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Jihad Watch is reporting that the recent bombing of the commuter rail in Bombay, India, has the appearance of being Kashmir Jihadists.  If so, then we should look for tensions over the Kashmir region between India and Pakistan to heat up again.

Remember the most recent spate of tensions there?  India and Pakistan almost went to war over Kashmir (all the while, the U.S. was courting Pakistan in order to gain assistance with the war in Afghanistan).  While I think that Dick Armitage is mostly a lackey, he apparently managed to suppress the tensions and pull a nuclear India and nuclear Pakistan back from the brink of war.

It would be better for world stability if this was an internal affair within India rather than the work of Muslim terrorists.  Michelle Malkin thinks that this is possible (reference here).

We’ll see.

 **** UPDATE #1 ****

The arrests make it currently look like it is Islamic Terrorists.  From Fox News:

The Indian home minister said on Indian television that authorities had information of an attack but did not know when or where it was to occur.

“There is no information about who is behind these blasts,

See this interesting article over at Fox News on the EU being a “leaderless superpower.”  It is right in so far as it goes (i.e., without a leader).  But the EU is so far from being a superpower that it is really surprising that anyone would have written a piece hinting at such a thing.

A few comments on the EU.  First of all, quoting from the link above:

Europe’s current climate of “Christianophobia

Here is a very, very, very strange post.  It is called the “Dark Side of the Blog” over at MSNBC.com.  One of the examples used as “dark” is of Glenn Reynolds.  The quote on the blog says:

One example that comes to mind is Glenn recently encouraging readers to contact the Egyptian embassy on behalf of an imprisoned blogger.

Um, excuse me?  Once again, um, excuse me?

Encouraging people to contact the Egyptian embassy on behalf of an imprisoned blogger is a “dark” example of blogging?  If so, then “Lord, please let me be a dark blogger who becomes a thorn in the side of the Islamo-fascist Mubarrak who imprisons not only bloggers but Christians as well.”

Here is Zarqawi from the CENTCOM web site (page “What Extremists are Saying“):

“”Why do not you tell them that your soldiers cannot sleep without taking drugs and hallucination pills …

Barbara Boxer, as shown and discussed on The Factor with Bill O’Reilly, July 10, 2006:

“Our soldiers are having to take anti-depressants …”

The context made it clear that she was discussing forward-deployed soldiers and Marines.  In Fact, the always enjoyable Col. David Hunt had to refute this claim.

I also know that our boys cannot have any drugs, alcohol, women or anything else that would interfere with the performance of their duties or otherwise adversely effect them when deployed.  The only thing they can have is tobacco.

There you have it.  Zarqawi and Boxer – extremists.  Boxer slams our boys in harm’s way because they use smokeless tobacco.

Nice job, Barbara.  Do you feel proud?

Here is a link to the current goings-on over Japan and North Korea.  This is a followup post to my “Will Japan go Nuclear?”

Japan is indeed worried, and they are talking big on rethinking a first-strike option for North Korea.  I just have four words for them: they had better not.  They are not prepared, do not have the air force or navy to pull it off, and do not have the missile defense capabilities right now to properly defend themselves from a North Korea missile attack.

They should go nuclear first.  It might take some time (a half a year to a year, I would guess, to make the weapons grade fissile material).  In the mean time, they can be beefing up their offensive and defensive capabilities.  Nuclear capability in Japan is the penultimate strategic defense (and it would forever modify the politics of the far east).  North Korean nuclear capabilities would not hold a candle to Japanese capabilities (I say this based on two things: (1) the availability of fissile material in Japan from commercial nuclear fuel, and (2) the capabilities of Japanese nuclear engineers).

An interesting thing appears in this little article I posted a link to at the top.  We hear this from Christopher Hill:

Still, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill questioned just how influential Beijing was with the enigmatic regime.

“I must say the issue of China’s influence on DPRK is one that concerns us,” Hill told reporters in Tokyo. “China said to the DPRK, ‘Don’t fire those missiles,’ but the DPRK fired them. So I think everybody, especially the Chinese, are a little bit worried about it.”

I am not buying it for one second.  This is bluster from China.  They want the appearance of having tried to reign in Kim Jong Il.  They could do it quickly if they wanted.  Too much aid comes from China across the boarder to N. Korea.  The country would quickly starve without China.

So why did Hill repeat this?  Does he believe it, or does he know better but want the rest of the world to believe that China tried to stop the missile launches?

While Bill O’Reilly was on vacation last week, John Kasich filled in for him.  When discussing North Korea, he had the always sensible Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney and the mostly nonsensical P.J. Crowley on the show.

After the Lt. General spoke, Crowley said something to the effect that he disagreed with McInerney and that he believed that the period of time during the Clinton years had managed to “pull us back from the brink of war and give us a number of years of stability.”

When I first heard this, I was going to post on it but decided not to.  After all, Crowley was security advisor to Clinton and any commentary he makes has a personal side.  The North Korea debacle is largely the responsibility and fault of Crowley and Clinton and the politics of appeasement and ignorance.  We will engage in talky-talk with them, give them things and hope that they don’t lie to us.  So I figured that I would give him some grace.  He was embarrassed and simply defending himself.  We must remember that it was during the Clinton years that North Korea went nuclear.  No matter when they got the technology from Pakistan, the fissile material to actually use in bombs became available during the Clinton years.  This is important to remember.

So having dismissed Crowley as personally involved, it was interesting  to see that over at MSNBC.com, where the Eric Alterman blogs, we see this commentary on North Korea:

The tone of Powell’s tenure was set early in the administration when he announced that he planned “to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off

Below “Lefty” takes me to task for insulting the MSM.  And then he accuses me of dripping sarcasm in my posts/responses.

I have sat alone in the dark and become pensive over this whole issue, and I have concluded that I did indeed insult the MSM.  And I have wept buckets and buckets of tears over it.

As to this issue of how reporting “from Ramadi,” or “from Haditha,” goes, primarily the MSM is holed up in Baghdad.  They (the brave ones) travel to a site — sometimes — like Ramadi, set up shop on the outskirts of the city where the risk is reduced, and pay informants and other news sources for information about a locale.  Then they report “from Ramadi,” or “from Haditha.”  The more cowardly ones just stay holed up in Baghdad.

Michael Fumento, on the other hand, dons full combat gear, goes in with the boys who are there, and gives us a first hand look during actual combat (like Ernie Pyle).

Michael Fumento is the closest thing to Ernie Pyle we have.  God bless Michael Fumento.

As for the MSM, I have wept buckets of tears over my insult to them.

You do believe my repentance, don’t you, Lefty?  Buckets and buckets of tears.

Sitting here pondering heavy things: the war in Iraq, my son’s deployment early 2007, immigration and what kind of U.S. I will turn over to my granddaughter, job, family issues, etc., etc.

A little music to relax by.  Peter Gabriel, the first thing he did when he split from “Genesis.”  Solsbury Hill.  Go find an MP3 feed (can be found by doing a search of “solsbury hill mp3”).

An easy listen.

Note: This post has been updated with Nuclear Japan.

I wanted to wait and think a bit on the North Korea situation before I weighed in.  Here it goes.

There is a history of tension between Japan and North Korea.  North Korea is known to have kidnapped Japanese citizens before, and of course there is the fact that the recent flury of missiles is an expanded repeat of what happened prior to this (Kim Jong Il lobbed missiles over Japan in 1998).

I honestly believe that there is only one solution to Kim Jong Il: it is for Japan and/or Taiwan to go nuclear.  It would be very difficult for Taiwan to go nuclear.  China has too many eyes in Taiwan.  It would be quite easy for Japan to do it.

Japan has not gone nuclear before now because of a number of things (including but not limited to):

1. Being the first and only country ever to to be attacked with nuclear weapons, there is a psychological barrier with the citizens.
2. Japan believes (with good reason) that there is at least to some extent a blanket of protection from the U.S. just as there is with Taiwan.
3. The theory goes that if Japan went nuclear, it would start an arms race in the region.

I do not believe that any of these reasons are determinative.  Go do a Google search on “Japan go nuclear” and read for a while.  There is much discussion available on this subject, but most of it was written after 1998 and well before now (when Kim Jong Il fires more missiles over Japan and supposedly in the direction of the U.S.).  Some of the literature concludes that Japan will not go nuclear (for at least some of the reasons mentioned above).  But with the expanded missile program and several more years to work on nuclear weapons in North Korea, Japan might just be getting a little bit edgy.

It should be noted that there is some degree of enigma surrounding the Kim household and a line of succession.  There is also some speculation on potential mental illness that Kim Jong Il might be afflicted with.  So it is difficult to know exactly what is going on: Is this bluster to show the world that Kim Jong Il is still “the man,” and in charge of his country and that he will be around for some time?  Or is he trying to prepare the country for someone else in succession?

Either way, he cannot be trusted and he has shown that every time he has had opportunity.  Now back to Japan.  Japan knows this and must be thinking hard about the world reaction to the most recent blitz of missile launches.  Sure, the ICBM was a flop.  But all missile programs in history created flops before they created the real deal.

My position on Russia is that the reason for their reticence is that if they were to weigh in and begin to pressure North Korea, they know that they would be mostly ignored.  They are not the player on the world stage that they once were.  They weigh in on the same scales that Germany or France do, not on the scales that the U.S. and China do.  They know this, but it would be quite the public and international humiliation to weigh in and then be ignored.  It would announce to the world what they know but what they do not want the rest of the world to acknowledge; they have become mostly irrelevant.

No one else matters except China and the U.S.  China will not pull the reigns in because they are enjoying seeing the U.S., Japan and South Korea and Taiwan hand-wring over the shinanigans of Kim.  But this might just backfire on them.

The Google search you did above (“Japan go nuclear”) yielded many hits that opined in the negative due to such things as “they would have to reprocess their nuclear fuel to get the weapons-grade Uranium or the Plutonium.”  This objection is nonsense.  It amounts to no more than the objection for anyone going nuclear: you have to create the fissile material through reprocessing.  Okay.  So where is the problem?  This is just a technical issue.  Japan has good nuclear engineers.  Their commercial nuclear program demonstrates that.

Possibly the most interesting of the literature showing up from this Google search comes from a doctoral candidate at MIT, who authored a paper entitled “Why Japan Won’t go Nuclear (yet).”  “Yet” is the operative word here.  Once again, this paper was written prior to the recent spate of missile launches by Kim.

The weakness in this paper, I believe, is that it gives too much credit for public reaction, legislative gerrymandering, and world reaction to being able to stop Japan from going nuclear.  In fact, it seems to me that such a publicly stated intent would be profoundly unwise.  China probably would not allow it to happen.  If it is going to happen, it must do so discretely.  Then Japan would announce it to the world after it had happened — not before.

If Japan does go nuclear, it would signficantly change both the politics and the power balance in the region.  And this, to our favor and the benefit of democracies in the world.

Will they do it?  It is the perfect solution to Kim.  Will the U.S. discretely recommend to Japan that they be going in this direction?  How much backbone does the U.S. have on this matter?  As for an arms race in the region, this won’t matter much if Japan feels that their future existence is at stake.  What person would not run if his life was in danger?  The fact that running is hard work becomes irrelevant when your existence is at stake.

Here is a good article from MSNBC (I don’t usually like the stuff they produce) on warrior ethics.  It was worth the time spent reading it.  I would also mention a post I made some time ago on Calvin and Aquinas on war (most of the post was quoting Calvin, with a pointer to a paper in “First Things” on the subject of good wars).  This is an even better read, very scholarly and studied.  It may sound jingoistic to some people (who haven’t a foundation, or “world view” from which to launch the balance of their thinking), but there are good reasons for waging war and defending yourself and others.  The fathers of the church even call this a “ministry” to others.

Hmmm.  What would the folks over at Daily Kos think of war as a “ministry?”