Friday, March 09, 2012

The Council Has Spoken!! This Week's Watcher's Council Results



The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for the first Watcher's Council match up of 2012, carved eternally in the eternal Kosmik records of cyberspace.



Many of the entries this week dealt with the tragic and untimely death of Conservative icon Andrew Breitbart. And in a way, both this week's winners dealt with death as well..deaths in a far away place and the death of a failed foreign policy strategy. Joshuapundit's Afghanistan - 'You Knew I was A Snake When You Picked Me Up' took a look at the riots over the Q'uran burnings in Afghanistan and the murders of our troops by their supposed allies and drew some conclusions about our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and the clash of cultures. Here's a slice:

There has been a great deal of anger expressed by average Americans over the riots in Afghanistan over the burning of Qu'rans - paid for by American taxpayers, I might add - that Taliban prisoners used to send messages to each other. The Afghan's reaction has been typical...hysterical rage expressed in violence towards people who had nothing to do with the matter at hand except that they were infidels and ferenghi.

At least four American soldiers have been killed, two of them American officers murdered inside the Interior Ministry building in a highly secured area, possibly by an Afghan security officer and two other American soldiers were shot to death by a member of the Afghan Army at a base in eastern Afghanistan. A number of others, both military and civilian UN and NATO personnel have been injured. An even larger death toll was avoided when an Afghan cook at Bagram Air Force base was caught attempting to poison food scheduled to be served to American personnel at the base.

After a successful car bombing in front of Jalalabad airport that killed nine and injured nineteen Afghan civilians and law enforcement officers and four NATO soldiers (Jalalabad is used exclusively by NATO forces and the military) NATO Commander General John Allen ordered all NATO military and civilian personnel to leave the Interior ministry and a number of other strategic locations in Kabul and go into what amounts to virtual lockdown.

General Allen is obviously aware that the chief danger comes from our Afghan 'allies' . He issued orders for Americans to stay clear of their Afghan counterparts until 'tensions die down'.

Both General Allen and of course, President Barack Hussein Obama promptly issued what amounted to groveling apologies to President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people for the Q'uran burnings. As I or anyone else familiar with the kind of mindset we're dealing with could have told them, the apologies only made matters worse and caused the violence to spike.

Charles Krauthammer, Andrew McCarthy and others were quick to point out that Hamid Karzai never apologized for the murder of our troops...any more than he apologized for the murder of eight UN aid workers last April, who were butchered when a crazed mob overran a base in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif after an American pastor from a small church in Florida deliberately burned a copy of the Q'uran. At least two of them were decapitated, and the only worker in the office who lived survived because he managed to convince the mob he was a Muslim.

General David Petraeus, who was then the NATO commander if Afghanistan and NATO Ambassador Mark Sedwill issued a particularly servile statement after that atrocity, apologizing humbly and condemning any disrespect for what they termed 'the Holy Q'uran'.

Karzai did not apologize or condemn the murders then or now for a very good reason. In his culture, apologizing is almost never done, because it's considered a sign of weakness and dishonor. In fact, that's true of Islam in general, especially when kuffars, non-believers are concerned. That should give you some insight into how Karzai, most Afghans and indeed a lot of Muslims feel about our representatives, our military commanders, and of course, our commander-in-chief at this point.

Another attitude not overly present in Muslim societies is that of gratitude, particularly when it comes to foreigners and infidels. Those of you whom were watching closely may have noticed a singular lack of it when our forces left Iraq.

After freeing the Shi'ite majority from the murderous Saddam Hussein, putting them in control of the country, saving their oil fields after Saddam set them on fire, seeing to it they had their first free elections and spending 4,000 precious lives and over a trillion dollars to rebuild their country, not a single Iraqi dignitary bothered to attend the final ceremony where our flag was lowered and we officially turned over all authority to the Iraqis, and Iraq's leader Maliki made a fairly harsh speech on Iraqi television that wasn't reported here on how happy the Iraqis were to finally rid themselves of foreign 'occupation' and see the back of us.


In our non-Council category, the winner was the masterful Mark Steyn with ‘Die, Die, Foreigners!’ submitted by Joshuapundit. In a striking essay, Steyn calls the U.S. 'an historical anomaly: the non-imperial superpower" and points out why we have no real strategic purpose or strategy for Afghanistan.

Here are this week’s full results. Gay Patriot and New Zeal were unable to vote this week, but neither was affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners

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