We give the French a lot of grief, but lets not forget that they are with us in Afghanistan, and under President Sarkozy they are getting ever more aggressive in fighting the enemy:
KABUL, Afghanistan - Ten French ISAF soldiers were killed and 21 injured when about 100 insurgents attacked a patrol in Kabul Province on Aug. 18. Afghan security forces were also involved in the patrol.
Fighting began in the late afternoon 18 Aug. and continued into Tuesday, 19 August. The initial patrol was reinforced with quick reaction forces, close air support, and mobile medical teams. During the engagement a large number of insurgents were killed.
“This is a difficult time right now for the families and friends of those who died or were injured, and we offer them our sincere condolences and sympathies,” said Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette, ISAF spokesperson. “The lives of these soldiers are irreplaceable, but this loss does not deter ISAF from supporting the people of Afghanistan in their fight against the enemies of peace and stability.”
The enemy also attacked a US base with a force of suicide bombers - the enemy, defeated in Iraq, seems to making a stand in Afghanistan. This really is a long war, and while Obama says he will fight it out in Afghanistan, the plain fact of the matter is that he’s an untried quantity, and for the long war we need a President who has proven he can take the worst and carry on - John McCain is that man, and lets hope we make the right choice in November.
Tags: Afghanistan, Barack Obama, France, ISAF, John McCain, Sarkozy, Taliban, Terrorism
August 20th, 2008
Excellent news:
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said France will send more troops to bolster Nato’s mission in Afghanistan, subject to certain conditions.
Mr Sarkozy, who is on a state visit to Britain, said he would make the offer at next week’s Nato summit in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.
Britain and the US have frequently called on other Nato members to send more soldiers to fight the Taleban.
The Nato-led force, Isaf, currently has over 43,000 personnel in Afghanistan.
In a speech to the British parliament in London, Mr Sarkozy said the Taleban could not be allowed to regain power.
“In Afghanistan something essential is being played out,” he said.
“France has proposed a strategy to its allies in the Atlantic alliance to enable the Afghan people and their legitimate government to build peace.
“If these proposals are accepted, during the summit in Bucharest, France will propose reinforcing its military presence.”
France already has troops in Afghanistan but like all other NATO forces - other than US, UK and Australia - they work on such restrictive rules of engagement as to be useless in a military sense except as static, garrison troops. President Sarkozy’s proposal indicates that the French military will engergetically engage in battle - and this, in turn, might get the Germans and others to step up to the plate. In the end, we are all in tihs together, and it will be over a lot faster if all concerned put some will into the fight.
The problem with Europe seems to be a lack of will to live, and a resultant unwillingness to fight. But it wasn’t always so - less than 100 years ago, France sternly sacrificed its manhood on the anvil-altar of Verdun, fighting for the core principle that governments must derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The great-grandsons of those brave men now hold the destiny of France - and, perhaps, Europe - in their hands. President Sarkozy has made a brave offer, we’ll now see if there is any will to live in France, and Europe.
Tags: Afghanistan, France, NATO, President Nicolas Sarkozy
March 27th, 2008
In case anyone wanted to know what a real civil war looks like:
IN retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.
What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: “Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!”
The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.
“I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground,” said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.
His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.
Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.
Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.
Thus a century of official anti-Christianity in French law coupled with half a century of leftwing political correctness as regards immigrants, especially Moslem immigrants. France now has a segment of its population which has de-facto been removed from the day to day rule of French law and this has been allowed to happen because the post-Christian French society has thus far lacked not only the backbone to defend itself, but even the confidence in the good of French civilization which makes a person wish to have it defended. Probably not one in ten Frenchmen adhere to those moral and theological principles which gave birth to French civilization and sustained it through a thousand years of crisis. Right now, about one in ten of the people who live in France adhere to a set of moral and theological principles alien to French civilization, and increasingly under the control of those who are violently hostile to it. The battle is on - and at stake is whether or not France will remain French.
This undigested population contained within France is, as I said, increasingly under the control of those who are violently hostile to French civilization; but this is not the same as saying all those people are hostile. My view is that most of them - perhaps even 90% of them - would very much like to participate fully, as French citizens, in French civilization. The battle, then, will be decided based not upon the actual strength of the French and their opponents, but on who is more willing to fight for their side. The French, if they want to have a France, will have to recover their backbone - have to, that is, recover the basis of their civilization and stride forward confident in the goodness of France and while being welcoming of the stranger, insistent that in France, French civilization will be the norm for the entire population.
As the news story goes on to relate, a strong police presence in the violent areas has enforced calm - but the calm is only on the surface. Until those who instigated the violence and who fuel the fires of hatred are punished - and punished quite severely, as traitors to France - the people who fight France will just bide their time, gather their forces and wait confidently for the French to back down. The French must get in there and insist that French law and French social norms carry the day - and that will only happen if the French believe in themselves, their nation, and the moral and theological principles which created both.
How it will come out will remain to be seen - but the warning is also there for the United States. France, and the rest of Europe, is much further down a road that the American left wishes us to travel. While their intentions might be honorable and generous, the practical effects of leftwing social policy lead precisely to the destruction of the will to live in the host civilizaiton. Break down faith, break down family, break down the inherent honor in all honest work, break down the story of the nation and highlight all sins while ignoring all nobility, and what you get is a post-Christian nation which has tolerated itself into a corner. It has come for the French a time to fight or flee - for the United States, there is still time for us to prevent this descent into sociological madness.
Tags: Eurabia, France, Islam
December 2nd, 2007
