Juxtaposition

From Powerline blog

The dark political side of "intelligence" ...

Ferocity

Try to imagine that you are Sam Peckinpah and you are making a movie exhibiting the ultimate in ferocity … really insane, gory, brutal stuff. Whatever you can come up with it is but piffle compared with what the Taliban just performed in north-western Pakistan at a Pashwar school for military children. I suggest that if you have a sensitive stomach or psyche that you not read the details of what these beyond-inhuman brutes did at this school … International Business Times Story.

I have gone to the thesaurus to try to find the right adjectives … horrific, dreadful, appalling, ghastly … none are sufficiently descriptive of these murderers. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how human beings can devolve into such barbaric behavior … no matter what the justification. Perhaps, just perhaps we now see why George Bush decided to wage war against this brand of Islamic extremism … and why we used some “enhanced interrogation techniques” to extract meaningful intelligence so that we might stop such insanity.

Why we have now decided to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan is so far beyond my comprehension that I won’t even try.

Afterward: Don't forget ... it's only "torture" if you do the same or worse to your prisoner than he would do to you if the roles were reversed.

After Afterward: For President Obama's reaction to this butchery read: Atlas Shrugged and he may have even abetted this attack ... see Atlas Shrugged 2.

Smoke

Why has China not smacked down North Korea's half-pint despot, Kim Jong-un, for his dangerous game of nuclear brinkmanship? Clearly China has much to lose from this saber-rattling in that both South Korea and Japan might now be tempted to develop nuclear capabilities of their own. And it is still possible that an actual nuclear Holocaust might be triggered.

Is it that China is allowing this insanity to happen in order to smoke-out the United State's defense capabilities vis-a-vis such a nuclear threat?  Might China want such knowledge so that they could develop counter-counter measures for the time when it might be China that was posing an equivalent threat?  Clearly the United States has taken preventative measures such as deploying sea-platformed radars (see: CNN Story) and anti-ballistic capabilities (see: The Aviationist Story) to the region. This is providing valuable information to China about the speed and extent of our deterrents.  Might China also be testing our neophyte Secretaries of State and Defense to see how effectively they respond to such a crisis (see: AP Story)?

To China, all this smoked-out intelligence might more than offset the downside risks mentioned in the first paragraph above.