Tag: war

Regime change comes to Eastern Europe

I have to admit, I haven’t been paying attention and I have no idea who is even supposed to be “the good guys” in Ukraine:

  • Ukrainian Health Ministry said 88 police, six journalists and four foreigners were among those hospitalised
  • Ukraine’s Interior ministry says 67 police troops have been captured by protesters in Kiev
  • At least 50 people have died in clashes in Kiev that came just days after the crisis in the Ukraine seemed to be over
  • Government snipers were reported to be shooting at some of the protesters in Kiev
  • Protest leaders and president called truce after two days of violent clashes between activists and police
  • President Barack Obama condemned violence, warning ‘there will be consequences’ for Ukraine if it continues
  • President Viktor Yanukovych declared Thursday a day of mourning for the dead
  • Several thousand protesters remained on Independence Square in Kiev and clashed with police on Thursday

It seems bizarre that one side is (allegedly) taking prisoners while the other one is (reportedly) shooting unarmed protesters. But those protesters don’t look particularly unarmed, what with the shotguns and all. And the fact that the Obama administration is pushing the Bush Doctrine of regime change in Europe makes me very suspicious of any attempt to turn the protesters into the good guys after their attempt to whitewash the psychopaths in Syria.

Women in combat: a prelude

The Sochi Winter Olympics are providing a useful service in demonstrating the complete absurdity of the woman warrior meme:

Sarka Pancochova, a Czech snowboarder, led the slopestyle event after the first run. On her second trip down the course of obstacles and jumps, she flew through the air, performed a high-arcing, spinning trick and smacked her head upon landing. Her limp body spun like a propeller into the gully between jumps and slid to a stop.

Pancochova was soon on her feet, and the uneasy crowd cheered. Her helmet was cracked nearly in half, back to front. She was one of the lucky ones, seemingly O.K., but her crash last week was indicative of a bigger issue: a messy collage of violent wipeouts at these Olympics. Most of the accidents have occurred at the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, the site of the snowboarding and freestyle skiing events like halfpipe, slopestyle and moguls.

And most of the injuries have been sustained by women….

The Winter Games have always had dangerous events. But the Extreme Park,
as the name suggests, is built on the ageless allure of danger. All of
the events there have been added to the Olympic docket since 1992, each a
tantalizing cocktail of grace and peril.But
unlike some of the time-honored sports of risk, including Alpine
skiing, luge and ski jumping, there are few concessions made for women.

For both sexes, the walls of the halfpipe are 22 feet tall. The
slopestyle course has the same tricky rails and the same huge jumps. The
course for ski cross and snowboard cross, a six-person race to the
finish over jumps and around icy banked curves, is the same for men and
women. The jumps for aerials are the same height. The bumps in moguls
play no gender favorites.

“Most
of the courses are built for the big show, for the men,” said Kim
Lamarre of Canada, the bronze medalist in slopestyle skiing, where the
competition was delayed a few times by spectacular falls. “I think they
could do more to make it safer for women.”

Compare
the sports with downhill skiing, in which women have their own course,
one that is shorter and less difficult to navigate. Or luge, in which
female sliders start lower on the track than the men. Or ski jump, in
which women were finally allowed to participate this year, but only on
the smaller of the two hills. The Olympics have a history — sexist,
perhaps — of trying to protect women from the perils of some sports.

But equality reigns at the Extreme Park, even to the possible detriment of the female participants.

Actually, equality doesn’t reign. Because the inferior and uncompetitive female athletes don’t compete against the superior men. But the young women are such stupid herd animals that they will literally kill themselves in their incoherent denial.

“I see it every contest,” Cusson said. “Unless they are forced to hit
the smaller side, the best ones will always go for the bigger jumps.
They want to prove to everybody that they are capable. And then all the
other girls will follow.”

As usual, the end result of feminism is more dead and injured women. If one simply judges by the consequences, it should be obvious that feminists hate women far more passionately than even the most virulent misogynist.

They can’t even compete in competitive leisure pastimes without half-killing themselves and requiring surgery, but they’re going to hold their own in combat, where the enemy is actually trying to harm them?

Women not in combat

One aspect of the Amazonian warrior woman that is never considered by its SF/F proponents is the female ability to override any combat assignment at will:

Nearly 100 female British soldiers have been sent home from Afghanistan after finding out they were pregnant. Between January 2006 and December last year, 99 servicewomen on operations have been flown back to the UK under strict military rules that ban mothers-to-be from serving in a war zone.The women were flown back on flights usually reserved for injured troops, meaning the true figure could be higher if other female soldiers came home via routine flights.

That is 1.2 percent of all the women serving in the British Army.  The percentage of women serving in Afghanistan is even higher, though unknown. And keep in mind that only three women have been killed in Afghanistan. This should suffice to demonstrate the complete absurdity of women in combat.  Even if one assumes a 10:1 kill ratio in Afghanistan, it means an Amazonian warrior woman is more than three times likely to get pregnant than to kill a single enemy troop.

In battles between reasonably equivalent forces, such as the Eastern Front in WWII, the kill ratio is 2:1. So, for every enemy soldier killed by a female soldier, the superior army can assume that it will lose 16.5 of its troops to pregnancy.

Imaginary women in the military

It’s not the article at Tor that is of interest here, but rather the discussion between Tom Kratman and a small collection of Pink SF enthusiasts who do not permit their complete ignorance of all things military affect their ability to express some strong opinions on future war: 

“Sexual attraction may be innate, but it’s not universal. See asexual, people who identify as.”

Do you really think the occasional fluke has a whole lot to say about mass armies? If so, why?

How people act on sexual attraction is learned behaviour.

Only in minor details. The love, lust, favoritism, demoralization, and de facto prostitution are fairly universal within any armed force that sees integrated sexes or integrated sexually compatible people unless extraordinary structural provisions are made. Those structural provision include segregation. Here’s an interesting quote from very liberal, very politically correct Canada’s PPCLI battle school: “Male/female attraction will not go away because we tell it to; and soldiers will court considerable risk to pursue the obvious.”

What you really seem to be saying is we can control it. Forget it; we can’t.

What you should not forget is the ability of an army, any army, to make a terrible idea look good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. Think Vietnam…or Project 100,000.

“can’t be controlled.” Tom, man. What’re you saying, dude? That people use sex to game the system? (Some people use anything to game systems.) And somehow that’s what, especially unfair? Or you’re saying, what, the act of sex is so inherently super-special it has in itself some peculiarly distorting effect on hierarchies? (Or maybe you’re saying something about sexual coercion, but I’m not going there.) I say to this: grow some imagination. I’m tired of hearing “the future can’t be different because [argument which boils down to “I don’t want to think about what would have to change”].” Like I said, these may not be stories you want to read or tell? But don’t pretend they can’t be told, or that other people may not find your futures as implausible – and even unpleasant – as you might theirs, on good grounds. From where I stand, your futures do live in Opposite World. And unless you bring a more SFnal imagination to our present interaction, my opinion of your wrongheadedness isn’t likely to change.

No, you are presupposing that things which cannot be changed can. Worse, you have no obvious basis for believing it except that you want to. Do you have any expertise in the matter of combat? I do. What you’re demanding isn’t SF; it’s fantasy. The mere fact that you can so lightly dismiss the effect of using sex to game the system, and as if that were all of it, indicates that anything that interferes with your particular fantasy has to be rejected.

Yes, the effect of sex has distorting effects in hierarchies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at any given corporation, but combat units are not corporations. The next time Bill Gates has to worry about a near ambush or artillery strike on his way to the office will be the first.

In this particular, no, the future cannot be different unless you write away what men and women are, how they think and act, what they care about, and what they’ll take risks for.

Tom’s response is brilliant because it highlights the essential inhumanity of Pink SF. If great fiction speaks to the human condition, the great flaw of Pink SF is that it specifically and overtly rejects the human elements of the human condition. While I defer to Tom Kratman on what he insists is the legitimate possibility, given a considerable quantity of extreme and particular training, of women serving in an effective military unit, I remain extremely dubious that even the conventional notions of superstrength and mandatory reversible birth control could begin to permit women to become even mediocre soldiers. (4-3-6), in ASL terms, would be a best case scenario.

While I am not a military veteran, I am both a student of military history and a former martial arts fighter. As the former, I am aware that what settles battles is not who can kill the other side more effectively, but rather, who can cause the other side to run away or otherwise quit fighting first. As the latter, I have observed that women quit fighting as soon as they take a single damaging strike and not infrequently before then.

I have seen many men fight with broken bones; I myself once won a ringfight after having my nose broken in the initial exchange. I have never seen a woman get up off the ground after being flattened or bloodied and continue fighting except when she is in training with someone she trusts not to intentionally hurt her. In fact, when a woman isn’t hurt but simply gets frightened while sparring, she tends to turn her back on the opponent and literally cringe.

So, my conclusion is that women in combat will either surrender or run like rabbits as soon as they get sufficiently frightened or their unit takes a few casualties.

This comment, in particular, amused me:

Then again, on the other hand, we have John Scalzi, against whom I can
levy no such complaint. Scalzi, unlike Ringo, Kratman, or Williamson,
doesn’t have a military background of his own. Yet I find his future
military more convincingly science-fictional than those of the aforementioned authors. Why is that?

I would think the answer is entirely obvious. Because you know nothing about war or the military and you prefer your weird non-science fantasies about old people’s orgies and men exchanging sexual favors to anything that can be reasonably extrapolated from the last 8,000 years of recorded military history.

The militaries in the science fiction world of QUANTUM MORTIS do not utilize female soldiers for the obvious reason that they are actually expected to engage in combat. The science fiction elements there involve physical augmentation, targeting-assisted weaponry, artificial intelligence, and interstellar mercenary corporations. They do not involve silly fantasies about strong, independent warrior women, which by rights should be classified as women’s erotic fiction rather than science fiction because it is quite literally anti-science.

A sacrifice for nothing

The fall of Fallujah, met with complete indifference in the very neocon circles that endlessly proclaimed the supreme importance of the Iraqi Adventure, sickens the Marines who fought there:

“I don’t think anyone had the grand illusion that Falluja or Ramadi was going to turn into Disneyland, but none of us thought it was going to fall back to a jihadist insurgency,” he said. “It made me sick to my stomach to have that thrown in our face, everything we fought for so blatantly taken away.”

The bloody mission to wrest Falluja from insurgents in November 2004 meant more to the Marines than almost any other battle in the 12 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many consider it the corps’ biggest and most iconic fight since Vietnam, with nearly 100 Marines and soldiers killed in action and hundreds more wounded.

“Lives were wasted, and now everyone back home sees that,” said James Cathcart. He fought as a private first class in the Marines in Falluja in 2004, and was discharged with post-traumatic stress disorder. For many veterans of that battle — most now working in jobs long removed from combat — watching insurgents running roughshod through the streets they once fought to secure, often in brutal close-quarters combat, has shaken their faith in what their mission achieved.

It shouldn’t shake their faith in what their mission achieved, because one can’t have faith in nothing. It should shake their faith in the US political system and the commanders-in-chief who are abusing the trust of the American military.

Let’s hope they remember this the next time the usual suspects are beating the war drums for attacking Serbia Iraq Afghanistan Syria Iran.

What happened to “never again”?

The Learned Elders of Wye had better speed up their exit plans if they’re going to continue to perpetrate materially traitorous idiocies such as this:

President Obama plans to nominate three people to the Federal Reserve’s
Board of Governors, including Stanley Fischer, former head of the Bank
of Israel, as the Fed’s next vice chairman, the White House said on
Friday…. Mr. Fischer, 70, would succeed Ms. Yellen in her current role. The
Senate confirmed Ms. Yellen as the Fed’s new chairwoman this week. She
will take over from the current chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, in February.
…

More importantly for Israel, Stanley Fischer won an appointment to the
Reagan administration’s U.S.-Israel Joint Economic Discussion Group that
dealt with Israel’s 1984-1985 economic crisis. … The U.S.-Israel
Joint Economic Discussion Group fundamentally transformed U.S. aid to
Israel forever.  Before the Reagan administration, most U.S. aid to
Israel took the form of loans that had to be repaid with interest.
 After the input of Fischer’s team, subsequent U.S. aid was delivered in
the form of outright grants paid directly from the U.S. Treasury—never
to be repaid or conditioned when Israel took actions the U.S. opposed.

Can you even imagine the widespread outrage if Haruhiko Kuroda of the Bank of Japan was appointed to the Fed and he promptly began sending billions of dollars to Japan? Or if Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China was named vice chairman and he subsequently began repaying US debt to China in gold and advanced weapons technology? Now keep in mind that Stanley Fischer is already guilty of literally giving billions to Israel!

It’s long past time for the USA to take two immediate measures. First, shut down all financial aid to Israel. The USA is bankrupt. So is the Federal Reserve, if its newly expanded balance sheet was marked properly to market. If Israeli citizens are convinced that inflation is good for the economy and they want to print money, well and good, but let them print shekels, not U.S. dollars.

Second, ban all dual citizenships. There is no such thing as a “dual loyalty”. It’s very clear that Stanley Fischer has no loyalty to the USA. His loyalty is to Israel. That’s perfectly clear. It’s even admirable. Would that his American counterparts felt so strongly about serving their own country. But it also means that he has no more place in a decision-making capacity for the US monetary system than Christine Lagard or Mario Draghi.

Now, let’s preemptively deal with the usual reaction. Are you tempted to call my position antisemitic? That’s not merely incorrect, that’s totally insane. Do you truly not see where this is leading? For the love of the God of Old Testament and New, the reason I’m speaking out against this is precisely because I don’t wish to see an American holocaust. I don’t want the children of my Jewish friends being made the scapegoat in reaction to the dreadful behavior of an insatiable, unconscionable elite. What is sickening, what is ominous, what is materially antisemitic is what the federal government has done by permitting Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Fischer to financially rape the American people.

This is all astonishingly short-sighted on the part of the Elders of Wye. Setting aside whether they can reasonably hope to successfully transfer their traveling game of three-card monte to China or India, even a bankrupt, post-collapse America will be filled with hundreds of millions of the same people who conquered the world in the 20th century, more or less without trying. And they are going to be very, very angry. They are going to be even more full of hate than the 20th century Germans were, because they are going to feel deeply betrayed. If an unfair post-war peace settlement created a sense of national fury, how much more anger will the bankruptcy and collapse of the union provoke?

In fact, having grown up in an End Times-conscious church, I can recall the eschatological enthusiasts discussing whether the King of the North was the Soviet Union or a united Europe. They often cited this passage from Jeremiah:

Behold, a people shall come from the north,
And a great nation and many kings
Shall be raised up from the ends of the earth.
They shall hold the bow and the lance;
They are cruel and shall not show mercy.
Their voice shall roar like the sea;
They shall ride on horses,
Set in array, like a man for the battle,
Against you, O daughter of Babylon.
The king of Babylon has heard the report about them,
And his hands grow feeble;
Anguish has taken hold of him,
Pangs as of a woman in childbirth…”(Jeremiah 50:41-43)

And yet, when I look at the events of recent years, it increasingly looks as if the most powerful nation that is the most likely to bear a tremendous populist grudge against Israel in the 21st century will be the United States of America.

Refugee blowback

These new concerns about internal attacks by pro-Syrian “Americans” is an object lesson in the foolishness of foreign intervention and granting residence to foreign allies from the losing side:

Islamic extremist groups in Syria with ties to Al Qaeda are trying to identify, recruit and train Americans and other Westerners who have traveled there to get them to carry out attacks when they return home, according to senior American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

These efforts, which the officials say are in the early stages, are the latest challenge that the conflict in Syria has created, not just for Europe but for the United States, as the civil war has become a magnet for Westerners seeking to fight with the rebels against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. At least 70 Americans have either traveled to Syria, or tried to, since the civil war started three years ago, according to the intelligence and counterterrorism officials — a figure that has not previously been disclosed.

The director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, said Thursday that tracking Americans who have returned from Syria had become one of the bureau’s highest counterterrorism priorities.

From WWII to the Syrian civil war, refugees have created massive problems for America. It’s one thing to grant humanitarian assistance and to help resettle people who are in danger. But semi-civilized peoples shouldn’t ever be resettled in civilized first world nations.

Diversity encompasses the civilized and the savage alike. And it is always a mistake to allow barbarians to enter the gates.

The survival genius of the House of Saud

Courtesy of Steve Sailer comes this fascinating explanation on the way the House of Saud survives by destabilizing its rivals by the War Nerd:

The Middle East has been Saudi-ized while we looked on and laughed at those goofy Saudis who didn’t understand progress. No wonder they’re content to play dumb. If we took a serious look at them, they’d be terrifying.

And of all their many skills, the one the Saudis have mastered most thoroughly is disruption. Not the cute tech-geek kind of disruption, but the real, ugly thing-in-itself. They don’t just “turn a blind eye” to young Saudi men going off to do jihad—they cheer them on. It’s a brilliant strategy that kills two very dangerous birds with one plane ticket. By exporting their dangerous young men, the Saudis rid themselves of a potential troublemaker while creating a huge amount of pain for the people who live wherever those men end up.

Saudis have shipped money, sermons, and volunteers to Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Russia’s North Caucasus just as they’re doing now in Syria. It’s a package deal—to get the money, you have to accept the Wahhabism and the volunteers. And it works. The Saudi package is usually resented at first, like it was by the Afghans who were outraged to be told they were “bad Muslims” by Saudi volunteers.

But Afghan Islam has been Wahhabized over time. The same thing happened much more dramatically in Chechnya, where Saudi volunteers showed they were serious about war and religion, a nice change from the coopted quasi-Soviet imams the Chechens had known before. Saudis like Ibn al-Khattab, Abu al-Walid, and Muhannad (all noms de guerre) provided the only real jobs a young man could get in Chechnya, and in the process did a great job of miring the Chechens in an endless war that has killed something like 160,000 people while forcing Chechen women into Saudi-style isolation, eventually leaving Chechnya under the control of Ramzan Kadyrov, a second-generation death-squad commander who does most of the Kremlin’s killing for them. This is a typical Saudi aid result: A disaster for the recipients, the Chechens, and their enemies, the Russians, but a huge win for Saudi. Same thing is going on in the rest of Russia’s North Caucasus, especially in Dagestan, where the Boston Marathon bombers’ parents live.

And one aspect of that victory is the elimination of potentially troublesome young males who might have made trouble inside Saudi. Jihad is like the princess in those fairy tales: It draws all the daring young princes to undertake quests no underwriter would insure, and in the process gets them far away from home during their most aggressive years. Better yet from the Sauds’ POV, most of them die.

It certainly puts a troublesome spin on America’s various crusades for global democracy, does it not?

The neocons were wrong

They were wrong about Iraq. They are wrong about Iran. They are always wrong and they don’t give a damn about the national security of the United States, the American people, or the foreigners about whom they profess such concern.

According to press reports last weekend, Fallujah is now under the control of al-Qaeda affiliates. The Anbar province, where Fallujah is located, is under siege by al-Qaeda. During the 2007 “surge,” more than 1,000 US troops were killed “pacifying” the Anbar province.  Although al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before the US invasion, it is now conducting its own surge in Anbar.

For Iraq, the US “liberation” is proving far worse than the authoritarianism of Saddam Hussein, and it keeps getting worse. Last year was Iraq’s deadliest in five years. In 2013, fighting and bomb blasts claimed the lives of 7,818 civilians and 1,050 members of the security forces. In December alone nearly a thousand people were killed.

I remember sitting through many hearings in the House International Relations Committee praising the “surge,” which we were told secured a US victory in Iraq. They also praised the so-called “Awakening,” which was really an agreement by insurgents to stop fighting in exchange for US dollars. I always wondered what would happen when those dollars stopped coming.

Where are the surge and awakening cheerleaders now?

One of them, Richard Perle, was interviewed last year on NPR and asked whether the Iraq invasion that he pushed was worth it. He replied:

I’ve got to say I think that is not a reasonable question. What we did at the time was done in the belief that it was necessary to protect this nation. You can’t a decade later go back and say, well, we shouldn’t have done that.

Many of us were saying all along that we shouldn’t have done that – before we did it. Unfortunately the Bush Administration took the advice of the neocons pushing for war and promising it would be a “cakewalk.” We continue to see the results of that terrible mistake, and it is only getting worse.

That quote from Richard Perle is all you need to know about the neocons to understand that they are fundamentally evil people who don’t give a damn about history or anything else. It is not reasonable to reconsider your actions in light of their consequences? That isn’t merely evil, that isn’t merely stupid, that’s freaking insane.

Events in the East China Sea

Things still appear to be heating up between China and Japan:

Events in the East China Sea since 2009 have thrust to the forefront the following frightening question: will China and Japan imminently go to war? Conventional answers in the affirmative point to the deep level of historical mistrust and a certain level of “unfinished business” in East Asian international politics, stemming from the heyday of Showa Japan’s imperialism across Asia. Those on the negative often point to the astronomical economic costs that would follow from a war that pinned the world’s first and third largest economies against its second in a fight over a few measly islands, undersea hydrocarbon reserves be damned.

I can’t pretend to arbitrate between these two camps but I find that far too many observers sympathize with the second camp based on rational impulse. Of course China and Japan wouldn’t fight a war! That’d ruin their economies! I sympathize with the Clausewtizean notion of war being a continuation of politics “by other means,” and the problems caused by information asymmetries (effectively handicapping rational decision-making), but the situation over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands can result in war even if the top leaders in Tokyo and Beijing are eminently rational.

Political scientist James D. Fearon’s path-breaking article “Rationalist Explanations for War” provides a still-relevant schema that’s wonderfully applicable to the contemporary situation between China and Japan in the East China Sea. Fearon’s paper was initially relevant because it challenged the overly simplistic rationalist’s dogma: if war is so costly, then there has to be some sort of diplomatic solution that is preferable to all parties involved — barring information asymmetries and communication deficits, such an agreement should and will be signed.

Of course, this doesn’t correspond to reality where we know that many incredibly costly wars have been fought (from the first World War to the Iran-Iraq War). So, if wars are costly — as one over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands is likely to be — why do they still occur?

There are some interesting thoughts there, but no one who has even a modicum of familiarity with military history will find the idea that war cannot happen because the observer does not believe it to be in the best long-term economic interests of the two nations involved to be credible in any way.