Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, June 22, 2009

A Duh! Moment

By Steve Hynd


A report today states the bleeding obvious (h/t Kat):



If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday.


Duh! Did anyone not know this already? What's far less obvious is the chances of that ever happening.


The Pakistani Taliban, for reasons of demography, comparative firepower and ethnic antipathy, have next to no chance of ever taking over Pakistan from the massive Pakistani military. The AQ network of mainly non-Pakistanis, therefore, have even less chance. Nil. The chances of AQ seizing those heavily-guarded nukes, possibly with their component parts widely disperssed, as well as the codes created with US help needed to unlock their destructive potential are likewise vanishingly small.


The only viable path to AQ's dream would be if Pakistan's military secretly handed them those components and codes, something that's also unlikely in the extreme unless the West backs Pakistan into a corner first. The hawkish penchant for bombing civilians, while not at all helpful, isn't sufficient for that. I'm having difficulties imagining a scenario that could lead to such help for AQ, especially given post-bomb forensic identification methods and the inevitable consequences for Pakistan.


It's a fantasy, a pipe-dream, a scary story intended to get Western pantswetting hawks all in a flutter, psyops terrorism by press release.



Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)