As I understand it, considerable damage in Baghdad was caused by the tons of AA that the Iraqis shot wildly into the air. Gravity can be a bitch sometimes.

I was wondering when somebody would drive the fully on-fire crazy truck into this conversation! Bravo!

He is quite popular with undereducated, angry, white guys. He is UKIP for the US. He will not be elected but he does have the power to cause a serious amount of soul searching butthurt in the GOP.

Yeah, an “unknown” guy who won three state senate races and one Illinois US Senate race. Completely under the radar... like the guy just appeared! You know, except for all that other shit.
It is ok not to like someone. It is even ok to insult them. Just making shit up to belittle them sort of makes you look like a…

Song title.

Well, both the Iranians and Russians don’t just want but desperately NEED the price of oil to go up. This kind of display might be a test of what they need to do to make the market nervous.

I just stumbled into this article and, although there is no way in hell I would buy a corvette (in Norway), I want to commend you on a very well written article. Your writing is very clean. Nice job. With the crazy tax on cars here and the equally crazy non-tax on electrics, I would go P85D in a heartbeat. . . had I…

P85D? or is that an “exotic”? I would not think so by how many of them I see rolling around Oslo. For real world butt-kicking, they are hard to match.

So all it would take to get these two kids to trade some swats in the schoolyard is a Turkish flagged boat to charge a Russian warship? I hope the Isis boys can’t get their hands on a boat...

One of these planes is a stealth fighter...

Woah there. Wait a second. The US is supposed to sort this Cluster F*ck out? Why and on whose dime? I think we should keep our fire engine at home for this fire. Frankly, I can’t see why we need to care that much.
Lob some bombs? Sure. Send in some extrajudicial hit squads to take out nasty people? Fine. Try to broker…

I.e., Columbian mercenaries?

Take a look at Africa, France is reasonably busy for how big they are. They like to go places and do things (Mali, CAR, etc.). The French military likes to get dirty, especially those bad-asses they have based in Marseille.

All I am saying is that they said they did not know they were being targeted so it follows that even if they had a warning system they were pretending they didn’t know and just ignoring it, so holding a lock would have been of little use in sending a message.

My impression is that we still have not figured out what to do yet. There are not a lot of modern counter-terrorism success stories. The fact is that, with modern tech and a little knowhow, a small group of crazy people can create havoc from damn near anywhere. At the same time, everything we do in that region gets…

I would highly recommend that any, and especially N. Americans, readers interested in the deeper ethno-political aspects of this conflict vis-a-vis Turkmen, the vestiges of the Ottomans, and the Caucasian people read Eastward to Tartary by Robert Kaplan. It is a good primer for understanding the intractable…

According (supposedly) to the Russian pilot who survived, they never saw the missile and did not know they had been fired on. What good would maintaining a lock on them have been if they had no idea they were being targeted?

Bravo for saying that Evil. Turkey violating Greek airspace has never been relevant to this event. As they are both NATO, it is more of an “oops, by the way, FU” on Turkey’s part but it is a tiff between allies.

Neither kosher or halal...

What’s a tiny border violation anyway?