India releases names, photos of Mumbai gunmen
MUMBAI, India (AP) - Indian police have released the names of the nine suspected Islamic militants killed during last month’s attack on Mumbai.
Chief police investigator Rakesh Maria gave the gunmen’s names and aliases at a briefing Tuesday. He showed photographs of eight of the men. A photo of the ninth suspect was not released because his body was too badly burned.
Maria listed the districts and hometowns of the gunmen. All were from Pakistan.
He did not say how police had tracked down their hometowns. However, police have been interrogating the lone surviving gunman.
India has blamed the Pakistani-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and demanded Pakistan take action.
This is how you fight a war against a nuclear power. Low intensity, soft targets, high terror, carnage, and brutality, but with enough cut-outs and fall guys to maintain deniability. You use the targets’ media as your force multiplier and you support a self-hating fifth column within your target ready to blame the victim, blow smoke, and counsel appeasement. It doesn’t look like the mass warfare of the past, but make no mistake, it is war.
In 1945, two of the most militaristic warrior nations ever to exist laid down their weapons, and the world was changed. How was this miracle achieved? Force. Japan and Germany were pushed to the brink of annihilation as nations and as peoples. They stared into the abyss, and they chose life, and peace. Japan and Germany today are peaceful bureaucratic welfare states that their ancestors would hardly recognize.
How many times are we going to need to have the lesson repeated before we learn? How many more innocents must die before we’re willing to admit war is being waged against us? When will we suspend the black-hearted butchers of Islam over the edge of the abyss and make them choose?
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Great analysis. Sometimes I could swear I’m reading Bill when I read your stuff. That’s a compliment.
As I keep pointing out, the Japan/Germany solution doesn’t apply. Islam is far too decentralized–like Communism, it is not a country. Do we bomb Holland (and a large number of other countries) because of their large Muslim minority? If not, Islam are free to continue to peck us to death from their safe havens surrounded by non-Muslims. Nuking a few Islam-governed countries like Saudi Arabia will not solve the problem, as they have clearly shown time and time again that pour encourager les autres doesn’t work on them.
So we have a problem.
In order to deal with guerrilla warfare/terrorism, it is almost always necessary to establish a police state, which of course comes with it’s own set of problems. It’s standard operating procedure for Communists to force just such a reaction in the hope the citizens will rebel against the police state and leave a power gap for them to fill.
Solution? Beats me. My guess is we either thrash around weakly while they take over, we descend into a police state, or we crack and annihilate every Islamic-governed country on the planet…then live with guerrilla warfare/terrorism until we establish a police state.
So…Islam or police state.
Here’s hoping for the Singularity.
Not really. They need money and support like any other group. They get it from state sponsors. Destroy the state sponsors and the terrorists will dry up. There will always be some level of thuggery. That doesn’t mean you can’t destroy the worst actors.
Thanks for saving me the trouble, Barry.
Toren has been reading DP from day one, so he can’t be ignorant of what I’ve been saying almost from day one: Destroy the regimes that arm, train, finance, shelter, and use, and we will destroy Islamofascist terrorism as an effective enemy.
Since we have not done that, and Toren offers no evidence that my analysis is not accurate, and since history directly contravenes his thesis (cf. the end of “endemic indigenous communist revolutionary terror movements”) almost immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, I have to wonder what the hell he is talking about.
I’m with you on this one, Bill. Take away the money and the safe havens and all you’ve got left are malcontents - and humanity will always have a few of those.
“You’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists - and we kill terrorists” was always the right answer. Too bad the President didn’t see it through.
I recommend this essay by Larry Niven, “Why Men Fight Wars, and What You Can Do About It.” It’s not complete, but it does lead in a useful direction. In order to get an enemy to change their behavior, they need to feel defeated. They need to be convinced that the consequences of further violent behavior will be more painful than they can bear. It works best if they’ve had some physical privation to push the lesson home, but that’s not fundamentally necessary. What is necessary is the total conviction that more fighting will just lead to more defeat.
A great book that gives an example of exactly this kind of thinking is April 1865: The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik.
Winik goes through the decisions made by Lee, Johnston, and Forrest as they chose formal surrender rather than descent into guerrilla war at the close of the War Between the States. Jefferson Davis and those around him wanted the armies of the South to disperse and move to asymmetric warfare, but Lee and Johnston specifically decided against it — to the point that Johnston ignored an order to continue fighting. They felt that the power of the Union was such that a protracted guerrilla war in the South would make Sherman’s March to the Sea look like a day in the park. It would result in the absolute destruction of the Southern States.
Lee expressed some remorse at his decision when he saw the effects of Reconstruction, but the Confederate generals explicitly made the decision to accept defeat and hope for an orderly restoration of the United States rather than descend into the kind of warfare that plagued Kansas and Missouri.
The Islamic terrorists have made the other choice. They will always interpret half measures as victories, and the Islamic states will continue to support them as long as they can do it safely. Only when the Islamic states face the real threat of destruction and the terrorist organizations face annihilation will they consider any other alternative.
Obama’s belief that he can offer them half-peace and half-measures is a recipe for continued terrorist attack.
Shrug. Depends on how much pain you’re willing to take. One nutcase with a jug of gasoline killed 168 people, shut down central Seoul, and caused $20 million in damage to the subway system. Doesn’t take much money to do that sort of thing, and imagine a semi-coordinated “gas can attack” on BART, say by five people.
Frankly, I’m significantly less worried about Islamic terrorism than their demographic and legal warfare against us. I don’t like their system and I don’t want it even if brought about by those means rather than terrorism.
But maybe you’re right. Finding a globally credible excuse to whack Saudi Arabia just to test the hypothesis will be rather difficult, though. As I said, we don’t have the will. If we suffer The Big Attack, unless we can prove beyond all shadow of a doubt the operation was directly financed by the Saudis, the entire world will be against us. Laugh if you will, but that’s a big battle to fight. And that’s just one regime. Your plan is fine, but how do you suggest it actually be carried out? Not in a dream world, but in this one. I’ve asked this question here before and was answered with resounding silence.
Taking down Pakistan might make the fat and comfortable Saudis more cautious, but I doubt Iran would care much. What we did in Iraq didn’t seem to impress anyone, and yet at the same time we’ve heard nothing but screaming all over the world about our horrible inhumane unjust war and occupation. If we had hit them as hard as we hit Germany, I have to wonder what sort of global political meltdown we’d be in right now. Again: your plan is a good one, and I’ve never denied it would be effective, but how do we make it happen without spinning the world into chaos?
And my point still holds: Islam is not Japan/Germany and drawing parallels is all but worthless. 99% of the Nazis were in Germany. We beat them and after ten years or so, had pretty much stamped them out. So let’s say we defeat Pakistan. How, exactly, are we to stamp out Islam there? And even if we do, Islamists are still present not only as the ruling party of entire countries, but also present in significant enclaves all over the globe, breeding frantically, teaching Islam to their children, and being protected by the PC laws of their countries of residence.
I apologize for having a different opinion that the rest of you. Mea culpa.
We defeated Germany, Italy and Japan and their state sponsored fascism. We didn’t eliminate fascism or fascists in the process. There are plenty of fascists around (read Liberal Fascism for instance), they just don’t control a Wesern State and it’s resources (yet). So, they can not produce the damage they did back then. They do control various Islamofascist States though and with more limited resources are inflicting the same relative damage they did in the 1900’s.
So fascism became impotent once we destroyed the States that sponsored them and it did not become a threat again until they controlled a State again. When those States gained the resources (through oil wealth) to reassert themselves, we have witnessed the resurgence of fascists ability to harm us and our classically liberal institutions.
Fascist didn’t get eliminated. It just went to ground. They’ve reappeared in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Iran etc. It’s also the reason why they’ve put on their smiley faces and tried to take over the US government. They can’t institute their agenda until they have the resources of a State at their command.
Taking even a further step back, fascism is merely one subset of tyranny. Tyranny has existed for all of human history and has to be repeatedly beaten back, no matter how many times it seems to have been defeated and relegated to the dustbin of history.
Shrug. It may hold, but it’s irrelevant. [to my point, at least.]
And nobody’s hammering you for having a different opinion. What I’m hammering is, in fact, not you, but what I believe to be an incorrect opinion.
You are historically aware, and therefore know that Europe, South America, and Africa were plagued with hundreds of “indigenous” communist terror movements. How do you explain that almost all of them vanished with the collapse of the USSR, which had been funding, sheltering, arming, training, and using them? At that time, communism was a “religion” practiced by almost a billion and a half people. But only one regime was backing almost all the “revolutionary movements.”
You are also aware that Israel was plagued with dozens of suicide attacks financed by Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime. How do you explain that Israel has experience zero attacks funded by the Iraqi regime since Saddam’s fall?
Israel is currently plagued with dozens of attacks, from small to large, instigated by the Iranian regime, working with and through the Syrian regime. What do you think would happen if both those regimes were destroyed?
With the fall of Iraq, one of the great terror masters of the middle east, Moammar Ghadaffy, renounced terror and his quest for a nuclear weapon. He probably feels pretty stupid today.
I regard your worries about “the rest of the world” as being irrelevant as well. I refuse to hand over the safety and security of the United States into a veto power caused by a need for the good opinion of other nations.
Regarding our ability to destroy the regimes who are backing terrorism against us, we of course do have the ability, and we have the will. We had it after 9/11, but George W. Bush squandered it. Our current state of defeat rests squarely on Bush’s doorstep.
We may be in a nation where only the GOP can make peace, and only the Democrats can make effective war. That seems to be the lesson one might draw from everything we’ve seen since WW I.
I have no problem with, nor any need of apologies from, those who disagree with me. But I do want to see better support for their opinions than I can come up with for mine, before accepting the alternate opinion.
And I don’t think you have come up with that justification, not by a long shot.