Lebanese Gov't Resigns

LINKA

BEIRUT, Lebanon (CNN) -- In a special speech to Parliament, Lebanon's pro-Syrian prime minister has announced his resignation and that of his government.

The speech, by Prime Minister Omar Karami, was broadcast by Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation.

Karami said he would have won a no-confidence vote scheduled for later in the day, but was resigning to avoid making his government a stumbling block to peace.

"I'm afraid we will have a vacuum in the country," said House Speaker Nabih Berri, who asked for the floor. "I should be allowed to say something." He was not given the floor.

It is happening now, or will be soon. The end of decades of Syrian oppression over Lebanon.

The More Things Change...

the more they stay the same...

The Nails are driven into the coffin...

This article is very interesting, especially the following segments:

One U.S. official emitted a deep, extended laugh when asked for an assessment of the prime minister and said Canada no longer qualifies as a trusted ally.

and the final sentence by the leader of the NDP, which is a corker:

"The fact is that if Canada is a part of a program like this, then we become a target."

Reminds me of why the people in Chicago, et al opposed ABM sites for Safeguard in their cities "because it would make them a target", never mind that every large major urban area was ALREADY a target according to Assured Destruction policies.

EDIT:Reading the article further, it appears that NORAD is up for review next year. Keep an eye on that; NORAD could be abolished in 2006, or reformed into CONAD, Continental Air Defense, with no Canadian participation.

Game Over for NORAD

CBC is reporting that

Prime Minister Paul Martin will reject Canadian participation in the U.S. missile defence program, CBC News has learned.

Martin plans to announce in the House of Commons as early as Thursday that the country will not partake fully in the controversial program, the CBC's French-language network reported Tuesday.

The news comes hours after Canada's next ambassador to the United States, Frank McKenna, set off a storm by saying Canada is already taking part in the program because it has agreed Norad can monitor the skies for incoming missiles.

Martin's planned announcement will mark an abrupt change from his position 16 months ago during the Liberal leadership race, when he signaled that Canada should partake in missile defence. Since then, Martin has insisted that he hasn't reached a decision on whether Canada should be a full partner.

Prime Minister Paul Martin will reject the missile shield as early as Thursday.

NORAD had a long and fruitful run; it was a model for countries on how to put aside their opposing interests and jointly defend the longest undefended border in the world. (That isn't as much of an oxymoron as it sounds, for Soviet bombers during the Cold War, in order to attack the US from over the Pole, had to overfly Canadian airspace.)

However, this is not the first time the Canadians have stabbed us in the back over NORAD before. The first (and most dangerous) time was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the signal to go to full alert went out of Washington, but not Ottawa.

For you see, PM Diefenbaker saw no need to activicate prudent defensive measures, and his foreign minister found nuclear weapons distasteful. As a result, at a time when we were closer to a full scale nuclear exchange than at any time in the history of the world, it took considerable cajolery by the US Government to get Diefenbaker to issue the orders alerting the Canadian squadrons for continental air defense and their officers in NORAD HQ in Colorado Springs.

We took this backstabbing treachery to heart; for after the Crisis, every "Canadian" slot in NORAD has had an American backup officer ready to fill in instantly if there ever should be an alert and Canada dithers again. I think it is now highly likely that those officers are quietly reviewing their duties in case NORAD is dissolved.

Za Putina! Za FSB!

Today, there was a very interesting article in today's Washington Post about the recent resurgence of the Sov-uhm-Russian Secret Service, the KG-oops-FSB in popular culture in Russia.

You can see it here.

Some choice quotes:

On Sunday the Russian Defense Ministry plans to launch what it calls a channel of "patriotic TV." It will show war documentaries and feature films to create "effective informational and ideological influences to ensure the social activities of Russian citizens," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov wrote in a letter quoted by the financial newspaper Kommersant. Last month, Ivanov, complaining about the mass media, said the "moronization of the people must be stopped."

Next, those whacky Russians will be saying "Ve Invented Ze History Channel!". But I must admit that is an awesome quote by Mr. Ivanov.

Attitudes toward the old enemy, the United States, are ambivalent in the shows and novels. Russia and America are allied in some, but in others a nefarious United States seeks to encircle and weaken Russia. In "White Legion" by Ilya Ryasnoi, a best-selling novel with a contemporary setting, Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms are cast as a CIA plot and the chaotic post-Communist society is saved from complete ruin by a secret network of former KGB officers.

This reminds me a lot of Dale Brown novels, and trashy technothrillers, etc that were all the rage after 1991. Most of them featured an evil cabal of ex-KGB agents which had a dastardly evil plan to restore Communism to save the Motherland from Ruin.

This is the truest proof that we won the Cold War, we exported our pulp technothriller trash to Russia.

Or as I'd say, in Soviet Russia, Book writes Dale Brown!

EDIT: Title Fixed, thanks to input from our Defender of the Motherland, who defends Za Rodinu from New York.

North Korea achieves a breakthrough (I)


From the Secret Superbunkers of North Korea Comes The Latest In Weapons Technology!

TVMB technology (Track via Migrating Birds) has been pioneered by the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. This amazing new technology, utilizes a powerful camera on the weapon which is angled upwards permanently. This camera follows the flight path of the high-flying Siberian Crane to keep the weapon on course. As it relies on animal life, it cannot be jammed or degraded, unlike the Capitalist Warmongering Global Positioning System

It is expected to cost a mere $80 Billion.

This is intended to be the first in a very long series of posts which parody the current US Military Procurement System, of which the use of "Objective" as a descriptor will be overused heavily. You have been warned.


A National Catastrophe is upon us all...

...or at least to us military geeks.

The US Government is dismantling a remarkable piece of equipment, the AN/FPS-118 Over-The-Horizon-Backscatter (OTH-B) Radar, the world's largest fixed radar. Twice the size of NYC's Central Park, it could pick up targets as far away as 1,700 miles from our coasts. What are we to do now that we can no longer pick up Airbuses idling on the tarmac at Charles De Gaulle Airport?

Oh, I know that the USAF has deployed the AN/TPS-71 ROTHR (Relocatable Over-the-Horizon Radar), which consists of a 1.61 mile long array, which will continue in service, but it won't have the same cachet that the OTH-B did.

The French Connection

The deceased Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri was a very close personal friend of Jaques Chirac, and apparently contributed heavily to Chirac's re-election campaigns; Chirac awarded Hariri the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, France's most prestigious award in 1996. (Who says that political kickbacks are just for Americans, eh?)

With this in mind, an astute pol/mil blogger would do well to keep an eye on the main anchorages of the French Navy, for they have four LPDs, of which the two latest, the Foudre class, each can land and support an entire mechanized/armored regiment of the French Rapid Deployment Force.

So keep an eye on those ships; if they sail, the probability of a French intervention in Lebanon rises dramatically.