Tag: war

The choice facing the West

Islam or Christianity. Secularism is not an available option. Here is the Muslim vision for Britain under Sharia:

If the Muslim sees a kaffir with nice clothes, the kaffir has to take his clothes off and give them to the Muslim. The kaffir, when he walks down the street, he has to wear a red belt around his neck, and he has to have his forehead shaved, and he has to wear two shoes that are different from one another. He [the non-believer] is not allowed to walk on the pavement, he has to walk in the middle of the road, and he has to ride a mule. They can have churches, but are not allowed to ring the bell….

We cover up all the women and put a niqab on their faces, including Queen Elizabeth and Kate Middleton as well, the whore, the fornicator.

Christianity will survive its abandonment by Western civilization. Western civilization will not survive its abandonment of Christianity. It is said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If that is true, then obviously the 1st Amendment cannot be either.

There is no such thing as “moderate” Islam. The War of the Third Wave of Islamic expansion is already underway, the problem is that only one side is aware of it.

Back to Iraq

Here we go again. The neocons never learn. We have a major invasion of the southern border, so naturally Washington has concerned itself with attempting to further delay the inevitable collapse of Iraq into Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurd states.

Nearly half of the roughly 300 U.S. military advisers and special operations forces expected to go to Iraq are now in Baghdad and have begun to assess Iraqi forces in the fight against Sunni militants, the Defense Department said Tuesday as the U.S. ramped up aid to the besieged country.

On Capitol Hill, senators who left a closed briefing with senior Obama administration officials expressed hope Iraq could soon form a new government, perhaps in the next week, facilitating greater U.S. military action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who attended that meeting, backed what he described as an advancing American strategy.

At the Pentagon, Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby told reporters the troops in Baghdad included two teams of special forces and about 90 advisers, intelligence analysts, commandos and some other support personnel needed to set up a joint operations center in the Iraqi capital. Another four teams of special forces would arrive in the next few days, Kirby said.

Those troops, added to the approximately 360 other U.S. forces that are in and around the embassy in Baghdad to perform security, would bring the total U.S military presence in Iraq to about 560. Kirby also said the U.S. was conducting up to 35 surveillance missions over Iraq daily to provide intelligence on the situation on the ground as Iraqi troops battle the aggressive and fast-moving insurgency.

These are truly the Crazy Years. I said back in 2004 that the Iraqi Occupation would inevitably fail. It did. It was obvious to everyone with even a modicum of knowledge of military history that it would. Which is why these efforts will prove futile as well. These are the last, trivial gasps of the American Empire.

Tikrit and Kirkuk fall

The Battle for Baghdad is about to begin:

Iraqi Kurdish forces took control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk on
Thursday, after government troops abandoned their posts in the face
of a triumphant Sunni Islamist rebel march towards Baghdad that
threatens Iraq’s future as a unified state.

In
Mosul, Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) staged a parade of American Humvees seized from the collapsing
Iraqi army in the two days since the fighters drove out of the desert
and overran Iraq’s second biggest city. Two
helicopters, also seized by the militants, flew overhead, witnesses
said, apparently the first time the militant group has obtained
aircraft in years of waging insurgency on both sides of the
Iraqi-Syrian frontier.

State television showed
what it said was aerial footage of Iraqi aircraft firing missiles at
insurgent targets in Mosul. The targets could be seen exploding in
black clouds. Further south, the fighters
extended their lightning advance to towns only about an hour’s drive
from the capital Baghdad, where Shi’ite militia are mobilizing for a
potential replay of the ethnic and sectarian bloodbath of 2006-2007.

Three of Iraq’s four major cities are under control of one of the rebel forces. This is the natural consequence of the USA foolishly failing to partition Iraq into its three obvious parts, Kurdistan, Shiastan and Sunnistan. It’s also informative to see how quickly the Iraqi government has been forced to stop relying upon its professional army; it has adopted a militia system to reinforce the regular soldiers and is arming volunteers in order to defend Baghdad.

That is a compelling rebuttal to the modern notion that militia forces are outdated, when the fact is that while smaller, well-trained professional forces are useful for offensive actions, they are considerably less effective in defensive ones.

A grand strategic failure

Back in 2004, I pointed out that there was no possibility of long-term success for the neocons in Iraq. Now, with the fall of Iraq’s second largest city, it is only a matter of time before Baghdad is taken and the utter failure of the entire neocon grand strategy is apparent to everyone.

Sunni militants spilling over the border from Syria on Tuesday seized control of the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, in the most stunning success yet in a rapidly widening insurgency that threatens to drag the region into war.

Having consolidated control over Sunni-dominated Nineveh Province, armed gunmen were heading on the main road to Baghdad, Iraqi officials said, and had already taken over parts of Salahuddin Province. Thousands of civilians fled south toward Baghdad and east toward the autonomous region of Kurdistan, where security is maintained by a fiercely loyal army, the pesh merga.

The Iraqi Army apparently crumbled in the face of the militant assault, as soldiers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms for civilian clothes and blended in with the fleeing masses. The militants freed thousands of prisoners and took over military bases, police stations, banks and provincial headquarters, before raising the black flag of the jihadi group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria over public buildings. The bodies of soldiers, police officers and civilians lay scattered in the streets….

The swift capture of large areas of the city by militants aligned with
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria represented a climactic moment on a
long trajectory of Iraq’s unraveling since the withdrawal of American
forces at the end of 2011.

As the Romans knew, if you’re not going to colonize a conquered territory, the correct strategy is to go in hard, break things and kill people, then immediately leave. Repeat as needed.

Ten years ago, I was correct about this. Ten years from now, it will be seen that those who demanded Reconquista 2.0 in the West were correct too. Unlike the tango, wars and invasions only require the participation of a single party.

The fall of Mosul also shows the Potemkin nature of the government authorities. As soon as a few committed militants with guns appear on the scene, the facade of omnipotent government power promptly collapses. In recent weeks, we’ve seen this everywhere from the USA to Ukraine and Iraq. The ironic thing is that what is being described as “a foreign invasion of Iraq” is a considerably smaller-scale invasion than the one taking place in the southern USA right now.

The price of war

I posted this 10 years ago. I think it is still relevant today.

The price of war does not stop being paid when the guns fall silent.
This was driven home to me when we bought our first house from an older
couple who had lived there for many years. My grandfather, a Marine
who’d fought on Guadacanal and Tarawa, recognized the home seller as an
Army veteran and asked where he had served.

 

In Europe, the man answered, and his eyes filled unexpectedly with
tears. He turned away for a moment, and then, composed again, he
apologized and explained that he’d lost his brother in Normandy. This
conversation was taking place 53 years later, but it was clear that the
pain still lingered.

It is almost impossible for us, sixty years later, to understand the
grim realities of D-Day. Yes, we are unfortunate enough to live in
what a Chinese sage described as the curse of interesting times, and
yet, we do not yet live in a real state of war. Most of us know a few
soldiers who are involved in the present conflict – I was relieved to
receive an email yesterday from my Italian cousin in Baghdad, telling me
that he was fine after the embassy attack – but it is not the vast
majority of young men of our acquaintance who are in uniform and in
danger as was the case back then.

A few years ago, I took part in a massive simulation of Gold Beach,
using the Advanced Squad Leader system. Each player was responsible for
a section of the beach; I was commanding three companies of British
troops plus 12 Shermans and a few funnies. The experience drove home
how a relatively small number of defending German troops were able to
inflict terrible casualties on the landing Allies, and it was sobering
to see the pile of cardboard casualties grow and realize that each piece
represented the lives of ten men.

To the left, I lost an entire company, and only a lucky shot and a
wildly aggressive charge by one Sherman commander allowed me to take out
the two AT-guns defending my attack sector and get the two surviving companies off the beach. It
was only a game, and yet, one could see how the valiant action of a single brave man could make all the difference in the world to the rest of the men involved.

In the end, after many hours, the Allies triumphed on the table just
as they had many years before on the real beaches. But there was no
celebration by the winners, instead we found ourselves standing quietly
around the massive array of maps, contemplating those who had fought and
died so long ago. Some may think that it is strange and silly, if not
downright disrespectful, to view the tragic loss of human life through
the lens of a wargame. But, sixty years later, this is the only lens
that many of us have.

Soon, all the young men who stormed Normandy will be gone. But as
long as there are other young men who are curious about history, who
want to know what happened when, where and why, neither they nor their
sacrifices will ever be forgotten.

A call for permawar

David Brooks openly calls for “constant garden-tending”, or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.

This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.

This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that “the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one” has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their “democracy” is a sham.

Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. Or the USA, where one of the largest invasions in human history – 50 million strong – was aided and abetted by the three branches of government.

The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It’s hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.

Saladin and diversity

The great Islamic sultan Saladin succeeded his uncle as vizier to the Fatimid caliph before he engineered a largely bloodless coup that allowed him to supplant the Fatimids and establish the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt. However, two years before the coup, he was faced with the challenge of dealing with a large foreign army who had been imported by the caliph in order to better control the oft-restive Egyptian and Syrian emirs. From Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land:

In the early summer of 1169, Mutamin, the leading eunuch within the caliph’s palace, sought to engineer a coup against Saladin, opening channels of negotiation with the kingdom of Jerusalem in the hope of prompting yet another Frankish invasion of Egypt to topple the Ayyubids. A secret envoy was dispatched from Cairo, disguised as a beggar, but passing near Bilbais a Syrian Turk spotted that he was wearing new sandals whose fine quality jarred with his otherwise ragged appearance. With suspicions aroused, the agent was arrested and letters to the Franks discovered, sewn into the lining of his shoes, revealing the plot. Saladin curtailed the independence of the Fatimid court, executing the eunuch Mutamin in August and replacing him with Qaragush, who from this point forward presided over all palace affairs.

Saladin’s severe intervention elicited an outbreak of unrest among Cairo’s military garrison.The city was packed with some 50,000 black Sudanese troops, whose loyalty to the caliph made them a dangerous counter to Ayyubid authority. For two days they rioted through the streets, marching on Saladin’s position in the vizier’s palace. Abu’l Haija the Fat was sent to stem their advance, but Saladin knew that he lacked the manpower to prevail in open combat and soon adopted less direct tactics. Most of the Sudanese lived with their families in the al-Mansura quarter of Cairo. Saladin ordered that the entire area be set alight, according to one Muslim contemporary leaving it ‘to burn down around [the rebelling troops’] possessions, children and women’. With their morale shattered by this callous atrocity, the Sudanese agreed a truce, the terms of which were supposed to provide for safe passage up the Nile. But once out of the city and travelling south in smaller, disorganised groups, they fell victim to treacherous counter-attacks from Turan-Shah and were virtually annihilated.

It should be noted that Turan-Shah was Saladin’s brother and lieutenant. Now consider: Cairo was founded in 973 and by 1340 it had a population of “nearly half a million”. If we generously assume the population of Cairo was 400,000 in 1169, this means that Saladin managed to eliminate or forcibly deport an armed foreign population that made up between 12 and 20 percent of the entire populace in a matter of days.

Keep that in mind when you assume that because there are a large number of foreign immigrants in a previously homogenous society, there always will be. Being one of the greatest and most decisive generals in human history, Saladin’s ruthless actions were more efficient and effective than most of their kind, but these periodic ethnic cleansings are the historical norm throughout the world and have reliably followed periods of relative peace and mass immigration.

The point is not to argue that these actions are good, only that they appear to be a predictable consequence of importing large numbers of foreigners. Of course, there is another known historical alternative, such as when the Ayyubid sultan was overthrown by his imported Mamluk slave soldiers 81 years later.

Sometimes the native populations win, sometimes the immigrants do. Saladin himself was a Kurd, after all, not an Egyptian or an Arab, although he was fully accepted by the Egyptians and Arabs over whom he ruled and he remains one of the greatest heroes of both Islam and Arabia. But the one thing that never seems to happen is for everyone to live together in one peaceful, multi-ethnic society. Not for long, anyhow.

Shifting priorities

Perhaps the Gulf States can hire the IDF to provide for their security as the US military shifts its attention to China:

Saudi Arabia and a clutch of Arab Gulf states responsible for a quarter of the world’s oil supplies have been told to provide their own security as the US and the UK slash defence spending.

For the last 30 years the six members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) have drawn heavily on US and British military support to safeguard their security but these unwritten guarantees are now unravelling amid cuts to defence spending and a reduced dependence on Middle East oil.

“Bilateral ties with the United States and American military presence are not enough to guarantee regional security,” US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel told a GCC ministerial conference in Riyadh yesterday. “America’s engagement with Gulf nations is intended to support and facilitate, not replace, stronger multilateral ties within the GCC.”

If the USA can’t protect the oil fields of the Middle East, it seems unlikely that it is going to go to the mat with Russia over Ukraine. Unless, of course, that is what Obama the master strategist wants Mr. Putin to think….

Sic semper tyrannis

Instapundit on “the proper response” to deal with criminal government thugs:

 If I lived in Venezuela, I’d find out where the guardsmen lived, and shoot them when they walked out the door in the morning. That is, of course, the proper response to dictators and their minions of every stripe, even Hollywood-backed socialists.

These are the sort of moments when you realize that the “A” in “fuckin-A” stans for “Amen”.

It also makes me wonder if those infamous FEMA camps aren’t intended to imprison revolutionary Americans, but rather, to protect the families of the government thugs.

Banana Empire

One can’t honestly call the USA a banana republic. It’s more of a banana empire:

Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expand edits Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

Daddy helps arrange for overthrowing the elected government, and the grateful oligarchs put junior on the board of directors. Anyone remember when the Russians were the bad guys?

I’m sure “the people of Ukraine” are a major concern here to everyone involved.