Intemperance continues! Verbiage was spewn!

Yes, I went to The Belmont Club when my mind was a bit befuddled and my awakeness draining and lunch just on the horizon. Unfortunately lunch took the other two away from me. Like the rest of my verbiage I take from my commentary elsewhere, this is given verbatim and I try to ensure that formatting remains *close* to the original. HTML is tricky at times! Again intemperance ruled the comment, but with some nice home-like rejoinder to listen. So this I commented on the look at foreign policy in the US between the democratizing Wilsonians and the Jacksonians who are... well, read on:

Please do *not* confuse Jacksonians with your everyday common conservative. The ideas of personal honor, giving help where its due, showing mercy to those that know how to show it, and helping someone who knows what surrender means to get back on their feet is something that really should cut across many lines, but is a straight line for Jacksonians. After wars Jacksonians are the first to lend a hand at helping to rebuild and try to make peace and friendship. The Marines get the right of it with: No better friend, No worse enemy.

Now this enemy of Transnational Terrorist organizations, of which Islamic stripe is the meanest but they are all a pretty foul lot, seem determined not to raise a flag, form a country, set forth something to defend, protect those under them and then interact in a decent fashion with the rest of the world.

Have I got the right of that?

Now, because they operate at this more personal level of small groups they are damn hard to deal with by law enforcement, statecraft or the military.

Keeping up?

So, these are low life, non-law abiding, abusers of liberty and freedom for common folks who seek no law but their own and often ignore even that.

Now that goes for your generic Islamic Terrorist and such as FARC and Shining Path and the such like. They just aren't decent folk who live and let live and really would rather just kill you as convert you.

Because these low life barbaric killers don't respect the fine concepts that have grown up between nations for the last few centuries and feel free to abuse them at will, that makes them deucedly difficult to deal with. Thrown in some basic bribery, regimes using Transnational Terrorists as anonymous proxies and simple gangstering with drugs and money laundering and you got yourself one helluva problem.

Luckily, the good People of the United States are loathe to give up on just about any right. Even something as simple slavery we leave around with a single proviso, just in case it is ever needed. And some things just fall into the shadows as 'progress' seems to make them obsolete. The old tool at the bottom of the toolchest that just can't change with the times.

But by ignoring the rules and throwing out the rule book, these Transnational Terrorist are starting to play in old tools areas. And because the American People have been polite we haven't dragged out the damn things for over a century. But against these low-life barbaric Transnational Terrorists, it may be just the trick.

Old tools can be given a modern cast to them and gently reforged for a new era and need. That tool is via the Letters language for Congress in the US Constitution. Unfortunately to even consider having to do such, Congress would need to be more than gelatinous sheep doing their best to bleat at actually having to understand their powers and exercise them in defense of the People.

By putting together the Treaty regularization power along with the Commerce power with Foreign Nations and the Letters language, Congress could recraft the entire asymmetry problem by reversing it. Let treaty signatories know that a long list of people, groups, companies and countries are either enemies or trafficking with the enemies of the United States, and shipment of goods or trade with those on the list is also considered trafficking with the enemy.

Now that will put liberals all in a tizzy and a good lot of Wilsonians, too, I bet! As those folks haven't come up with a better solution, they can stuff it.

Next put out bounties on the listed contraband and include the vessels moving them on that list. Warranted organizations will be put under the Congressional Law of the Seas language and allowed to stop and inspect shipping that does not have a certified and verified cargo manifest from all countries agreeing to same with the United States. This would require DHS to get off their butts and give a serious timeline to get that done. Also banking transactions entering or passing through the United States must be verified to come from totally legal sources and not from anyone on the list.

Now those free traders are howling in pain! Probably a few more civil libertarians expecting the USA to enforce their rights every damn place on the globe. You folks haven't come up with a damn thing on this and can join the others and stuff it.

So Americans and their wholly owned Companies and some private individuals of wealth would be allowed to stop suspected shipping on the High Seas if contraband and trafficking with the enemy is thought to be going on. If such is found and verified, either via Dept of Justice or State Dept. or other cognizant group, then that entire vessel and its contents would be hauled in and the Bounty awarded.

To those saying this is illegal and piracy, it is nothing of the sort! It is the time-honored and tested method of Privateering updated for the modern age. If you think Transnational Terrorists are inventive going after their goals, just wait until you hang out pure profit to Americans! Find it, verify it, bring it in, no questions asked and immunity from extradition within the confines of the United States.

The southern border probably needs to be sealed good and tight, but nothing that a couple of walls with a warning system and kill zone between can't handle. Give some of those UCAV folks a chance to test their skills on live targets. Less lethal means could be employed, but really once this sort of thing starts unauthorized entry starts to look a hell of a lot like spying. I don't care if it is just poor folks looking for a job, let the oh-so-wise President and Congress work that one out.

Now our Fine Men and Women of the Armed forces do a bang-up job against totalitarian regimes, nation states and the such. We don't want to distract them with piddly little tracking and hunting jobs either on land or at sea. They bust up the big stuff just fine, but the very fine teasing out of what is going where and to who is something I am quite sure Americans can figure out once they put their minds to it. And see a profit in it.

Yup, most of the audience has fainted dead away! Simple, easy, gets you safer in the long run, and once you take the glamor out of Terrorism and turn them into starvlings on the run unable to get regular supplies... well, that would suit me just fine!

I expect it would be a bit tricky to start, but once people started to see the first arms caches and cargo ships and aircraft coming in and bounties being paid... well that is heartwarming!

As my daddy always said: "The proper tool for the proper job."

Yes, the above is semi-in-jest. But the point is a hard and cold one. We do not need just an Army of Davids.

We need a Nation of Davids at War.

Lunch time! See you all later!

And there it is! Verbiage was spewn and vast dictionaries lay rendered pageless!

Now, I did get one respondant to this, so I will excise name, although the moniker is wonderful! Again, given as best I can transfer it from there to here:

Dear [Respondant] - And I do enjoy that moniker! Wonderous!

The semi-in-jest part is the general tone of the comment I gave and the idea that the gelatinous wooly masses upon the Hill might actually do more than rent a single backbone to even consider their powers. If they have even read the damn document they are sworn to uphold and defend. At this point I have to believe that they either don't recognize their powers or are so damn afraid of setting the American People loose that they are doing *anything* to distract themselves from it.

The rest is in dead earnest. I hit upon the idea a bit ago and have been putting it forward here and there.

It seems that the mindset of Statist responses to non-state assymetrical warfare is not the best way to go about things. Nation States have problems dealing with such as we have seen. Law enforcement, statecraft and military work all do some of the job and can wound a distributed Transnational Terrorist organization, but none of them can do the right job of being a distributed group with coherent goals setting about to attack the situation from an angle that cannot be responded to.

Terrorism has taken some hard blows and is in the hospital bed. Going after commerce would be stepping on the oxygen hose and withholding meals. Americans are inventive and did a lot of work on making distributed corporations, economic systems and goods dispersal systems. And putting that same inventiveness to use in tracking and seizing goods would seem a natural fit. Consider it a Global Repo Operation with Congress putting out the Warrants and those designated by such out to bring them back in.

Somehow trafficking with an enemy has gotten to be a low-risk, low-cost operation, with just some minor state imposed inconveniences. By interdicting and seizing the goods and transport vessels the entire calculus changes for shipping companies. That is not a bit of profit being lost, it is operating capital. And attendant publicity to such would make those trafficking with terrorists look pretty unsavory.

I figure that either allowing the vessel and goods to be sold at auction or a Congressionally set fee, with choice upon those Warranted on which they want when they bring such in, would be a good concept. And any trying to run a scam operation are, by doing so, trafficking with or giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Justice for that would be swift and final.

The entire conception is asymmetric: all trading partners are warned and given a methodology to verify cargo and ensure manifests so that swift trade will not be impeded, putting the foreign banking systems on a similar footing would then start shutting off the flow of US funds via 'neutral' banks to less savory financial systems, and putting *enforcement* of it out to the People with high rewards offered for finding and bringing in contraband... well, Terrorists could start attacking every damn place, but that really does make them look even less good than now.

I do believe in the Terrible Swift Sword of the Republic.

The military is the sharp and well honed leading edge of it and point. But the Sword is no slim rapier, it is a damn weighty two handed affair for the real bulk of it is the People of the United States. We have grown strong enough to wield it so that it slices and pokes very, very well... but against the hydra the full flaming fury of the Sword is needed in broad strokes. That can be done now, by loosing the American people to give the Sword bite so that arteries and muscles to each head do no regrow and the monster slowly passes out head by head with none regrowing.

Or it can be done all at once later, with the bright dawn a thousand times over in many lands after the Republic is struck hard and deep. For the fury of the Republic will cleave and chop with murderous light, taking good and ill alike.

I prefer to strangle and drain the beast slowly, give it an ignomineous death of wimpering and twitching for all to see its nastiness. But if the twittering in Congress continues and Transnational Terrorism gains a hand to strike a blow to depopulate an American city or remove it from the map. Then the other way of 1,000 new dawns in many lands will answer.

May God have mercy on the enemies of the United States, for We The People shall surely have none.

This time only a mere pocket dictionary was lain waste to.

And there you have it, more thoughts on why we need to go asymmetric on the foe.