We owe the following to NCR, a reader and vet, who emailed it to us. It was written by a French soldier in Afghanistan. The translator is unknown.

We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while – they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. [It is the 101st Airborne – NCR] We live with them and have got to know them, and we know we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army.

They have terribly strong American accents – to us the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word?  Whatever state they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other.

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine [Heh. More like Waffle House and McDonald’s – NCR) – they are all head and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us – and because of this they often mistake us for Afghans.

Honor, motherland – everything here reminds one of that: the American flag flying in the wind above the outpost … Even though recruits may often originate from the heart of American cities and gang territory, they all hold high and proud the star spangled banner.

Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provide them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location: books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is made aware of how much the American people back him in his difficult mission.

This is a first shock to our preconceptions: the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team is the focus of all his attention.

And they are impressive warriors!

We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you [that we think this] when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how.

The wearing of combat kit never seems to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.), and the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to trouble them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles, their sight unmoving in the direction of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues night and day. At night, all movements are performed in the dark – only a few subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered – everything happens in pitch dark, even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.

And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always with the shortest delay.

That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat-ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride. They bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.

This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies, find repeatedly surprising. No wonder it surprises the hell out of our enemies.

We seldom hear any harsh word from them, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit.

A passing American helicopter will stop near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright. An American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is.

From what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a splendid and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow upon us the honor of sharing their combat outposts, and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to America’s army deployed on Afghan soil, we owe this tribute, hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and always continue to hear them say that we are all a band of brothers.

Muslims of the Middle East, Far East, North Africa and anywhere else, your attention please!

Great good news – if you haven’t already heard it! Just get yourself into Britain and say you’re a ‘refugee’ and ask for ‘asylum’, and you will immediately be given money and a place to live; you can import a wife or several wives, and they’ll all be given ‘benefits’ including ‘child-support’; your children will be given a free education and all of you will have free medical treatment. When you feel nicely settled you can carry out your duty of jihad by demanding that Britain adopt sharia law, or, if you fancy martyrdom, by suicide-bombing trains and buses to kill some British infidels.

From the Mail Online:

Migrant gangs [of Muslims – JB] in Calais are targeting British holidaymakers in terrifying ‘highway robberies’.

Would-be illegal immigrants are forming human roadblocks to force motorists passing through the French port town to stop. Travellers are then robbed at knifepoint by the migrants, who are desperate for funds to help them sneak into the UK. …

Since the closure of the Red Cross refugee centre at Sangatte in 2002, would-be migrants have been sleeping rough in and around Calais while they attempt to sneak on board cross-Channel trains and ferries. There are currently around 2,000, many living in a squalid camp known as the Jungle, which the French government has said will not be cleared away until next year.

In April immigration minister Eric Besson vowed to bulldoze the litter-strewn shanty town … after admitting it had become a hotbed for people smugglers and criminal gangs. But he has now said the camp must remain in place until it can be dismantled ‘in a dignified manner’.

French politicians have blamed Britain for the return of migrant camps to Calais.

The mayor of Calais, Natacha Bouchart, said the lure of the UK’s ‘enormous’ state handouts to asylum-seekers was the reason why thousands of foreigners are using the French port as a staging point to get across the Channel.

Mrs Bouchart said the UK Government’s policies were ‘imposing’ thousand of migrants on the town, costing the local economy millions of pounds.

A Russian writer observes how the present US administration, which he recognizes plainly as Marxist, is intent on implementing the very policies that wrecked the Soviet economy.

Stanislav Mishin writes in Pravda:

It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.

While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of “recovery” and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business…in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that’s a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry. …

Read it all here.

The person so strangely elected president of the United States ‘dreams’ – as the president of France says –  of a world without nuclear arms. Or at least of an America without  nuclear arms. Obviously the dreamer does not care if Iran and North Korea have them.

Paul Greenberg writes:

Since the United States now has joined Europe in endorsing the mullahs’ right to develop nuclear power for ever so peaceful purposes, does it really matter whether this site [near Qom] or the next oh-so-secret installation has started producing nuclear weapons yet? The switch from nuclear power to nuclear weapons is less a scientific than a political decision for the Iranians at this point. And it can be made — and carried out — quickly.

Does anybody …  believe that Iran’s little fuehrer isn’t bent on producing a nuke of his own, and that his rocket scientists aren’t working feverishly on a way to deliver it?

It’s also an open secret (much like Iran’s nuclear processing plants) that, whatever his forceful statements about how Iran won’t be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, Barack Obama isn’t really going to do anything to prevent it. Any more than the United Nations is. Any more than the Clinton and Bush administrations prevented North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il from acquiring a nuke of his own.

Just as he’s slipsliding when it comes to the war in Afghanistan despite all his tough talk about having to win it, it becomes clearer that this president is willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. You can tell because he’s been so emphatic about never accepting such an outcome. …

We’ve come to a not so pretty pass when Americans have to rely on the president of France — France! — to face the truth and tell it to the world. After the American president had delivered one of his sweetness-and-light nuclear-disarmament lectures at the United Nations, it was left to Nicolas Sarkozy to tell it with the bark off the next day at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh:

“President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries (North Korea and Iran) are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council resolutions. … I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And, last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a member of the United Nations (Israel, of course). What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”

Not necessarily. Not as long as the president of the United States continues to consult, consult and consult. And then temporize, temporize and temporize. Until one day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his nuke. …

John Bolton … pretty much summed up the fine mess brewing in Iran:

“The more sophisticated Iran’s nuclear skills become, the more paths it has to manufacture nuclear weapons. The research-reactor bait-and-switch demonstrates convincingly why it cannot be trusted with fissile material under any peaceful guise. Proceeding otherwise would be winking at two decades of Iranian deception, which, unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems perfectly prepared to do.”

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Sarkozy …  could not conceal his astonishment at Obama’s naivete. On Sept. 24, Obama ostentatiously presided over the Security Council. With 14 heads of state (or government) at the table, with an American president at the chair for the first time ever, with every news camera in the world trained on the meeting, it would garner unprecedented worldwide attention.

Unknown to the world, Obama had in his pocket explosive revelations about an illegal uranium enrichment facility that the Iranians had been hiding near Qom. The French and the British were urging him to use this most dramatic of settings to stun the world with the revelation and to call for immediate action.

Obama refused. Not only did he say nothing about it, but, reports Le Monde, Sarkozy was forced to scrap the Qom section of his speech. Obama held the news until a day later — in Pittsburgh. I’ve got nothing against Pittsburgh (site of the G-20 summit), but a stacked-with-world-leaders Security Council chamber, it is not.

Why forgo the opportunity? Because Obama wanted the Security Council meeting to be about his own dream of a nuclear-free world. The president, reports The New York Times citing “White House officials,” did not want to “dilute” his disarmament resolution “by diverting to Iran.”

Diversion? It’s the most serious security issue in the world. A diversion from what? From a worthless U.N. disarmament resolution?

Yes. And from Obama’s star turn as planetary visionary: “The administration told the French,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “that it didn’t want to ‘spoil the image of success’ for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N.”

Image? Success? Sarkozy could hardly contain himself. At the council table, with Obama at the chair, he reminded Obama that “we live in a real world, not a virtual world.”

He explained: “President Obama has even said, ‘I dream of a world without (nuclear weapons).’ Yet before our very eyes, two countries are currently doing the exact opposite.”

Sarkozy’s unspoken words? “And yet, sacre bleu, he’s sitting on Qom!”

At the time, we had no idea what Sarkozy was fuming about. Now we do. Although he could hardly have been surprised by Obama’s fecklessness. After all, just a day earlier in addressing the General Assembly, Obama actually said, “No one nation can … dominate another nation.” That adolescent mindlessness was followed with the declaration that “alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War” in fact “make no sense in an interconnected world.” NATO, our alliances with Japan and South Korea, our umbrella over Taiwan, are senseless? What do our allies think when they hear such nonsense?

What they ought to think is that the time is over when they can rely on American strength to protect them and save them from bothering too much about defense. France and Britain have made appeasement the central tenet of their foreign and domestic policies. If  Obama’s display of idiotic complacency over the danger Iran poses to the world has woken them up, that’s one good result of the Showman President’s fecklessness.