Quote of the Day

View The Madmen of Benghazi in a larger map

Would that we had the stones to actually carpet bomb.  You haven't won until your enemy knows in his bones that it's over.  Precision pinpricks don't do it.  If they want jihad we really need to show them how that tune is played. - jsallison commenting on the USA's assigned task in Iraq War 3.0  (on one of Dustbury's posts).

P.S. I'm reading The Madmen of Benghazi, a thriller by Gerard de Villiers. He's talking about all these towns in Egypt and Libya, so I decided to find out if they were real, and if so, plot them on a map. Many of the names recall WW2 battles.The light blue markers are in Libya. Tripoli is the farthest left and Benghazi is next. That was a surprise. I thought Benghazi was a suburb of Tripoli. The reddish ones are in Egypt. The purple ones mark Cairo. The blue marker is Eilat, Israel.
    I was surprised to find that they were all along the coast. I thought there was some kind of green along the North African coast, but I guess not. And there is no sign of Qaddafi's great irrigation project, at least not at this scale.