Quotulatiousness

March 30, 2010

Retired US general apologizes for smear on Dutch troops

Filed under: Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

Former USMC general John Sheehan has apologized for his remarks about gay Dutch soldiers in the Srebrenica massacre:

An ex-U.S. general has apologised after saying Dutch UN troops failed to prevent the Srebrenica genocide partly because their ranks included openly gay soldiers, the Dutch defence ministry said Tuesday.

John Sheehan, a retired former NATO commander and senior Marine officer, “wrote a letter of apology,” ministry spokeswoman Anne van Pinxteren told AFP.

In it, Mr. Sheehan said he was “sorry” for remarks made at a Senate hearing earlier this month where he argued against plans by President Barack Obama to end a ban on allowing gays to serve openly in the US military.

[. . .]

Mr. Sheehan claimed that Dutch leaders, including the former chief of staff of the Dutch army General Henk van den Breemen, had told him that the presence of gay soldiers had contributed to the fall of the enclave which led to the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

There were a lot of reasons for the massacre, but the sexual orientation of individual soldiers in the Dutch contingent had nothing to do with it.

December 10, 2009

Russia does it again, to NATO’s benefit

Filed under: Military, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Sometimes, the Russian approach to diplomacy results in exactly the opposite to the intended outcome:

In the 1990s, when enlarging NATO to take in the ex-communist countries still seemed perilous and impractical, help came from an unexpected source. Yevgeny Primakov, a steely old Soviet spook who became first head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, then foreign minister and even, briefly, prime minister, liked to say that it would be “impermissible” for the alliance to admit ex-communist states.

His remarks, and others in similar vein by leading Russian politicians, proved counterproductive. The more the Kremlin huffed and puffed about ex-captive nations deciding their own future, the harder it became to dismiss those countries’ fears: if your neighbour terms it “impermissible” for you to install a burglar alarm, people will start taking your security worries seriously. Some wags even suggested that a “Primakov prize” be established to mark the boost he had given to the cause.

But the lesson apparently was not learned:

Instead, Russia is adopting the opposite course. It habitually violates Baltic airspace. It maintains a vocal propaganda offensive (such as a report being launched in Brussels this week by a Russian-backed think-tank, which criticises Baltic language and citizenship laws). This autumn, it scandalised NATO opinion by running two big military exercises, without foreign observers, based on highly threatening scenarios (culminating in a Strategic Rocket Forces drill in which Russia “nuked” Poland). The exercises demonstrated weakness and incompetence, as well as force of numbers and nasty thinking. But they made life hard for peacemongers and strengthened the arguments of NATO hawks and the twitchy eastern Europeans.

August 27, 2009

QotD: Taliban propaganda, as abetted by the mainstream media

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Well, surprise, surprise: yesterday’s VBIED attack in the city of Kandahar killed at least 41, and wounded over 80 more people. All of them were civilians. Every single one.

And yet still, in the AP piece above, you read the phrase “Taliban spokesmen were not immediately available for comment…” What if these lying sacks of shit had been available for comment, folks? Would we have been reading their misinformation in black and white, juxtaposed credibly against BGen Tremblay’s words in a pathetic bow to “balanced reporting” — like somehow both should be weighed equally? You bet we would.

I’m tired of it. I’m sick and tired of our media giving them a soapbox from which to proclaim what is clearly, plainly, and obviously pure propaganda designed to attack our will as part of a well planned and executed information operations campaign. I’m tired of our journalists willfully ignoring the fact that they’re not just observing the war, they’re affecting it with their reporting. I’m bone-tired of them refusing to take steps to ensure their powerful voice isn’t used against the very system of government that allows them such unfettered speech in the first place.

Damian “Babbling” Brooks, “Real propaganda”, The Torch, 2009-08-26

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