NORFOLK, VA. -- More than 40 years after a Navy plane crashed on a glacier
in Greenland while hunting Russian submarines during the Cold War, a Navy
team will set out today to recover the last of the victims' remains.

That gratifies Bob Pettway, a Navy veteran who has spent the past few years
pressing the government to make this recovery effort. He led a national
letter-writing campaign to spur action by Congress.

The P-2V Neptune aircraft, equipped to track Soviet submarines, went down
Jan. 12, 1962, during a routine reconnaissance flight from the naval station
in Keflavik, Iceland. All 12 aboard were killed.

An eight-day search turned up no trace of the plane, but in August 1966 four
British geologists hiking on Greenland's Kronborg Glacier discovered the
wreckage and remains of the crew.

By the time a Navy team reached the site, several feet of snow had fallen,
but the remains of seven crew members were recovered, returned to the United
States and buried with full military honors.

The Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force safety officer, Capt. Tom Sparks, is
leading a 16-member team, accompanied by dogs trained to search for
cadavers. They are expected to be on the glacier for about a week and return
home around Aug. 15.

Pettway, of McDonald, Tenn., thinks the Navy should have returned to the
site before now.

"I'm just glad they're going back and doing [this] right," said Pettway, 61.

A Navy spokesman said recovery of the remains is important to the Navy as
well as the families.

"In the Navy, we firmly believe that we will not leave anybody behind," said
Mike Maus, with the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Naval Air Force, based in Norfolk.

Pettway, who was a Navy radio operator, learned of the 1966 discovery of the
plane about four years ago.

Curious, he got in touch with one of the British explorers, who told Pettway
he had returned to the area in the summer of 1995, who saw human remains
during a flight over the crash site.

That's when Pettway began contacting relatives of the men and other members
of the squadron to raise support for a new recovery effort.

Maus said poor weather had blocked consideration of other recovery attempts
since 1995.

"So now, we've got another one of those time periods it appears that the
weather is going to be good enough to get people in there," he said. "It's
another warm spell."

http://www.rmstitanichistory.com/eastland/eastland.html

Two predictions:
1) George W Bush will win a second term as president of the United
States.
2) He will be sorry he did.

The dog that did not bark at the Democratic Party's convention was
opposition to the Iraq war. To the chagrin of the Europeans, who
oppose the war by vast margins, the Democratic leadership all but
muzzled opponents of a war. The battle will be fought on Bush's
ground.

Senator John Kerry set himself up for defeat by making an issue of the
conduct of the Iraq war, rather than the war itself. Bush will pull a
rabbit out of his hat or, to be more precise, a bear, as I reported
last week (When Grozny comes to Fallujah, July 27). (Spengler predicts
the US will invite Russian troops into Iraq since the US doesn't have
the stomach for large-scale slaughter.-Galt)

Replacing the commander-in-chief in the midst of war is something
Americans never have done, although Abraham Lincoln had some sleepless
nights before the 1864 elections. Americans want a war, and will
choose the war party in the end, however they may chastise the
president for his numerous errors. As in war, in politics as well, the
threat is mightier than the execution. Poor results in the opinion
polls are a warning to the president, not repudiation.

Bush opened Pandora's box a year ago, and not even Kerry proposes to
shut it. In this case Pandora's box better resembles a nested set of
Russian dolls. Open one, and a bevy of demons flies out, forcing you
to open the next one, and so forth. Dubya will be the president who
led the US into a world civilizational war, although it is more
precise to say that civilizational war led the US into it. Many will
be the night during his second term that Bush will wish he were still
in Texas, and still drunk.

In his own unassuming fashion, Bush is a world-historical figure in
Georg Hegel's sense of the term - never mind that he does not know who
Hegel was. A more thoughtful man would recoil in horror at the choices
before him and fade into paralysis, like the unfortunate president
James Buchanan in 1859. World War I was declared by elderly statesmen
who had spent their entire careers (since the 1878 Treaty of Berlin)
avoiding a European war. By delaying until the Central and Allied
powers had sorted themselves out into two equally matched entities,
they ensured that the outcome of war would be the mutual destruction
of all the combatants.

World War I could not be forever delayed, though. With its declining
population, France stood one generation away from helplessness at the
hands of the German Empire; with its rapid industrialization, Russia
stood one generation away from military parity with Germany. By
analogy, if Washington were to sit on its hands until Iran, Pakistan
and other Islamic states developed nuclear weapons, the inevitable
future conflict would be ruinous beyond imagination. Europe's
demographic collapse and the replacement of European Christians by
Middle Eastern and North African Muslims present an even deadlier
long-term threat.

Washington will choose preemptive war. Narrow-minded but principled,
trusting no one's judgment but his own, petty and ruthless, George W
Bush is the man of the hour. The Weltgeist will give him a second
term.

Among Pandora's nested boxes, the next one to be opened will extend
the conflict into Central Asia. Turkey's status as the "sick man of
Europe" drew the European powers into World War I, and it is Turkey's
present role as the sick man of Central Asia that will draw in the
Russians. Last week I predicted that Russian President Vladimir Putin
would ride to Bush's rescue by introducing Russian forces into Iraq's
Sunni triangle. On July 27, the pro-government Russian daily Izvestia
editorialized on behalf of such an action:

Washington, to be sure, would like Russian peacekeepers in the Sunni
belt in Iraq: they have a great deal of experience operating in such
Muslim hot spots as Bosnia and Kosovo ... One should take note that in
all these areas, the Russian peacekeepers enjoyed a very good
relationship with the locals, without incidents and terrorist acts.
Truthfully, the Russian leadership should consider this option quite
carefully.
Bush thinks he needs Putin to prove his strategy right before the
American electorate, but Putin will do so precisely because US
strategy in the region is dead wrong. Washington believes that
stabilizing Iraq will stabilize the entire region: Moscow knows that
the Iraq war already has destabilized the region. In the 21st century
version of the Great Game, Russia's winning chess move is to replace
Turkey as the dominant power in Central Asia.

Russia's most important strategic interest lies in the Black Sea
oilfields, and its greatest worry is pan-Turkish agitation along its
southern border. Sergei Blagov in Asia Times Online (Tug-of-war over
Uzbekistan, July 31) reported Russia's alarm over Islamic drift in
Central Asia. On July 28, K Gajendra Singh detailed the weakening of
Turkey's traditional alliances (Turkey, Israel aim to forgive and
forget).

It is more probable that Turkey will revert to an Islamic model under
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan than it is that Iraq will emerge
as a secular democracy on the old Turkish model. Erdogan wants
involvement in regional conflict less than anything in the world,
except for one thing, which is the humiliation of Turkic populations
in adjacent countries. He no more can remain indifferent to the plight
of ethnic Turks in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet
Union than could Nicholas II of Russia abandon the Serbs to Austria in
1914. By the same token, Russia does not want to engage its weakened
and demoralized army in a foreign venture. But it no more can remain
indifferent to Turkish agitation in the Caucasus and Black Sea than
could Austria tolerate Russian subsidies to Serbian terrorists in
1914.

Those are the characters in the next act of the tragedy, and their
motivations. The role of tragic lead falls to George W Bush, who will
be re-elected and regret it.

Without US aid before the war, both would likely have lost and
then trying to take back "Fortress Europe" might have been
impossible for decades, or longer.

President Bush didn't "take us into war" -- this war was forced
upon us by 9/11 and a host of other attacks to which previous
administrations, even Regan but especially Clinton, had failed
to handle.

Finally, we have a President that understands you CANNOT
"defend" against terrorists but must beat them by attacking.

A patient terrorist, willing to die can eventually find a weakness
or a weak moment, but if you kill or capture them then the
threat is removed.

STOP THE THREAT -- it's the same principle that we use and
teach in personal defense but it requires one extra amplication
as when you "chase the threat away" you must be reasonably
certain that the threat will not just reappear and attack at the
next weak moment or weak spot.

STOP THE THREAT -- make the terrorists go away PERMANTENTLY.

But again, doesn't matter since Sodamn and Al Qaeda had MANY
links  AND Sodamn was an admitted supported of international
terrorism.