque aggression upon its Arab neighbors, constant lies in the international press, torture of civilians, bulldozing of occupied homes, manipulation of foreign governments through media control and banking strategems, and antisemitic (anti-Arab) racism, then let us permit one of the other mid-East countries the ability to do it for us. Iran would be a good choice.
Jerry, your website is just so much conspiracy theory gibberish. And as you are actually arguing for the collective nuclear slaughter of all the people of Israel, Jew and Arab alike, forgive me if I just write you off and just another nutjob.
hack the (1st year or 2nd year)papers 2005year
all papers hack 1st year or 2nd year