Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
It must be more than that. Saddam had money and oil.
Well, for one thing, the only thing we do have enough manpower for, is holding the oil rigs. Their only shot at getting the oil would be to bomb the rigs and rebuild new ones. And doing that with undersea oil sources on a seismically pseudostable region with major nearby methane clarthate deposits is a recipe for making Kuwait look like a regular bonfire. The chain of events leading out from such a thing can potentially render Earth unable to sustain human life. That's a bit more of a gamble than entering Iraq.
Also, they would have to kill everyone. Otherwise, they would lose every soldier and mechanized infantry unit they landed here, and the navy would find that the coastal defense grid is very much alive and kicking. It's a losing proposition in the financial sense, except with a massive aerial bombardment campaign, which would leave a lot of people less than enthusiastic. Nuclear bombs would be a problem, as there are veins of fissile material in some of the mountains, and there is limited data on which ones, since we aren't mining it.
Finally, Russia is a next door neighbour, and they don't want the USA on their doorstep.
quote:
Many people like to talk about how terrible the attack was and things like that, but I question why. Why in the world would anyone mess with you ? It makes no sense, but in time more things may come to light. I doubt they will be pleasant to realize.
Actually, the terrorist attacks in Oslo made perfect sense, and I wasn't the least bit surprised. I had a list of four likely candidates, and it didn't include a single non-domestic source. Turned out it was the first item on the list. Or, depending on how you count, the first and the second. The surprising thing is that so few people were killed, and that it was so successful in accomplishing the goals of the attack even with less than a hundred dead (though we can expect the figure to rise).
As for jihadist attacks, one of the heads of Ansar al-Islam is in Norway as a political refugee, and is currently indicted for threats against key political figures. He's being handled in the "business as usual" manner via the regular courts, and everything is quite above board in that regard (though there's clearly some ruffled feathers about the failed attempt at exiling him).The matter has attracted the expected series of threats of terrorist attacks, which is again handled in the "business as usual" manner by the intelligence and counterterrorism branches of the police force.
Incidentally, while Breivik brought some intelligence to the table, he didn't bring enough. His execution was sloppy and poorly planned in some areas. While the bombs at the government building were not the primary concern, they could have been a significant contributor to the result if he'd just investigated a bit up front. As it was, he struck (by chance) in a narrow window of opportunity when the safeguards against car bombs were down for maintenance. Additional measures were going up in the August to September timeframe. And also, the basement parking lot bore the brunt of the force of the explosion, so under normal circumstances, that particular part of the operation he carried out would have done marginal damage. That could have been foreseen with a bit more planning.
Norway is generally peacable, but there are some internal forces that are less than happy with the status quo, and some external ones that are less than happy that we've got some pretty effective troops in the Middle East, and have since the beginning. I'm guessing they were a lot more popular when they were keeping the peace in Lebanon, or when we operated a field hospital open to the public along the minefield near the Highway of Death in the First Gulf War (and a bar nearby, carefully placed so no part of it would be on the Kuwait side of the border, where drinking was illegal). Incidentally, that's the one that put a stop to the bounty on civilians collecting mines, by letting the ambassador see the combat medics at work when a load of casualties came in. Until he fainted, anyway. The same place is where they developed the current gold standard guidelines on the first aid procedures for crushing injuries and explosives injuries.
Anyway, every nation has some skeletons in its various closets.
Our closets simply happen to have Hobbit skeletons.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
|
RE: There goes the neighbourhood - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread