Tag: war

Palestine is a recognized state

I’m sure the David Frum, Jon Podhoretz, and other advocates of open immigration will be eager to defend the right of the world’s newest nationals to freely immigrate to Jerusalem now:

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas Sunday promised someday the PA flag would
fly over “Jerusalem, eternal capital of the state of Palestine.” Thousands of people greeted Abbas rapturously upon his return from
the United Nations, where the General Assembly granted the PLO,
representing the PA, upgraded status as a nonmember observer state.

It seems strange that so many people are obtaining the right to self-determination around the world, with US support, with the noticeable exception of Americans.

Petraeus starts talking

Two interesting bits of news to surface today:

1.  “Representative Peter King stated that former CIA Director David Petraeus
stated that he knew the Benghazi attack was terrorism and that the
talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice were different from the
ones prepared by the CIA. Petraeus stated Rice’s talking points were
edited to demphasized the possibility of terrorism.”

2.  “Reports from those who listened to recordings of the pleas
for help coming from the Benghazi Consulate on September 11 that caused Marine
Ty Woods to disobey orders and fight to defend the consulate suggest that the
tapes are “damning” proof of the Obama Administration’s mishandling of the
attacks.”

I’d provide the links, but that’s all there was.  It looks like Obama could be a lame duck a lot sooner than his two-term predecessors were.   There are going to be a lot of people interested in discovering who edited the CIA notes and why.

The diversity dilemma

Thomas Friedman can be a clueless buffoon at times, but the one thing he does know about is the Middle East.  What I find fascinating about his nightmare scenario is the way it shows how left-liberals who clearly recognize the structural problems in other countries can nevertheless turn around and advocate the continuing construction of the same sort of problems in the United States:

Ever since the start of the Syrian uprising/civil war, I’ve cautioned
that while Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Tunisia implode, Syria would
explode if a political resolution was not found quickly. That is exactly what’s happening.  The reason Syria explodes is because its borders are particularly
artificial, and all its communities — Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds,
Druze and Christians — are linked to brethren in nearby countries and
are trying to draw them in for help.

 That’s an astute observation, Tom.  Now, guess what’s going to happen when the various communities inside the United States, the Mexicans, the Colombians, the Muslims, the Chinese, and the Jews, can’t make any more headway in collecting resources from the central government and start battling it out amongst themselves as is already taking place in places like south central LA, which the Aztecs have 65 percent ethnically cleansed already.

Now, why isn’t all that diversity making Syria stronger?

The poison is the antidote

Or so numerous pundits, a number of whom actually voted for Obama in 2008, would have us believe given their advice to the Republican Party:

It was a crushing defeat.  Despite
an economy as underpowered as a cheap flourescent light, Mitt Romney
somehow failed to unseat Barack Obama.  And now it is time for the
Republicans to rethink their platform in order to attract new voters–or
doom themselves to permanent minority status.

I
think the obvious place to start is with immigration reform.  Increase
the number of visas available.  Explore guest-worker programs.
 Establish a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were brought
here as children and have never known any other home.  This not only
gives the GOP a shot at the Latino vote, but also softens their image in
the eyes of the professional class, who might be willing to give the
party another look if it didn’t seem so committed to deporting poorer,
darker skinned people who just want a shot at picking fruit, trimming
lawns, and cleaning houses.

The
GOP would also help itself with those people by embracing gay marriage.
 To be sure, this might cause them some problems with the evangelical
base whose organizing support is crucial to Republican get-out-the-vote
efforts.  But the GOP could assuage that tension by promulgating a
hard-core, Republican version of gay and straight marriage.  That’s why
they should pair it with making marriage mandatory, and eliminating
no-fault divorce.  The message should be that if everyone can get
married, then there’s no really excuse not to be.   Oh, I know, the
divorce changes might cause friction with the kind of Republicans who go
through wives the way other men go through undershirts, but this seems
like a small price to pay for a shot at the 1-3% of the electorate that
is eligible for gay marriage.  

The frightening thing here is that McCardle attempts to portray herself as an economist.  My suggestion is that one never take either political or economic advice from an economist, however tall, who cannot figure out that 20 percent is larger than 2 percent….

Regardless, there is only one viable long-term solution for the Republican Party, indeed, for the survival of constitutional America throughout the current territorial limits of the United States, and that is a repeat of Operation Wetback on a vastly larger scale. Such an action would require the banning of all dual-citizenships, mass deportations on an unprecedented scale, and likely inspire violence of the sort that has not been seen in America since the riots of the 1960s.  And, needless to say, it is clear there is now no chance that it is ever going to happen.

Which is a real pity, because it would actually have been the lesser of the two probable evils.  What is going to happen instead is some sort of civil war following the next major stage in the ongoing economic meltdown.  How big it will be and how it will turn out, I don’t pretend to know.  But it is as easily predictable as the wars in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and the former British empire in India, because war is how diverse groups of people usually negotiate imperial divorce.  The USA has not truly been a single nation since imperial rule was forcibly imposed upon the southern states in 1865, but the difference is that it is no longer possible to plausibly pretend that it is still one any longer.

It’s not a question of hate, race, or religion.  It is the simple historical observation that the Kuomintang will not voluntarily live under the same governance as the Chinese communists.  Pakistanis will not voluntarily live under the same governance as the Indians.  Americans will not voluntarily live under the same governance as Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, or Arabs.  They just will not do it, and to pretend otherwise isn’t so much foolish as insane.

It doesn’t matter what you do.  It doesn’t matter what you think.  Winter is coming.  The only question is whether it will take you by surprise or not.  And there really isn’t much excuse for being surprised when the temperature has been dropping and the leaves have been falling for quite some time now.

Soldier boy is BETA

I usually keep the Game-related content for Alpha Game, but this intersection of Game and current events simply demands comment:

At some point after Petraeus was sworn in as CIA director on Sept. 6,
2011, the woman broke up with him. However, Petraeus continued to pursue
her, sending her thousands of emails over the last several months,
raising even more questions about his judgment.

It doesn’t only raise questions about his judgment, but about his socio-sexual rank as well.  Petraeus superficially appears to be a handsome, successful warrior, an obvious Alpha in every way, but in addition to being unimpressed by his military performance since 2001, I’ve long felt that he carried himself more like a man dressed up like a soldier than a military commander.

I’ve met a number of top military commanders, including three that were members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Such men exude dominance and a palpable sense of command even when they are wearing a t-shirt and shorts while washing the car; you get the impression that they could successfully invade a small South American country with no more than a BB gun, a wrist rocket, and the staff of the local McDonald’s restaurant.  For all his fruit salad, Petraeus always struck me as being much more akin to Hollywood’s notion of a general than an actual fighting man.

What sort of socio-sexual loser sends THOUSANDS of emails to a married woman who has indicated she is done with him?

WND column

Is Obama unfit for command?

There were no American helicopters shot down at the CIA annex in
Benghazi. But those who have seen the movie, “Blackhawk Down,” will
surely recall the scene where the two Delta snipers, Randy Shugart and
Gary Gordon, are desperately fighting off the Somali attackers, who are
attempting to capture the crew of the downed Black Hawk. Shugart and
Gordon, valiant men who were both posthumously awarded the congressional
Medal of Honor, killed 25 Somalis while defending the crew before being
killed by the enemy militia.

As the details of the large-scale attacks on the American diplomatic
compound and the CIA annex gradually leak out into the press, it appears
that two of the four fallen Americans, former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods
and Glen Doherty, died fighting in a manner no less valorous than Sgt.
1st Class Shugart and Master Sgt. Gordon.

The drone war widens

Drones are already being flown into Israel.  How much longer before they are flown into the USA and Americans become targets?  I mean, of course, those Americans who aren’t already being targeted by their own government.

The Israeli air force shot down a drone after it crossed into southern Israel on Saturday, the military said, but it remained unclear where the aircraft had come from.  The drone was first spotted above the Mediterranean Sea in the area of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip to the west of Israel, said military spokeswoman Avital Leibovich.
It was kept under
surveillance and followed by Israeli air force jets before it was shot
down above a forest in an unpopulated area near the border with the
occupied West Bank.  Leibovich said it
was shot down at about 10 a.m. (0700 GMT), after it traveled east some
35 miles across Israel’s southern Negev desert.

It should be illuminating indeed to hear federal officials angrily decrying the monstrosity and inhumanity of those flying lethal drones firing missiles at Americans inside the USA.

Navies in space

Foreign Policy interviews a naval analyst concerning what science fiction gets right and what it gets wrong about warfare, especially from the naval perspective upon which so much fictional space war is based.

FP: The United States is in the midst of a major
debate on what our defense policy, especially given shrinking budgets and the
rise of China as Pacific sea power.  Does
sci-fi offer lessons on how the United States can resolve this?

CW: Fiction does not replace policy analysis.  But science fiction is the literature of
“what if?”  Not just “what
if X happens?” but also “what if we continue what we’re doing?”  In that way, science fiction can inform
policy making directly, and it can inform those who build scenarios for
wargames and exercises and the like. One of the great strengths of science
fiction is that it allows you have a conversation about something that you
otherwise couldn’t talk about because it’s too politically charged. It allows
you to create the universe you need in order to have the conversation you want
to have. Battlestar Galactica spent a lot of time talking about the war in
Iraq. There were lots of things on that show about how you treat prisoners.
They never came out and said that directly. They didn’t have to. At the Naval
War College, one of the core courses on strategy and policy had a section on
the Peloponnesian War. It was added to the curriculum in the mid-1970s because
the Vietnam War was too close, so they couldn’t talk about it, except by going
back to 400 BC. 

I’m a big believer in the martial utility of wargaming, but as the article notes, most wargames and all science fiction tend to completely omit the more tedious elements of war, especially logistics and bureaucracy.  Unsurprisingly, wargames tend to do a better job of addressing strategic assumptions and strategic goals than other entertainment media, although even the wargaming implimentation are usually built into the game design rather than left up to the player.

You’d better sit down for this one

I’m certain we’re all just absolutely shocked by this revelation:

U.S. intelligence officials knew within 24 hours of the
assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya that it was a terrorist attack
and suspected Al Qaeda-tied elements were involved, sources told Fox
News — though it took the administration a week to acknowledge it.  The
account sharply conflicts with claims on the Sunday after the attack by
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice that the
administration believed the strike was a “spontaneous” event triggered
by protests in Egypt over an anti-Islam film.

 It’s always so hard to see innocence shattered.  So much for the feared rage of Jihad Boy.  Sure, we all knew that Obama and his handlers were liars, but the remarkable thing is how bad at it they are.  Mitt Romney, now, there is a politician who can tell perfectly credible lies without blinking, insofar as he can resist contradicting himself.

The need to restrict drone use

Those discussing the use of killer drones, both pro and con, at the New York Times somehow managed to completely fail to consider the two most problematic aspects of their use:

One point in favor of drone strikes is that they are weakening Al
Qaeda, the Taliban and affiliated groups, and hence protecting lives,
American and other.

Also, there don’t seem to be better means of doing
so.

Points against drone strikes are the cost in civilian lives, the
alienation of parts of the Islamic world, potential harm to the
authority of international law, and the possibility that drone use will
spread around the world, generating more conflict and harming long-term
U.S. interests.

These are all valid points, and I respect that reasonable people
could be convinced by either set. My own reasoning turns on four
arguments.

  1. First, states have a primary responsibility for the protection of
    their own citizens. If drone strikes are the best way to remove an
    all-too-real threat to American lives, then that is an especially
    weighty consideration.
  2. Second, I doubt that ending drone strikes would substantially reduce
    anti-Americanism in the Islamic world or put a dent in radical
    recruitment.
  3. Third, the U.S can do a lot to moderate some harms caused by its use
    of drones. By being clearer about what it’s doing and offering detailed
    legal justification, the U.S. could mitigate damage to international
    law and the threat of uncontrolled proliferation.
  4. Finally, there is evidence that drone strikes are less harmful to
    civilians than other means of reaching Al Qaeda and affiliates in
    remote, lawless regions (for example, large-scale military operations).

There are two serious problems with the use of drones overseas, both of which outweigh their potential benefits.  First, it has successfully established a precedent for using them domestically for routine law enforcement.  Second, and more problematic, the administration has foolishly granted a comprehensive justification for the use of drones by foreign forces against Americans on American soil.  When foreign militaries acquire access to drones, and they will, the US will find little sympathy from other nations when the equivalent of Hellfire missiles begin raining down on New York and California.

And the threat of disproportionate response won’t necessarily be a convincing deterrent, because clever attackers will be careful to disguise who is piloting the drone.  An Iranian drone might actually belong to China.  A Chinese drone might actually be utilized by American rebels… or by China making it look like American rebels.  The widespread use of drones is a very foolish move on the part of the U.S. Commander-in-Chief and can be safely expected to result in some serious blowback.