The famous Rhein-Main Air Force Base was turned back over to Germany today as US forces are redeployed in our post-9/11 world.
The airstrip south of Frankfurt airport was used to keep West Berlin from the Soviets during the 1948 blockade and served as a major staging point for later conflicts, including Vietnam, the 1990 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
U.S. hostages held captive in Iran and throughout the Middle East during the 1980s and 1990s also passed through Rhein-Main on their way to freedom back home and Elvis Presley went through the air base after finishing his military service in 1960.
Washington said last year that a total of 30,000 troops would leave Germany as part of plans to bring forces back from Europe and Asia over the next decade, reflecting revised priorities after the end of the Cold War.
Goodbye, Old Europe! You are either with us or against us in the war against Islamic fundamentalism. I’m happy to take our economic-generating bases to one of our true allies in this new world war.
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
Amen to that, sister! You are either with us or the terrorists. Some pinkos have yet to figure that concept out.
Regards,
Peter Hughes
#1
Come on Senator McCarthy, stop posting under that lame Peter Hughes moniker.
Goodbye and good riddance.
I like the sentiment (good bye old europe), Bruce. I’m sorry to say it’s only a sentiment.
All we did was move our forces that were at Rhein Mein AB to Ramstein and Spangalum bases. The personnel and money are still in Germany.
Apparently you do not recall that the US military has been pulling out of Germany for something over a decade. The US military reduced its occupancy there by some 3/4 by (if memory serves) 1995, and substantially terminated its presence in Kaiserslautern, which housed a huge US military installation. If the Reuters column is correct, 30,000 US military is an even smaller number than was present in the 1990s.
One question: is the US going to terminate its hospital facilities in Ramstein? That is where most of the US military who were injured in Iraq were shipped for repair, before they were transhipped to the US. Anyone who can look at a globe would know why.
Be careful what you wish for. It might come back to haunt you.
Oh, and, by the way, the fact that the US is pulling out of Germany has made our house over there a lot more quiet. We used to have military jets flying over the house on a regular basis, out of a nearby air force base in Furstenfeldbrueck. Since the Americans pulled out, that has stopped.
I havn’t heard anything about Ramstein facilities being closed. They’ve just completed $100 million(s) worth of construction projects. Of course, that doesn’t mean anything, base closure wise. Supposedly Ramstein is going to be “THE new European cargo hub.”
Look! I’m not the one who said Joran Van der Sloot is gay.
I’ve heard he was gay, and I’ve talked to guys who claim to have slept with him, but I never slept with him.
Maybe Joran Van der Sloot is gay. That doesn’t make him innnocent. Maybe he killed her because Natalee was with his boyfriend. Maybe his boyfriend is bi-sexual, and killed Natalee, and Joran helped dispose of her body.
All I’m saying is that I never said Joran was gay.
Comment by airforceboy — October 11, 2005
Oh, so you’re admitting that the US isn’t totally pulling out of Germany.
The US has been pulling out of Germany for well over a decade. Primarily during the reign of the center right government of Helmut Kohl. Nothing in Germany has changed. If there are only 30K Americans left there, what do you believe the further withdrawal might accomplish?
It is likely that NATO is largely dead. There is no common enemy and, regardless, the Bush administration that it wants to “lead” irrespective of whether there are any “followers.”
Raj,
yea…though ‘admitting’ would would suggest that I wasn’t aware all along that we were keeping a military presence in Germany…or that I was trying to keep that information from you, which I wasn’t.
30K is hardly a military presence compared to what it was in the 80’s, but it is still 30K too many. Whatever the (huge) financial benefit certain Germans have derived, it was always a nuisance for most people and a little bit of a humiliation. And then on the American side there were lots of drawbacks. The cost was the obvious one, but there was also the annoyingly deluded way so many people stationed there thought the Germans were out friends.
#2 – Talk about the fag calling the kettle black. It sounds about as phony as YOUR moniker, honey, and I would change it before some enterprising attorney hired by a former “Friends” actor slaps a lawsuit on you.
You must really be into self-loathing as a liberal. My sympathies.
Guys..Guys..Guys..
Germany and the Netherlands are fighting the war on terrorism in Afghanistan. And this is how you thank them? So they didn’t support Bush’s war in Iraq. So should they pack up their troops and go home? I didn’t realize they were fighting the Americans there.
So you hate the Europeans. Why? Because they don’t support every ill-considered move by Bush?
The situation is much more complicated than the hyperbolic AM talk radio mantra I’m reading in here.
“…Germany and the Netherlands are fighting the war on terrorism in Afghanistan.”
…..My ass. They refuse to engage in combat. Amount of the fighting they are doing in Afghanistan: 0
Also – it’s not that they “fail to support Bush’s moves” – it’s that they actively worked to keep an evil dictator in office and sell him weapons, in contravention of their own diplomatic and legal promises.
Looks like that “European moral equivalency” disease (where people are unable to recognize evil dictators and enjoy appeasing them) may be getting to you.
You mean like supporting the Saudi Royal family?
The only way in which the Saudi royal family even comes close to Saddam is in supporting terrorists. In every other respect, Saddam makes them look like Boy Scouts with headdresses.
Moreover, if you want to play comparison games, compare the European response to Slobodan Milosevic with their response to Saddam Hussein. Saturation-bombing of civilians, invasion, and occupation were warranted for Slobodan’s thousands killed; billions of dollars in armaments and subsidies were for Saddam’s millions.
#12
Senator McCarthy, you have dropped trou.
I like the way you toss the fag thing around.
You are the kind of conservative I have come to know so well.
And there is nothing phony about my signature;
My name is Chandler and I live in (both Las Vegas and) Hollywood.
GayPatriotWest most certainly vouch that that is true.
As for the tone of the rest of your pittiful missive – get fisted 🙂
Oh, and by the way, you totally missed the point.
Not surprised.
It may be better in the long term for Europe to just go away. I’ll still miss the closer connections our nation had with them for so many years. Although India, China, Turkey, and Brazil need to have our greater focus now, we will never have any real bond with them like we once had with Europe. However, with China getting scarier it looks like India, Japan, and probably Indonesia and Vietnam will become more “western” in thier alliance with the US. They’ll do it for the same selfish reasons Europe did but it still looks like a lot of the anti-American crap in those countries will subside somewhat.
The Euros don’t do crap in Afghanistan. They are the real window dressing unlike our actual allies in Iraq.
#18
Miss having Alger Hiss and his bunch in government jobs?
#20
Miss Hiss. Long stretch of the historical argument there.
#16 – Perfect illustration that the “European moral equivalency” disease has indeed infected you, Tom.
The Saudi royal family’s crimes are/were simply not in the scale or degree of Saddam’s. Saddam was, by all accounts, killing his own citizens at a rate of 50,000 per year for decades and burying the bodies in mass graves. As killers go, and in proportion to Iraq’s population, he was in the league of Hitler, Stalin, Mao.
In addition: Nobody is selling the Saudis weapons in contravention of their own diplomatic and legal promises. Unlike the Europeans, who sold Saddam weapons in gross violation of approximately a dozen U.N. resolutions.
We can go on and on with this discussion, if you’d like. Every point you would want to raise next has a very solid answer. I’ve done it enough times to know. Toss the next canard out there; listen and learn the truth. For example, perhaps for your next move, you’d like to claim that the Coalition’s invasion of Iraq was itself in violation of U.N. resolutions. It wasn’t. It was in support/implementation of U.N. resolutions; we can discuss resolution numbers and texts, if you’d like.
Yeah, yeah… I wish those Europeans would send troops to help keep the peace and win hearts and minds in Afghanistan. I’m sure all of us here realize that launching a war in Iraq — and especially not bothering to plan for how to win the peace — just inflamed opinion in the MidEast against us. After all, aren’t 95% of the Islamoterrorists fighting us in Iraq, FROM IRAQ? Darned Old Europeans. But we’ll show them — we’ll bar them from bidding on the contracts to rebuild Iraq!
#23 – “I’m sure all of us here realize that launching a war in Iraq — and especially not bothering to plan for how to win the peace — just inflamed opinion in the MidEast against us.”
Nope. You got it wrong, Ben. On several counts.
(1)”Launching a war in Iraq” – Sorry Ben, but we didn’t. It was launched in 1990. By Saddam. Gulf War I never came to an end, i.e., no peace treaty was ever signed. There was only a cease-fire. According to U.N. resolutions, the cease-fire was wholly dependent on certain very specific conditions. Conditions like: Saddam not killing his own people, not shooting at Coalition over-flights, not seeking to acquire uranium refining centrifuges and long-range missiles (which they proved he did), and generally not seeking to cheat or expel U.N. weapons inspectors. Conditions that Saddam violated repeatedly and massively. When the U.N. Security Council found in no uncertain terms that Saddam had done so, the cease-fire legally ended – in other words, Gulf War I resumed, legally and militarily. That was the situation when the Coalition took it into Iraq in 2003.
(2) The Islamo-fascists already hated us and wanted to establish a Caliphate (that means Empire), killing us in the process, before the resumption of hostilities in 2003. Remember: 9-11, Khobar Towers, USS Cole, Somalia, the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the attempt on Bush 41’s life in the early 1990s, etc., all happened before 2002. That’s at least 6 major actions in a global war against us, all having nothing to do with the resumption of hostilities in Iraq. To suggest that the Islamo-fascists are an “inflammation of opinion” resulting from the 2003 resumption of hostilities in Iraq is fatuous.
(3) Recent evidence suggests that, far from being inflamed against us, the “Arab Street” is starting to understand that the Islamo-fascists are the bad guys and the Coalition is serious about establishing democracy in Iraq, Lebanon, etc., and hence the good guys. As a result, Arab opinion is reportedly turning in our favor. Click here for the 411.
“After all, aren’t 95% of the Islamoterrorists fighting us in Iraq, FROM IRAQ?”
Sorry man – Wrong again. 95% of the Islamoterrorists fighting us in Iraq are NOT FROM IRAQ. Zarqawi, to name only one, is a Palestinian-Jordanian.
I’m talking about the actual Islamoterrorists here: the people indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians all the time.
Now, it happens that there are also some ex-Saddam regime elements – let’s call them “Baathist diehards” – who have also been fighting Coalition troops – (and not as much Iraqi civilians). Those guys increasingly hate the Islamoterrorists (who mass-murder Iraqi civilians eagerly and indiscriminately) and are slowly, very slowly but surely, starting to assist ISF (Iraqi Security Forces) and Coalition troops against the Islamoterrorists. So say various milblogs.
God, does #24 ALWAYS go on and on like that? Sheesh, sounds like she’s got the squawkschickentalkhawk disease that we see so much of on this website.
joe — October 13, 2005 @ 12:32 am – October 13, 2005
This is one of the silliest posts I’ve read.in years.
Gulf War I never came to an end, i.e., no peace treaty was ever signed.
No peace treaty was ever signed? So? I watched GHWBush declare the war over. On television.
BTW, just to remind you, no peace treaty was signed in the Korean War, or in the Vietnam war. Have you ever heard of the term “fait accompli”? The thing that has been accomplished.
Conditions like: Saddam not killing his own people…
Just to let you know, this silliness about “Saddam killing his own people” referred to Saddam suppressing an insurrection of Kurds in 1988 during the Iran/Iraq war. A war that the Reagan administration not only supported, but also supplied Iraq arms–including chemical weapons–for. The Reagan administration originally tried to blame the Iranians for the gassing of the Kurds, but were forced to relent when it became clear that the claim was farcical.
…95% of the Islamoterrorists fighting us in Iraq are NOT FROM IRAQ. Zarqawi, to name only one, is a Palestinian-Jordanian….
The last is true. Al-Zarqawi was a prisoner in a Jordanian jail for some years. I haven’t done a poll, so I don’t know where the other “Islamoterrorists” are from, and I doubt that you do either. Regarding al-Zarqawi, after he was released from Jordanian prison in 1999, he was operating in the Kurdish region of Iraq–a region over which the Kurds controlled, but Saddam did not. It was within the northern Iraq “no-fly zone.” So, it seems to me, the Kurds were harboring al-Zarqawi, not Saddam.
Poor Raj….still trying to spin that all the things outlined in Resolution 1441 that joe mentioned never happened?
NDT, I know all about Res 1441, and I have been discussing it on more than a few conservative web sites for more than a few years. I also know about the previous resolutions. I also know that, following Res 1441, Negroponte, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, admitted that there would have been required a later vote by the Security Council to authorize a war by the US against Iraq. There was no later vote, because the US knew that they could not win won.
Don’t BS me.