Tag: war

Into the blast furnace

The UK’s demographics are illustrating the truth of GK Chesterton’s observations concerning the human disinclination to believe in nothing:

In England’s second city of Birmingham, of 278,623 youngsters, 97,099 were registered as Muslim compared with 93,828 as Christian. The rest were of other faiths such as Hindu or Jewish, or none.

A similar trend has emerged in the cities of Bradford and Leicester, the towns of Luton, in Bedfordshire, and Slough in Berkshire, as well as the London boroughs Newham, Redbridge and Tower Hamlets, where nearly two-thirds of children are Islamic.

Last night experts said more must be done to ensure that society does not become polarised along religious lines.

I think it is fairly obvious that when people are being beheaded, it is a little late for that. To quote Jerry Pournell’s apt observation, there will be war.

Professor Ted Cantle, of the ICoCo Foundation, which promotes community cohesion, said: ‘What we are seeing are several trends running together. There is a long-term decline in support for the established religions, notably Christianity; continuing immigration from the Asian sub-continent; and higher fertility among the Muslim population, which has a considerably lower age profile.

‘There is also deepening segregation exacerbated by the loss of white population from cities and more intensive concentration of black and minority ethnic groups as a result of replacement.

‘This is the real problem, as residential segregation is generally compounded by school and social segregation.

If he thinks segregation is a problem, just try desegregating those communities. Because communities that can’t peacefully segregate will always eventually find another, less palatable means of doing so.

Well done, secular Britain. Out of its desire to weaken Christianity’s societal dominance, it imported Islam. That’s like leaping out of the frying pan and into the blast furnace.

Fourth time’s the charm

Obama is merely the latest U.S. president to attempt to make a pointless gesture that will resolve absolutely nothing by bombing Iraq:

Did last night’s primetime presidential speech announcing expanding authorization for airstrikes in Iraq and Syria feel kind of familiar? Like you’ve heard it before?

That’s probably because you have. You’ve been hearing for more than two decades, from presidents on both sides of political aisle. At this point, bombing Iraq is practically a American presidential tradition.

And, via the magic of YouTube and The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, you can watch every president back to the first George Bush announce a new plan to launch military strikes in Iraq.

Presidents and the public love airstrikes because it feels like war without actually risking any American lives. Never mind that they are an act of war and a direct provocation that legitimates any amount of “terrorism” directed at the American public.

The Great War 100 years later

esr reviews Collision of Empires, a history of WWI:

Collision of Empires (Prit Buttar; Osprey Publishing) is a clear and accessible history that attempts to address a common lack in accounts of the Great War that began a century ago this year: they tend to be centered on the Western Front and the staggering meat-grinder that static trench warfare became as outmoded tactics collided with the reality of machine guns and indirect-fire artillery.

Concentration on the Western Front is understandable in the U.S. and England; the successor states of the Western Front’s victors have maintained good records, and nationals of the English-speaking countries were directly involved there. But in many ways the Eastern Front story is more interesting, especially in the first year that Buttar chooses to cover – less static, and with a sometimes bewilderingly varied cast. And, arguably, larger consequences. The war in the east eventually destroyed three empires and put Lenin’s Communists in power in Russia.

Prit Buttar does a really admirable job of illuminating the thinking of the German, Austrian, and Russian leadership in the run-up to the war – not just at the diplomatic level but in the ways that their militaries were struggling to come to grips with the implications of new technology. The extensive discussion of internecine disputes over military doctrine in the three officer corps involved is better than anything similar I’ve seen elsewhere.

There is more at his site. However, as a corrective to this obviously
deficient history of the Great War, allow me to recommend the book I just
finished reading, namely, CATASTROPHE 1914 by Max Hastings, which can be
summarized as follows.

  1. The Great War was the inevitable consequence of dastardly German militarism. Since the
    Kaiser didn’t forcibly stop Austria from invading Serbia, the Germans
    are entirely to blame for making British lads volunteer to travel to the continent
    and die in the mud.
  2. Moltke was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  3. French was a psychological train wreck wholly unsuitable for command.
  4. Churchill was an excitable loon wholly unsuitable for command of any unit larger than a company.
  5. If it were not for the brave and heroic British Expeditionary Force
    defending freedom, justice, and democracy, the Germans would have broken
    through the French lines and conquered the continent.
  6. The French did a little fighting too. So did the Russians. The Serbs
    killed lots of Austrians. None of this had any serious effect on the
    war, which was won by British courage and pluck.
  7. The death of millions was worth it in the end, because Germany is bad and if the Central Powers had won, Europe would not have the European Union today.

Obama betrays the Constitution

What’s remarkable isn’t that Barack Hussein Obama is ignoring the U.S. Constitution and its limits on the powers of his office. What is remarkable is that the New York Times is calling him out on it:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s declaration of war against the terrorist group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria marks a decisive break in the American constitutional tradition. Nothing attempted by his predecessor, George W. Bush, remotely compares in imperial hubris.

Mr. Bush gained explicit congressional consent for his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In contrast, the Obama administration has not even published a legal opinion attempting to justify the president’s assertion of unilateral war-making authority. This is because no serious opinion can be written….

But
for now the president seems grimly determined to practice what Mr.
Bush’s lawyers only preached. He is acting on the proposition that the
president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has unilateral
authority to declare war. In
taking this step, Mr. Obama is not only betraying the electoral
majorities who twice voted him into office on his promise to end
Bush-era abuses of executive authority. He is also betraying the
Constitution he swore to uphold.

ISIS in Iraq and Syria is not a problem. Immigrants in the USA are a problem. The complete lack of a southern border is a problem. The expanding credit demand gap and the outstanding debt to GDP ratio is a problem. The decline of Christendom is a problem. The rise of the new Caliphate will likely pose a serious problem for future generations, but there will be no future generation capable of fighting it if the West in general and the USA in particular refuses to provide it with a coherent opposition that is not riven by its sympathizers.

We are waiting for Martel.

It is an appallingly bad idea for Obama to attempt to drag a war-weary, divided nation into a war that has nothing to do with the national interest. It is such a bad idea that even the New York Times is capable of recognizing it.

Fisking George Will

In case you haven’t noticed, Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler. Because fascist. And threat-crisis. Also, Hitlerian:

Vladimir Putin’s Hitlerian Mind. The Russian president’s fascist revival in Eastern Europe poses a unique threat to the West. Vladimir Putin’s fascist revival is a crisis that tests the West’s capacity to decide. 

When Will speaks of ‘fascism’, he means it in the mythological sense of the word, not the historic. You know; big bad Hitler plotting to conquer Planet Earth and exterminate or enslave all non-Aryans blah….blah…blah.  Notice how Will cleverly embeds the allegations of a “fascist revival” and a “crisis” as a given, and then quickly redirects the subject to how the West should handle it.

Salesmen refer to this cunning rhetorical tactic as ‘assumptive selling’. Sorry George. We will not allow you get away with slipping such poisonous assumptive ‘mickeys’ into our journalistic drinks. Either prove your underlying premise of a “facist revival’ (in the sense you mean it), or cut the crap about some dangerous “crisis” caused by Putin.

At a certain point, one loses one’s innocence about the strangely repetitive coincidences concerning which first Britain, and then the USA, continually find themselves engaged in fighting wars on other people’s territory for reasons that are never, ever their fault.

I thought it was interesting that there was barely even a handwave in the less-than-halfhearted attempt to declare Assad the new Hitler.

The EU prepares for a winter cold war

The EU strategy is obvious: stock up enough natural gas to try to outlast the need Russia’s gas exporters have for European cash. Zerohedge points out three possible problems with that strategy:

1) What if the weather is considerably colder than normal this winter? (i.e. they need more supply)

2) Russia has already committed to supporting the sanctioned firms.

3) German industrials will need energy in the spring.

This also ignores one fundamental flaw in the concept. If the EU is stocking up on its gas supplies, then it is already paying the Russian firms for the gas they would have otherwise expected to buy during the winter. Now they’re buying it early, which means this tactic won’t put any more financial pressure on the Russian firms than it would have if they took delivery later, and accordingly, paid later as well.

Perhaps they’re expecting that the Russians will take all their newly received cash and put it in the NYSE, which will then crash violently, thereby depriving them of it. A stroke of pure genius!

Things I’ve noticed while reading military history

  1. Civilian leadership usually appoints the wrong commanders.
  2. The main thing lacking in military leaders, from the highest level to the lowest, is a willingness to accept the risk of defeat. Nothing assures failure like indecisiveness.
  3. Advances in communications technology increases the amount of civilian interference into war operations.
  4. Civilian leadership seldom has a clear objective in mind.
  5. Military commanders regard “the book” as an intrinsic excuse and therefore have a tendency to cling to it.
  6. A historian’s take on a given war is strongly influenced by his nationalist sympathies.
  7. The temptation to interfere with a strategic plan once it is put into action appears to be almost overwhelming.

My favorite quote from Max Hastings history of World War I thus far: Falkenhayn noted laconically on taking over command:  “Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.”

It’s really remarkable to observe how overwhelmed, inept, and generally detached from reality the generals on both sides were. Between the commander of the British Expeditionary Force constantly attempting to retreat and the high commander of the German forces not bothering to even give orders to his generals for literally days at a time, it’s just astonishing.  And they were the relatively competent ones in comparison with the Austrian and Russian commanders.

It’s somewhat sobering to read the historical blunders in light of the lunatic decisions presently being made by the US and European military leaders.

This seems unwise

At what point are the EU and USA going to realize that Putin doesn’t react well to token gestures:

As fighting between the army and Russian-backed rebels rages in eastern Ukraine, preparations are under way near its western border for a joint military exercise this month with more than 1,000 troops from the United States and its allies.

The decision to go ahead with the Rapid Trident exercise Sept. 16-26 is seen as a sign of the commitment of NATO states to support non-NATO member Ukraine while stopping well short of military intervention in the conflict.

The annual exercise, to take place in the Yavoriv training center near Ukraine’s border with Poland, was initially scheduled for July, but was put back because early planning was disrupted by the crisis in the eastern part of the country.

“At the moment, we are still planning for (the exercise) to go ahead,” U.S. Navy Captain Gregory Hicks, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s European Command said on Tuesday.

I suspect there will be a substantive Russian response to this which will likely involve taking more territory.

Ex-US intelligence warns the EU

A group of retired intelligence officers are warning Angela Merkel and the other EU leaders not to trust current US intelligence regarding the reported Russian invasion of Ukraine:

Timing of the Russian “Invasion”

The conventional wisdom promoted by Kiev just a few weeks ago was that Ukrainian forces had the upper hand in fighting the anti-coup federalists in southeastern Ukraine, in what was largely portrayed as a mop-up operation. But that picture of the offensive originated almost solely from official government sources in Kiev. There were very few reports coming from the ground in southeastern Ukraine. There was one, however, quoting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, that raised doubt about the reliability of the government’s portrayal.

According to the “press service of the President of Ukraine” on August 18, Poroshenko called for a “regrouping of Ukrainian military units involved in the operation of power in the East of the country. … Today we need to do the rearrangement of forces that will defend our territory and continued army offensives,” said Poroshenko, adding, “we need to consider a new military operation in the new circumstances.”

If the “new circumstances” meant successful advances by Ukrainian government forces, why would it be necessary to “regroup,” to “rearrange” the forces? At about this time, sources on the ground began to report a string of successful attacks by the anti-coup federalists against government forces. According to these sources, it was the government army that was starting to take heavy casualties and lose ground, largely because of ineptitude and poor leadership.

Ten days later, as they became encircled and/or retreated, a ready-made excuse for this was to be found in the “Russian invasion.” That is precisely when the fuzzy photos were released by NATO and reporters like the New York Times’ Michael Gordon were set loose to spread the word that “the Russians are coming.” (Michael Gordon was one of the most egregious propagandists promoting the war on Iraq.)

No Invasion – But Plenty Other Russian Support

The anti-coup federalists in southeastern Ukraine enjoy considerable local support, partly as a result of government artillery strikes on major population centers. And we believe that Russian support probably has been pouring across the border and includes, significantly, excellent battlefield intelligence. But it is far from clear that this support includes tanks and artillery at this point – mostly because the federalists have been better led and surprisingly successful in pinning down government forces.

At the same time, we have little doubt that, if and when the federalists need them, the Russian tanks will come.

This is precisely why the situation demands a concerted effort for a ceasefire, which you know Kiev has so far been delaying. What is to be done at this point? In our view, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk need to be told flat-out that membership in NATO is not in the cards – and that NATO has no intention of waging a proxy war with Russia – and especially not in support of the ragtag army of Ukraine. Other members of NATO need to be told the same thing.

For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

        William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
        David MacMichael, National Intelligence Council (ret.)
        Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
        Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
        Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (Ret.)
        Coleen Rowley, Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
        Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned)

Just remember, the Official Story is never, ever, true, especially with regards to military situations. The only thing you can be absolutely sure of is that whatever is being reported in the mainstream media is not what and how actually took place. It’s remarkable that people forget this, when almost every single book of military history openly describes how the various governments almost always mislead their people, or at the very least leave them in the dark at the time the important decisions are being made.

The EU states the obvious

The European Union has no intention of fighting to defend its Ukrainian puppet:

There can be no military solution to the Ukraine crisis, only a political one, Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s new head of foreign policy, has insisted.

In her first interview since being appointed at the weekend, Ms Mogherini, soon to step down as Italy’s foreign minister, said: “It’s in the interests of Ukraine, Europe and Russia that the crisis should have a political, not a military solution.”

The prospect of Europe going to war to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression “simply does not exist”, she insisted.

At least the Eurofascists are not operating in the realm of complete fantasy, at least where the Russians are concerned. Putin has stated that Russian forces can take Kiev within two weeks, and based on the inability of the Ukrainian army to hold its ground, there is little reason to question his assertion:

Kiev forces retreated from Luhansk airport after battling a “Russian armed forces” tank column on Monday, Kiev said, in what Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko described as the latest stage of Moscow’s “direct and open aggression”.

The battle came ahead of a key meeting between Russia and Ukraine in Minsk, the Belarus capital, later on Monday.

“In the Luhansk direction, Ukrainian forces have received an order and have pulled back from the airport,” Ukraine army spokesman Andriy Lysenko told reporters. He said seven Ukrainian service personnel had been killed in the past 24 hours. Ukraine’s defence minister Valeriy Geletey said that Russian units are moving into other towns in the region, including the largest city of the region Donetsk.

Ukraine should jump at the opportunity to give Novorossiya its independence if that is what Putin is demanding at the Minsk talks. It is strategically risky to fight a war you are certain to lose if what is at stake is not vital, because you often end up losing far more than you were hoping to protect. And the Ukrainians should keep in mind that NATO is not a magic shield; neither the European nations nor the USA are going to go to war with Russia over resistance to their their shabby attempt to financially pillage Ukraine and expand NATO.

There are no good guys here, but it is a positive sign to see that there is resistance to the global vampire squid as well as limits to its rapacious reach.