Bond... James Bond! Bang Bang Bang

[Warph]

As you may have noticed, Kim Jong-Il has the world's leaders running around like headless chickens.  Now that he's taken advantage of both Clinton and Bush and has achieved nuclear capability, is Obama far behind?  Everybody is wondering if the United Nations or Red China can make him heel. The fact is, the U.N. couldn't make a Chihuahua heel.  China, which provides North Korea with most of its food and energy, probably could, but there's nothing its leaders enjoy more than to see the United States frustrated and impotent.  Besides which, anybody who thinks we have more to fear from North Korea than from Communist China is a screwball.

What do you do about Kim Jong-Il?  The answer that comes to mind is in fact a question; namely, where is "a real life" James Bond?  Time after time, when the free world was being held hostage by the evil likes of Dr. No, Goldfinger, Dr. Kanaga, and Maximilian Largo, Agent 007, in the service of her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, took care of business.  Professional that he was, Bond always managed to dispatch the villain and his cronies, departing from the megalomaniac's realm just as it was exploding into oblivion.  And he still found time to visit his tailor, instruct bartenders on the proper way to mix a martini, and indulge in some heavy-duty smooching.

So what do you do about Kim Jong-Il?  Answer: Sanction him, of course.... and this is where "a real life" James Bond comes in. 

Now, I understand that there's a gentleman's agreement among national leaders not to knock each other off.  That's fine for them, but it's not so great for the rest of us.  Eventually, after all, it's everybody else who dies when wars break out, even though it's people like Kim Jong-Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his rebel clerics, and Bashar Al-Assad, who leave the world a far better place simply by leaving it.

What's the point of having to bribe tyrants or to compromise our principles by appeasing them when it makes so much more sense to simply eliminate them? I realize that some folks are going to be offended at the mere notion of assassination mainly because, in the wake of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, the word has come to have such a negative connotation.

But there is a world of difference between a good assassination and a bad one, just as there's a great divide between a cold-blooded murder of a child and the execution of the killer.

Understand, I'm not entirely opposed to diplomacy, although I do believe that, in nearly all cases, the best thing to be said for diplomacy is that it provides gainful employment for people who would otherwise be wards of the state. 

Quite honestly, in the final analysis, I would far rather leave negotiations in the hands of Bond, James Bond, than in those of Obama, Barack Hussein Obama.

[Warph]

Government Sponsored Assassinations


Today's war on terror is not a war by traditional standards.  It does not abide by the Geneva Convention or any other rules of war as we know it.  There is no clearly identifiable enemy, no obvious lines of battle and no objectives in the traditional sense which need to be taken.  In short, the rules of war in the 21st century have changed.  We are not fighting a sovereign nation with a uniformed regular army.  We don't even have the benefit of fighting a guerilla war as we did in Viet Nam in which even the local Viet Cong could be identified and rooted out to some extent.  In Iraq and Afghanistan we are fighting shadows.  The only problem is these shadows strike back in brutal and bloody ways that we cannot conceive of while we still think along the lines of conventional warfare.

Terrorist strike using all manner of methods from commercial airliners to explosives laced vehicles.  They kidnap citizens and soldiers and put them on public display before savagely executing them in all manner of grotesque and inhumane ways.  They indiscriminately send suicide bombers into public markets, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent civilians, women and children.  They sacrifice themselves gloriously in the hope of killing only a few people.  This is an enemy that is not bound by the rules of war.  This is an enemy that we can never defeat by conventional means.  There is no way to win a war playing by the rules if your enemy is not bound by those same rules.

Government sponsored assassinations, while brutal and barbaric is an effective method of playing by the enemy's twisted sense of the rules.  Until we as Americans either accept the fact that we cannot win the war on terror and give up or accept that in order to win we have to play by the same rules as the terrorists we have no hope of making any inroads into an already agonizingly long war.  We must become the very thing we despise. We must terrorize the terrorists.  Show them that they and their families are as equally at risk as we and our families.  We must level the playing field and stop trying to wage conventional war on the shadows that are the terrorists.

Small groups of specialized soldiers operating secretly under cover in-country unfettered by the restrictions of the Geneva Convention would be far more effective at waging a war of terror on the terrorists than an entire division of regular army troops.  Until the terrorist have something to fear, they will continue on their rampage of wonton destruction.  Knowing that they are afforded undeserved protection under the Geneva Convention by our troops, and assured that the American people will not stand for the same inhumane treatment that they have generously dished out to their victims, the terrorist can predict our actions and counteract them.

Authorizing the assassination of known members of terrorist groups will be the first step in lifting the chains that bind our military from taking the actions necessary to truly protecting our great nation.  No longer can we afford to treat the terrorist and insurgents as combatants in a war and provide the protections that such a label offers.  We must be able to wage unrestricted warfare on the terrorist, how, when and where it becomes necessary to do so.  Our armed forces must be able to execute their duties with rapid dispatch without fear of repercussions or retribution by their own government.  State sponsored assassinations are the beginning of a new shift in policy for handling these unconventional conditions.

Of course this is not to say that there should be no restrictions on this policy.  In order to protect the freedoms and liberties that make this country so great this type of policy must remain under constant scrutiny to ensure it is not inappropriately abused. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures.  

Given the number of American lives lost in the war on terror so far and given the overall lack of advancement of our goals over the past year, the world today can certainly be described as being in desperate times.  While this is a valid policy to advance the interests of the nation, it is a policy that must be conducted with the highest degree of integrity and supported by the best intelligence possible regarding the potential targets of such a policy.

[Diane Amberg]

Go for it....and I don't need to know about it.