On the question of the Russian threat, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had this to say in an interview with Spiegel Online:
Of course, I do hope that we can come to agreement with the Russians in the future. At the moment, though, it is good to be strong militarily. That makes understanding easier.
Yewbetcha.
The fight to drive the Daesh out of Iraq (while killing too few of them IMNSHO) has caused more than $45 billion in infrastructure damage to Iraq.
That’s roughly half the cost of the damage a couple of hurricanes did in Texas and Florida last year, an even smaller ratio when Puerto Rico is figured in. But it’s a lot of damage for a nation like Iraq.
What might that imply, besides the relative wealth of the two nations?
One is the relative dependence we have on our more highly developed, and so expensive, infrastructure compared to Iraq. Iraq is scraping by with that level of damage and already beginning to recover.
If we suffered the same relative level of damage to our infrastructure, particularly our electric grid, how well would we fare?
House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D, CA), in response to the Committee’s Republican members’ four-page memo—the Nunes Memo—regarding the FBI’s abuse of FISA court-approved surveillance of Americans, produced a ten-page Progressive-Democrat member response, which the committee voted unanimously to release to the House with an eye to getting the memo released to the public via the White House’s security vetting. The House approved the release and sent it to President Donald Trump, who had five days to disapprove the document, or it would be released.
Concerns that the Progressive-Democrat members had larded their memo with information that, if released, would jeopardize intelligence and FBI methods and sources in order to make political hay over their redactions have been justified.
The White House on Friday told Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee to redraft their rebuttal to a controversial GOP memo alleging government surveillance abuse during the 2016 campaign, saying sensitive details need to be stripped out before the document can be made public.
It isn’t simply a refusal to release the memo with its cynically included classified information, though, nor is the White House playing guessing games with the Progressive-Democrats about what would be releasable. In a letter advising the committee that the Progressive-Democrat memo could not be released in its current form, White House Counsel Don McGahn wrote,
However, given the public interest in transparency in these unprecedented circumstances, the President has directed that Justice Department personnel be available to give technical assistance to the Committee, should the Committee wish to revise the February 5th Memorandum [the Schiff Memo] to mitigate the risks identified by the Department. The President encourages the Committee to undertake these efforts.
Notice that. It’s not a refusal to release at all, as the committee’s Progressive-Democrat members had voted to do with the Nunes memo. It’s a refusal to release with the deliberately included classified material and a willingness to release with those data removed by the Progressive-Democrats in coordination with DoJ.
And the Progressive-Democrats are busy growing their political hay.
Two Daesh terrorists who grew up in Great Britain have been captured.
Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told the Sun newspaper on Saturday: “I don’t think they should ever set foot in this country again.”
Williamson is absolutely correct. Barbarians like this, who think terrorism is the way to go, should be allowed freely to leave to join their barbaric gangs.
And then they should be barred from returning. Forever.
There is a need for a discussion of how to handle terrorism and terrorists. Before that discussion can be useful, though, we need to understand the relationship among terrorism, crime, and war. This is a beginning of that discussion.
We currently have two categories of conflict participants which I’ll term—my layman’s terms, understand, not any legal or legalistic ones—criminal and soldier or combatant. The one is a domestic (usually) question involving the violation of a nation’s domestic criminal laws. The other is an international question involving a nation’s soldiers or combat arms engaging in more or less declared war and during the conduct of which the nation and its soldiers are subject, together and individually, to national laws and generally agreed international laws of war (for instance, the Geneva Conventions).
As we have seen at least since the turn of the century, though, there is a third category of conflict, and those who perpetrate this third kind—both the polity and its individuals—need a different form of response when encountered on the battlefield or after capture. It’s important to understand, too, that the battlefield in this third category isn’t limited to classic set-piece force on force encounter on a field or over a beach, nor is it the hit and run battlefield of a guerrilla effort. This new battlefield includes those, certainly, but it also includes our theaters, concert venues, shopping malls, subways, airports, airplanes—anywhere groups of people are gathered.
This third category already exists in the public’s mind, but it needs a third category of legal handling. This third category is terrorism and its participants are terrorists. Examples of these include polities like al Qaeda and the Daesh and gangs like Boko Haram and their individual members.
These are entities and individuals who are intent on killing innocents, not soldiers, and they’re intent on the killing for its own end. The resulting terror is their goal and their tool for destroying the body politic of their target.
Mere criminal laws are inadequate for handling such mass murderers, whose killing does not rise from insanity, but from a desire for creating the terror that is their tool for larger ends. Nor can these entities and individuals be handled adequately with laws of war governing how soldiers are to be encountered and killed or treated after capture; their behavior, their targets, place them outside such laws.
For the individual terrorists of a polity or a gang, we need new laws, laws of terror war, both domestic and international, with which to govern our encounters with them in battle and our handling of them should any be captured. Simply putting them on trial and locking them up on conviction is useless; they’ll just return to their battles upon release (nor are they worth the effort, expense, or resources of maintaining in confinement). Dealing with them on the battlefield under existing laws of (ordinary) war is unsuitable, too: in far too many cases, to take just one example, their shields are not building walls or bunkers, but innocent, helpless women and children.
Similarly, we need a new Convention with which to deal with a terrorist polity or gang. Simply crushing these in a series of battles is insufficient. Their existence as non-nation-state entities, as network entities, makes any battle victory, any war-level victory a chimera. Their goal of wanton destruction for the terror to be caused make any defeat, or appearance of one, an empty gesture. Sterner, more permanent measures and the rules governing those measures are needed.