The Soft Underbelly of Europe

[waste gate]

Germany presents a tempting target for the jihadists and others.

Something from the Wall Street Journal.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010879

[Swede]

If im not misstaken it was Italy that was the underbelly of europe. And the whole "soft underbelly' was a missquote.

[AntEater]

Article = Skybird Bait
:rotfl:

But since he isnt here apparently:

I agree that our Governments approach on military missions is moronic. Either let your Soldiers do something useful or pull them out.
Deploying soldiers with a set of ROEs so restrictive they are basically bound to their camps is a waste of money.
Generally, defense policy and the treatment of the Bundeswehr by our politicians and media is something I could rant about for hours.

Regarding internal threats, the article confuses a low key approach with no approach.
While there's no obvious racial profiling and other un PC measures, our security services sofar proved up to the task.
Also, muslims here are mostly turks, not Maghrebians (Morocco, Algeria etc.) in the Netherlands and France or Pakistani and Bangladeshi in the UK.
The radicals among them (many just live like everybody else) are more talk than anything else and spend most of the time fighting each other anyway: Turks vs Kurds, Sunnites vs Allevites, Kemalists vs Islamists etc..

Here it seems mostly that our intelligence community knows pretty much what is going on in the country, but action must be politically approved and that is touchy, as our politicians today are quite a bunch of cowards, at least of the enemy is more than some punks or skinheads and if racial issues are involoved.

Regarding Iran, I suppose in 12 years Germany might be threatened by Iranian nukes if the US hasnt flattened the place by then. But by then NATO has the absolutely not anti-russian missile defense system installed for just such a threat.
We weren't threatened by Saddams WMDs either
:D

As a whole, while our politicians leave much to be desired (but there are no others to elect!), the people who actually do the work are up to it.
Just because a country doesnt go bragging with how many Islamists it arrests each day doesnt mean it is sleeping.

[Chock]

You have to suspect that if there were to be a nuclear strike on Germany it would not exactly please the rest of Europe, as they would likely get a lot of fallout too. You only have to look at the Chernobyl accident to see how far that stuff can go on the European jetstream, even with the prevailing Westerly wind that covers much of Europe a lot of the time, fallout still made it against that flow as far as Ireland, lots of it hit Wales too. So if France, Spain, the Baltic states and probably Russia too were getting a mouthful of radioactivity from a nuclear strike on Germany, it wouldn't much matter if there was some kind of mutual protection treaty from other nations or not, you could just bet one of the affected countries would be ready to pop over a few nukes if they had a clear idea of where any rogue nuke had originated from, and that's likely to be easy to trace since it lights up detection systems like a Christmas tree.

There have been precidents for considering this too, despite what many pacifists would like to believe following the two nukes that were used on Japan. Several countries were considering the use of them in Korea in the fifties, France has a nuclear deterrent independent of NATO, and Margaret Thatcher is widely known to have considered nuking Buenos Aires during the Falklands conflict; apparently the plan was to pop a Polaris missile over there from a sub (with no warhead on it), followed by a message saying something along the lines of, 'the next one will have a warhead on it if you don't feck off right now'. This was a contingency that was considered twice in fact, once before the fleet sailed and again as a back up plan if one of the two carriers would have been hit, as the makeshift aircraft carrier, Atlantic Conveyor was.

With that in mind, any terrorist would have to think very carefully about 'reaping the whirlwind', after all, despite the propensity of suicide bombers, they're not all suicidal, you don't see Osama, Ayatollahs or any of that crew lining up for the chance to strap some C4 to themselves do you? and that's supposed to be a guaranteed ticket to paradise if they really believe what they peddle.

If only they'd have chosen somewhere small with a crappy army as the Great Satan instead of the USA, they'd have probably won by now:rotfl:

:D Chock

[VipertheSniper]

If only they'd have chosen somewhere small with a crappy army as the Great Satan instead of the USA, they'd have probably won by now:rotfl:

:D Chock

Sorry, Austria doesn't have enough influence on world politics... but once again we got a threatening video from the Global Islamic Media Front to withdraw our soldiers from Afghanistan, and release the two muslims who made the first video of that kind.

Maybe if a nuke from Iran hits us, politicians will finally come to the conclusion, that to be neutral you need a strong army to defend the neutrality. Or finally give up the neutrality and get into the Nato (that's political suicide in Austria atm)