Comments on: No way this doesn’t end badly

By: Michael Lonie

Michael Lonie — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 03:02:29 +0000

At least they’ve gone into rehab. For pity’s sake, send the CIA and Foggy Bottom into rehab.

There’s an old joke about the CIA, actually dating to its predecessor the OSS in WWII. The CIA is a very clever operation but our enemies are on to it: it’s a cover story for a real intelligence operation.

That joke has seemed less and less funny as the years go by.

By: Jack

Jack — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:22:46 +0000

Our foreign policy is being run by the same people who advise Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears.

By: Michael Lonie

Michael Lonie — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:17:23 +0000

Let thewm buy the stuff form the others. Then we can bribe some Saudi officers (they’re Arabs after all) to give us the technical details and we will know as much about the things as the guys who made them. If we sell them stuff that’s what Russia, China and France will do, to the detriment of our security.

By: Ed Hausman

Ed Hausman — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 01:58:28 +0000

Arming the Saudis and the Egyptians hoping they will use these weapons to defend themselves from our common enemies is futile. They aren’t capable of fighting that well, however well we arm them, and they haven’t the will to do so anyway. All they are interested in is eventually harming Israel.

If we can’t persuade them to show any change in bad behavior before they receive the weapons, why would we think they would reform afterwards?

By: Lil Mamzer

Lil Mamzer — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:05:05 +0000

4. No quid pro quo? Why the hell not?

Because we hold very little if any sway over the Fraudis. If they don’t buy JDAMs and warplanes from the US, they can buy them from the Russians, or French, or the Chinese.

If they DO buy American, at least the US will then have the keys to the magic maintenance programs that necessarily comes with the sophisticated weapons systems in the proposed deal. The idea is that if they don’t play nice, we let their expensive toys rot in the desert.

I keep hoping that the engineers at Boeing can come up with a JDAM GPS receiver that is hard-coded not to operate anywhere near Israel, rendering them essentially useless as smart weapons at any GPS coordinates in Israeli territory. For all we know they have already done this.

By: Michael Lonie

Michael Lonie — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:54:06 +0000

1. The Saudi armed forces are so incompetent they cannot use such advanced weaponry effectively. We’ve been selling them high-tech stuff for years, and the result is that when they are threatened by some other power (remember Iraq in 1990) they still cannot defend themselves and need us to bail them out.

2. These weapons will be used against Israel eventually. They may even be used against us eventually.

3. The only way to safeguard against Iran is to overthrow the Pharaohs of Tehran. Anything short of that is futile.

4. No quid pro quo? Why the hell not? If we are going to sell stuff like this to Saudi, we should say “You drop all your support of terrorists, mosques, cultural centers, madrassas, and other sources of terrorist incitement and recruitment abroad, kill all the terrorists in Saudi, and get rid of their supporters there among your upper classes and armed forces. Stop everything you are doing that is inimical to the USA. Otherwise, no sale.” Do these Saudi clowns think they are doing us a favor by fighting those terrorists who want to destroy the Saudi government and replace the Princes with themselves?