I appreciate their thoughts ... but ... there you have 16-17 young men asking for American young men and women to fight for their freedom. I don't see a single weapon among those Syrians.
Fight for your own freedom, and then ask for help --- that is what we did. Americans should help those who help themselves - not do the dying for those who a few months later will do little but blame us for their problems anyway.
Good luck men of Kafranbel - but put down the sign and pick up a gun if you want your freedom. You'll only appreciate it if you earn it yourself. If not, then keep on as the slave that you are.
Hat tip Bad Rachel via Jawa.
34 comments:
Agreed w/your point, but there is a simple message here that I like. The sign is true. For all of Amnesty International's blathering about who is being repressed, no libs are going to the defense of the defenseless.
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The sign is true. But I have to agree in staying out of it. They will turn on us the moment they win. Let the world gaze on a country next door to Iraq without American sacrifice. Arm them under the radar and let them do what they will. We simply cannot afford to put out every fire in that region. OR get the Turks to do it on their own...and then whine about them doing it.
Of course they are! Haven't you heard the hue and cry over the occupy wallstreet victims driven to such lengths as begging for money for their underwater basket weaving degrees?
<span>As far as I can know some already took the guns - and AWOL - from the military side, and started raising havoc with possible yet not confirmed help from Turkey. How much of that is a rebel propaganda, no idea, but regime itself plays up it's casualties in effort to paint itself as victim of "rebel terrorists". As usual with such conflicts, there is much conflicting info coming our way and possibly even people in the know dont know much more than we do. Such is nature of the fog of war... STRATFOR has a nice open article on this: <span>http://www.stratfor.com/</span><span></span><span>weekly/</span><span></span><span>20111214-syria-crisis-asses</span><span></span>sing-foreign-intervention</span>
URR and Ewok highlighted my main question: just how accessible are guns in Syria for the general populace, and how much resistance can deserters put up?
Let us stop for a moment, and admire how neighboring countries have raced to aid the oppressed Syrian people... {/snark}
Well, send a few dozen rifles. Let's see if they are willing to fight and die, or just parlor pinks waiting for Uncle Sam to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
As Steve Miller told us, "there's a solution".
how accessible were they in Libya? You need to find some deserters, hit a weapons cache, and then hand out the arms to the populace. There is always a way.
Well, as with all countries where military is drafted, there is a thin line between army staying loyal and rebelling in favor of their civilian population... as Romanov's painfully learned in 1917, and Germans in 1918. Look at the Stratfor map, it is obvious that Turkey is only possible regional sponsor for the rebellion, with Jordan and Lebanon too weak and Iraq too preoccupied with own problems... I am not a 100% pure geopolitics fan, but sometimes you just can't ignore map.
2nd amendment is a hell of a thing.
Ewok, up until 40 years ago, the first 195 years of our history, our military was largely conscription. We never, ever had issues with loyalty to our government, and the one instance of open rebellion was after secession.
It is the constitutional guarantees of never using the military as a police force or as a means of political suppression, our Title 10, that has always sustained us.
Unfortunatly while that is true some people lack the ability or rather the maturity to understand what is and isnt relevant to the 2nd amendment.
Used to if a person like you and all of the people here were talking it was probablyt in a bar. In that case the person you insult could either beat the hell out of you or challenge you to a duel.......
The bad thing about the internet is that cowards and assholes can hide. When ususally they wouldn't.
Go and bad.
Since Civil War US never needed to use armed forces internally, save few national guard uses during riots and natural disasters... and the reason is well functioning democratic process that ensured transferring of the will of the voters into national policies. Imagine Nixon trying to override Watergate, shut down congress and continue Vietnam by using military force and you get yourself a picture of what could have been - namely military rebelling against CINC.
Ewok,
In each of those scenarios, the Military is bound to follow lawful orders and also bound to support and defend the Constitution. Loyalty to the Commander in Chief is only in light of that obligation. Use of National Guard inside our borders is under Title 32, US Code, a very different animal from Title 10.
The most plausible scenario actually came from Hollywood. Seven Days in May. Kirk Douglas in Marine Trops, Boit Lancastahhh as the CJCS, and Ava Gardner lookin' hot in those sweaters. Fredrick March as the prez, and George McReady overacting even worse than Kirk. Oh, and a pretty good plot, too.
That's the fun about some countries... they are happy up to the point we do all the heavy lifting... then they begin casting us as the bad guy....
Once burned... well... twice burned. But we don't have to go for three time's a charm....
Not quite, URR.
Conscription was a traditionally a wartime-only expedient. And not all wars - the Mexican and Spanish-American wars were fought without it. The only peacetime draft was between the end of the Korean War and the start of the Vietnam War...about ten years.
The rest of the time, the armed services of the United States were a volunteer force.
I've got $100 towards their AK-47/M-4/16 fund. Anyone else in? Yeah, young able gents, YOU do it. For a change.
Actually the first time a draft was used was during the American Civil War, when Lincoln decided in 1863 that more men were needed to join then were coming in via regular recuriting drives. After that most of the time it was a volunteer force or a drafted force where the back-bone was formed from those that found a home in the military after the need for the draft ended. Those were the ones that Hunginton referred to in his classic book on a professional military service. It was those NCO's that after being drafted and doing well in the military stayed, while most folks either returned to thier local National Guard units or retired to the reserves and thier civilian lives. Most folks were not use to having large standing armies in the US and it wasn't until the post WW2 that the need for a large standing Army was seen as being a justified expense by the population on a whole.
Sure it is a hell of a thing, even more so when it is used as the founding fathers intended at times.
Some non-political musings:
Given the geopolitics of the US, nothing bar extra-hemispheric standing commitements - such as ones that existed during cold war or lately war on religion (whose name is not to be spoken) extremists - justifies peacetime large standing army - after all who is going to invade? Mexico? Canada?
In almost all succesful wars US was actively seeking and using allies, sometimes quite unsavory ones - Stalin anyone? - to provide bulk of the overseas fighting manpower - simply because it is very hard to sustain large army overseas.
Now Navy and Air force is different - they can be based at homeland, relatively easily forward deployed at allied bases, and most importantly they control the approaches to the homeland which any potential enemy would have to cross to attack the US.
I am wearing a short sleeve shirt just to exercise that right!
A knife is for getting a handgun which is good for getting a rifle which is good for getting an SMG which is good for getting....
Mike M.,
I am aware that conscription was a wartime-only expedient. However, until the 1930s, the US had not much of a military to speak of in peacetime. The draft represents the vast preponderance of US citizens who served in uniform. Better than 90%.
By the way, Roosevelt instituted a peacetime draft in 1940.
*Snort!*
I used to have a t-shirt that showed some huge dude, and it said "if you are gonna bear arms, have arms to bear!"
Bulk up or be crushed. Life is too short to be small.
ewok,
I would submit that, for a nation of 310 million souls, our Army is very small indeed.
Easy for you big guys to say..... some of us make do anyways....
There's always the Guadalajara Vitamin Store!!!
Are there guns available for them to pick up? Or is this the predicable outcome of a disarmed citizenery?
A well-regulated Militia is necessary to ensure that a State stays free of being required to submit to a Federal government by force of arms; that way a State has recourse should the Feds invade. So the States maintain Militias. But then, how to ensure that the Militia will have some minimal amount of training (especially those not in the National Guard; i.e., the unorganized Militia, as recognized in current Federal law)? And also, how do you ensure that the citizenry itself can resist the Militia if the State government uses it to oppress the people? The answer in both cases is to ensure that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The great irony many of the countries with terrible internal striff have strict gun laws have large numbers of murder by gun violence. Hell mexico is one and look at it.
Beware of men who say: "Why don't you and him fight."
I hear Libya is having a sale on some nice NOS FN/FAL's. They don't call it the Right Arm of the Free World for nuthin'. Anybody know a good broker?
Gotta get in on that deal! Prefer the FN/FAL to the M16 family, hands down!!!!
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