Tag: war

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.

Doubling down

Nicolas Kristof has learned absolutely nothing from the reaction of Boko Haram:

Women’s rights advocates in Nigeria noisily demanded action, and social media mavens around the world spread word on Twitter, Facebook and online petitions — and a movement grew.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, started on Twitter by a Nigerian lawyer, has now been shared more than one million times. A Nigerian started a petition on Change.org, calling for more efforts to find the girls, and more than 450,000 people around the world have signed it.

Nigerian women embarrassed the government by announcing that they would strip off their clothes and march naked into the Sambisa forest to confront the militants and recover the girls….

All of us can respond more directly. Boko Haram, whose name means roughly “Western education is a sin,” is keeping women and girls marginalized; conversely, we can help educate and empower women. Ultimately, the greatest threat to extremism isn’t a drone overhead but a girl with a book.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and, by all means, let’s use it to celebrate the moms in our lives with flowers and brunches. But let’s also use the occasion to honor the girls still missing in Nigeria.

One way is a donation to support girls going to school around Africa through the Campaign for Female Education, Camfed.org; a $40 gift pays for a girl’s school uniform.

Kristof is acting as if the young women are not legitimate military targets. But that is the entire point. He, and many others like him, have made them legitimate military targets by intentionally turning them into weapons in a cultural war. And he had better pray that Boko Haram does not follow al Qaeda’s lead in bringing the West’s cultural war on the South and East back to the West.

At Virginia Tech, one mentally disturbed immigrant managed to kill 33 college students. A small team of Boko Haram activists could probably manage to kill at least five times that number should they target an American university. And the latest news out of Nigeria makes it clear that they are at least one step ahead of the likes of Kristof et al.

Islamist insurgents have killed hundreds in a town in Nigeria’s northeast this week, the area’s senator, a resident and the Nigerian news media reported on Wednesday, as more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by the militants, known as Boko Haram, remained missing.

The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses. When it was over, at least 336 people had been killed and hundreds of houses and cars had been set on fire, said Waziri Hassan, who lives there, and Senator Ahmed Zanna….

Gamboru, a town of perhaps 3,000 people, “is now burned into ashes,” Mr. Hassan said. “I saw it with my own eyes, 171 dead bodies, scattered around.” At least 18 police officers were killed, but Mr. Zanna said there were no military forces in the town because all had been drafted in the search for the schoolgirls.

Perhaps the Nigerian government actually knew what it was doing when it didn’t drop everything to engage in a fruitless search for the young women, who may not even be inside the country’s borders anyhow. Regardless, in the end, there can only ever be one result between those who “fight” by public posturing and those who fight by taking arms.

UPDATE: The US military cannot get involved as it is prohibited by law from collaboration with Nigerian security forces.

Perhaps a ribbon is in order

Strangely enough, all the Senatorial tears and Nicolas Kristof columns don’t appear to have convinced Boko Haram to stop targeting girls:

Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of the Islamists’ strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday. The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, followed the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the militant group last month, whom it has threatened to sell into slavery.

Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, told Reuters that armed men had opened fire during the raid.

“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army color. They started shooting in our village,” Musa said by telephone from the village in the hilly Gwoza area, Boko Haram’s main base.

A police source, who asked not to be identified, said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.

This can only mean one thing: a ribbon campaign. That will show the anti-educationists!

Tom Kratman, columnist

This should strike fear into Tranzi hearts everywhere. Tom Kratman has a new column, which he inaugurates with an argument for better service rifles:

In the last 40 years there have been a number of attempts at replacing the M16 family. All, prior to 2008, have failed or been rejected. All were too ambitious. For example, the rifle project for the 1980s, the Advanced Combat Rifle, demanded a 100% improvement over the M16. A 100% improvement? That means that we will never have a rifle that’s 99% better. I’ve read that it only cost $300 million by the time it was canceled. What a bargain.

A little aside here, when something calls for nothing less than a 100% improvement in a weapon, be very skeptical. Does that mean 25% more accurate, 25% lighter, 25% cheaper, and with 25% better aesthetics for public relations?

Would 100% better PR be enough? Or is 100% more accurate necessary? What if it were 100% more accurate, but twice as heavy? And if it cost a hundred times more? All in all, wasn’t it really just an attempt to set a goal nobody could measure? I suspect so.

In any case, in killing the ACR, the Infantry School reported that rifles had reached their peak and only exploding bullets could improve matters. Never mind, of course, that this begged the question of whether the M16 family was that peak. Also, Fort Benning wasn’t serious about the exploding bullets, actually; they’re illegal. As for rifles having reached their peak, no, they haven’t and the only way someone could claim they had was by discounting any improvement that was less than a doubling. More on that a bit later.

Someone, however, apparently took that exploding bullet idea to heart. The next attempt was the OICW, the Objective Infantry Combat Weapon, a combined rifle and (semi) smart, fairly flat shooting, 20mm grenade launcher. This effort, while not reaching the previous attempt’s stated goal of 100% improvement in the rifle, still managed to chop the length of the rifle barrel down to something that even an M4 could sneer at, while allowing for the launching an utterly and preposterously inadequate 20mm grenade, albeit with great accuracy.

On the other hand, OICW did at least manage a more that 200% increase… in the weight… before being killed… after spending… well… nobody seems willing to admit what was spent. One suspects that the sunk and lost cost of OICW was just staggering, beyond belief.

And you know what’s really scary there? This is scary: The French PAPOP-2 seems to actually do most of what OICW was supposed to, without either castrating the rifle or making it a joke in poor taste, and while tossing a 35mm grenade that is actually pretty lethal, while keeping the weight within something more or less tolerable. That’s right, the French. Savor the taste of that one for a while.

It’s just as well DoD hasn’t hired John C. Wright as a consultant. Forget exploding bullets, they’d be blowing billions on AI bullets smart enough to argue with the shooter over the windage.

Weaponizing girls

It astonishes me that liberals such as Nicholas Kristof can’t seem to understand that they are metaphorically painting targets on the very young women they wish to proclaim off-bounds when they openly advocate female education as the most effective means of destroying rival cultures.

DOZENS
of heavily armed terrorists rolled into the sleepy little town one
night in a convoy of trucks, buses and vans. They made their way to the
girls’ boarding school. The
high school girls, asleep in their dormitory, awoke to gunfire. The
attackers stormed the school, set it on fire, and, residents said, then
herded several hundred terrified girls into the vehicles — and drove off
and vanished.

That
was April 15 in northern Nigeria. The girls were kidnapped by an
extremist Muslim group called Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa
language means “Western education is a sin.”

The attack in Nigeria is part of a global backlash against girls’ education by extremists. The Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15 because she advocated for girls’ education. Extremists threw acid in the faces of girls walking to school in Afghanistan. And in Nigeria, militants destroyed 50 schools last year alone.

If the girls aren’t rescued, “no parent will allow their female child to go to school,” Hadiza Bala Usman, who has led protests in Nigeria on behalf of the missing girls, warned in a telephone interview….

The
best tool to fight extremism is education, especially of girls — and
that means ensuring that it is safe to study. The greatest threat to
militancy in the long run comes not from drones but from girls with
schoolbooks.

“These
abducted schoolgirls are my sisters,” Malala told me in an email from
Britain, where she is recovering from the Taliban attack, “and I call on
the international community and the government of Nigeria to take
action and save my sisters.” She added: “It should be our duty to speak
up for our brothers and sisters in Nigeria who are in a very difficult
situation.”

It is apparent that the cunning plan of Western liberals to destroy the Dar al-Islam  by pushing secularized Western education on Islamic women has been comprehended by the strategists of the global Caliphate. The jihadists are responding in two ways, by infiltrating and taking over educational facilities in the West and by destroying Western educational facilities in the South and East. The very name of the Nigerian group illustrates that they grasp the Western tactic.

Now liberals like Kristof are aghast at the fact that the very young women they intentionally turned into cultural weapons on behalf of their secular ideals are being targeted for enslavement and destruction. But what else did they expect? It would appear they were misled by the widespread failure of the Christians of the West to respond to the successful capture of their daughters by the secular establishment into thinking that the Muslims of the South and East would be similarly complacent.

If Western secularists actually gave a damn about women, (and the tens of millions of aborted young girls around the world strongly suggests they don’t), then they should have thought twice before weaponizing young women and turning them into legitimate targets in the violent clash of rival cultures.

Some of my dimmer critics have been foolish enough to claim that I support the actions of the Islamic militants in targeting young women. I do not. In fact, I am a far more staunch opponent of the militants’ objectives than those secular would-be dimmis will ever be. Unlike them, I will never submit. Unlike them, I have a rational perspective on strategy. I understand that if you make something a weapon, your enemy will have to be cowardly, self-defeating, or a fool to refrain from destroying it.

And Islam was weakening its enemies by capturing its youth long before Western secularists had the bright idea of taking over the school systems. But at least the equalitarians should be pleased to know that it is not only boys who are now able to pursue a career as a janissary catamite.

Once broken, the rules are a dead letter

The illegitimate US-backed government of Ukraine doesn’t seem to grasp that it can’t appeal to a nonexistent government authority:

Separatists, many of them of Russian descent, believe that the government in Kiev is illegitimate since it formed after what they call the illegal ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych in February. They have demanded that no one in Kiev should control their territory, saying that power and responsibility should rest with them or their Russian ally.

Officials in Kiev have the opposite view. They accuse Moscow of meddling, in its support of separatists and more, trying to break up Ukraine and, perhaps, take over parts or all of it. The government explains their military and security actions in the east and south are aimed at a common goal: to keep their Eastern European nation whole and united.

Referring to his call with Lavrov on Saturday, Kerry said he stressed the United States and allies’ desire “for Russia to withdraw support from the separatists, … assist in removing people from the buildings (and begin) to de-escalate the situation.”

Now, if the West backed the Ukrainian coup because it wants a war with Russia for one reason or another, their actions make sense. But if they simply wanted to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit while avoiding military action, they appear to have badly miscalculated.

No one, in Eastern or Western Ukraine, views the current government as legitimate, for the very good reason that it is not. The separatists are in the legal right, and Russia has as much right to govern their territory as the officials in Kiev do. Since they prefer the Russians, under the right of self-determination, the USA should, by rights, be backing Russian intervention.

It is not, obviously, because it supported the coup in the first place, and that’s giving the USA the benefit of the doubt, and assuming, contra some indications, that it was not primarily responsible for the coup in the first place. But regardless, making a public appeal to a nonexistent government authority that no one recognizes isn’t fooling anyone and it isn’t clever, it simply makes US diplomacy look as if it is being run by low-IQ amateurs.

Perhaps that is the idea and there are much larger plans within plans being played out here. I’m not privy to such lofty discussions. But if I lived in Taiwan, I’d be leaving right around now. And if I lived in Japan, I’d be looking to move to the countryside. Trusting these masters of geopolitics to provide protection from China, even if war in Ukraine is somehow avoided, seems like a bad idea.

UPDATE: The Russian warning could not be much more overt:

Speaking in Moscow yesterday, Mr Peskov said: “People are calling in despair, asking for help. The overwhelming majority demand Russian help. All these calls are reported to [President] Vladimir Putin.” He made clear that the Russian government blamed the West for the worsening situation, while stressing the need for “dialogue” towards a peaceful resolution. “Kiev and its Western sponsors are practically provoking the bloodshed and bear direct responsibility for it. Those who recognise this junta as a legal power become an accomplice to this crime.”

The Ukraine “government” in Kiev isn’t legitimate by any standard of which I am aware, and those supporting it are, as the Russians have correctly pointed out, going to be seen as responsible for provoking the ongoing bloodshed.

UPDATE 2: This bodes well:

Citing unnamed German security sources, Bild am Sonntag said the CIA
and FBI agents were helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of
Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure. It said the agents were not directly involved in fighting with
pro-Russian militants. “Their activity is limited to the capital Kiev,”
the paper said.

I imagine the White House doesn’t want to see CIA and FBI agents captured and paraded before the global media. They had better hope the Russians don’t have anyone in Kiev.